Symbol is ACU. We're one of the leaders in safety solutions and cutting technology. When you think of that, things that save lives, bleed control kits, tourniquets, first aid kits for minor injuries, we're a major player in that area, and we're consolidating parts of that business. The company started in a different business, and that was in the cutting area. On the lower right, you can see one of the Westcott scissors. This is an incredibly good business. It's about 30% of our total sales, 70% is first aid. Don't underestimate the Westcott business. It's the leading brand. We sell 70 million scissors a year, has a very, very strong cash flow. A growing market, not a fast-growing market, but people are opening boxes from deliveries and packing all sorts of things. They're doing crafts, they're in the school area.
It's an important part, and there's an overlap of our customer base. We're growing through innovation, and in the first aid area, we'll give you some examples of that. You'll also see in the Westcott area, things that we've done on coatings. We've got 150 patents on that either enhance the hardness of a blade or make them non-stick or antimicrobial. We've had 15 consecutive years of sales growth from ongoing operations, and I can tell you that's through every kind of crisis you can think of and consistently adding to the size of the company. We've had a history also of successful acquisitions. We throw off a lot of cash flow, and it's an increasing amount of cash flow as we've gotten bigger. We've been able to grow from about $70 million in sales to about $230 million in the past 12 years or so.
It's been without raising any outside capital. It's because of our cash flow. We've been investing in domestic production and expanding our international sourcing, and we do a lot of work in the trade area, as you can imagine, because we've got a broad product family and we're getting the costs at the lowest price in the world, or at least we try to, internationally or we domestically produce it. We think we're positioned for excellent growth going forward, and our track record demonstrates that we've been able to do that. Here's a corporate overview. On the right side, you can see Westcott, and that was where the legacy products, the scissors started. Then we began doing titanium coatings, margins increased, and then we moved into industrial cutting with Clauss and then sharpening with DMT.
On the left side, we had instrument packs and medical devices, being made off the same equipment as scissors. Then we started to move into first aid. As we did that, we discovered that the industrial business, and that would be the Grainger and the Fastenals and the large factories globally, have tremendous need for first aid. When we bought Pac-Kit First Aid, we got the first taste of that. Then we bought First Aid Only, which had hundreds of thousands of first aid boxes on the shop floor throughout the United States. It was such a good acquisition, we named the major part of our business First Aid Only.
Then we bought Spill Magic, which does spill cleanup powders. Then we moved it into bloodborne pathogen kits, where margins are better and where you're dealing with things that are either from bleeding and you're cleaning up or it's bodily fluid kits. In 2020, we bought a company vertically integrating to make alcohol prep pads and BZK wipes for our first aid business and outside customers. That Med-Nap is based in Florida. We've put a tremendous amount of work in getting that to be an important supplier of our components in first aid. We also bought in 2020 a company in Canada, First Aid Central. For the first time, we had an entity in Canada in first aid. We discovered it was a very fragmented industry in Canada with small competitors, high margins. We've had four plant expansions since 2020 with that acquisition.
It's done terrifically. We bought Safety Made in 2022, which personalizes first aid kits. Then in 2023, we bought Elite First Aid, which was a higher-end first aid kit than we'd previously been selling, and it had a military background. We bought Hawktree Solutions out of bankruptcy in Canada. We bought it for less than its inventory. That's now merged with First Aid Central. In 2026, we bought My Medic. That's our latest acquisition. It's a company that I'll give you more of an overview on the next slide. My Medic is direct to the consumer. There's a half million social media followers. This product line saves lives, not cuts and bruises. Yes, it deals with that, but if you've got a serious wound, you can die in 90 seconds. These products are designed so that you've got a tourniquet that works and is safe.
You've got chest seals, you've got bleed control bandages with QuikClot material. It was actually started by a wife and her son. They'd lost her husband when a truck ran over them and he bled out, and nobody was able to. They didn't stop the bleed. They started in their garage. They started to sell directly. They built quality products. That's what we bought in January 2026, a $19 million business, 500,000 direct-to-consumer followers, and a momentum to be able to transport these items into our other areas in the first aid category. We're doing that. We're very excited about this deal. Of our 11 most recent acquisitions, they've been either in the U.S. or Canada, and they've been manufacturers.
Although we do import about 40% of our products, a lot from China, some from India, some from Egypt, some from Malaysia, and other places, we're also producing 60% of our products in our factories. On the left, you can see our corporate headquarters are in Shelton, Connecticut, but we have operations in Vancouver, Washington; Santa Ana, California; Rocky Mount, North Carolina; Marlborough, Massachusetts; Mount Pleasant, Tennessee; Brooksville, Florida; Keene, New Hampshire; and Salt Lake City. Our footprint in Canada includes our production site with First Aid Central in Laval, outside of Montreal, and a distribution center in Mount Forest, headquarters in Toronto. In Europe, Solingen, Germany is our headquarters and our major distribution site. In China, we have four offices which are working on quality, engineering, sourcing, and logistics.
This footprint has the room to support far bigger business, and we believe we will be able to identify new growth areas organically, as well as additional acquisitions, as we've done in the past. Here are the financial results. As you can see, the company has had consistent growth, and it's been good growth. And I am very pleased with where we're headed this year. Although it looks like it flattened out a little in sales between 2023 and 2025, in fact, we sold our Camillus hunting and fishing business, which was $12 million in sales, for 100 times what we paid for it, received $20 million and paid down debt, and that positioned us then to take on other acquisitions such as My Medic.
We'll finish this year, as you can see, $115 million halfway through, so it'll be somewhere, we believe, somewhere between $220 million and $230 million in revenues for the year. The EBITDA, you can also see consistent and growing EBITDA cash flow. This matters to us. This is the lifeblood that allows us to self-finance the growth, and we also pay a small dividend. In the first half of the year, we've had $12.5 million of EBITDA, and we're on for another record year in EBITDA 2026. Our profitability has been consistent. 2023, we all may remember there was a huge transportation crisis in the United States due to over-stimulating our economy, and the ports were plugged and the demurrage, and the cost of getting things out were very expensive. I attribute that to poor policy, and it wasn't our fault, so take that note.
In 2026, we've had $6 million in fully taxed net income, and we're on track for another record year. Earnings per share, $1.46 per half. Also on track for a very significantly profitable year. And you can see, yeah, there's a little variability, but mostly it's up, and it's up because obviously the EBITDA, the earnings, and the sales are up. The dividend history continues to increase. We increase the dividend assuming we have sufficient cash flow, and that's number one priority. We tend to increase it every six to eight quarters. In the first half, we had declared $0.48, but at the current track rate, that would mean $0.64 for the year. The growth drivers. First, if you look at the first aid to safety market, it's large. And depending on how you define it can be very large.
In the North American market, it's a little under half the global market. And we're a big player in the U.S. and in Canada. We are moving aggressively into Europe in our first aid efforts. I'll be in November at the MEDICA show for the second time. We're building our staff there, we're building our presence, we're building our product line, and that will be a growth segment, we hope, for our first aid business. The overall growth, as we define first aid, is about 4.5%, and that's what's projected. However, as you keep increasing what you make in your first aid, well, then the market gets bigger.
For example, first aid supplies is one piece, but when you broaden it to include AEDs, these are defibrillators, and first aid training, and consumer first aid kits, and bleed control kits, all of a sudden you get to be a much, much bigger market. You have the growth of the underlying piece that we define as just first aid supplies, and then on top of that, the other pieces as you broaden the shoulders of what you sell. Growth drivers, rising injury rates, workplace safety regulations, and consumer focus on preventative healthcare. But more importantly, as an employer, you want your workers safe, and you do that by law, but you do it because you want it, and you equip your vehicles with bleed control or your municipalities or your schools, because if there's a serious accident, you don't have a long time to respond.
But if you have the products, you can save lives. Here's a smart compliance kit, and this is a typical industrial first aid kit. You can see it's white, it's on the wall, and there are components. Each of these components in these boxes are bar-coded and in our kits, each box contains RFID tags. As I talk about the next generation, the automation of refills of these through RFID tags is a major step forward, we believe, and it's about to occur. The bleed control kits come in many shapes. You've got some for limbs, some for your torso, some for your chest, some that does everything. The key thing is chest seals, hemostatic gauze, QuikClot bandages, and tourniquets. Our tourniquets are safe, and from years ago, people said, "If you put a tourniquet on, you lose a limb." That's not the way it works today.
You release it, you turn it on again, but you save a life. Usually, the limb is perfectly fine. We are selling millions of dollars of these bleed control kits, and it's increasing across the board, whether it's schools, municipalities, industry, offices, and home. This is a product that is an AED combined with a quick response bag. This is really good because if somebody has an arrhythmia, it's not walking to the station, you are going to that person, and there may be other issues that need to be addressed, and you've got a grab-and-go solution. It allows you to get there quickly and save lives.
This product had a lot of interest last week at the National Safety Conference, and I was really pleased to see that we're meeting the needs of what our end users are saying, "Yes, this helps us." Here's a crossover retail product. It's a lens cleaner, and it's for cleaning glasses, goggles, microscope optics, and it's all produced in our Med-Nap facility. It's made in the U.S., and this product line is doing very well for us, and it's a U.S. production product that is also being made on equipment that's going into alcohol prep pads and BZK wipes for the medical sites.
In the cutting area, we're leveraging our technologies, and that includes titanium nitride coatings, titanium carbonitride coatings. These are enhancing the hardness of the blades. Our non-stick coatings were developed with BASF many years ago. Again, all patented. We've got about 150 patents in this area.
We've got antimicrobial plastics for schools and the office. Finally, the box opener, the one that you see at the bottom, has a ceramic blade. It's very safe. Unlike a razor, you might be able to cut your hand if you slip, but you're not going to lose a finger. If you cut it'll be just a scratch. These things are being used at major warehouses in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and gaining traction. We're growing in the craft market. Again, this is all in the Westcott area. You can imagine your core is your cutting tools, all of which have non-stick patented coatings.
In addition to that, you've got self-healing cutting mats, and you've got paper trimmers, and you're leveraging the retail partnerships that we have in the office and in the back to school, in the craft market, at Amazon, and we're having good success with that. This is a fun one. These are two kids' scissors, and of course, we have some that are boring and we don't sell many of them. There's a tradition that seems to have endured, even though there's a lot of online sales, either a father or a mother or a grandmother or grandfather will often take, or a brother, sister will take siblings shopping for back to school, and the thing that sells kids scissors is color and texture, and Vibees is a great example of both. By the way, we had a great back to school this year.
We've also in the kitchen area with kitchen shears, and these are just some examples that happen to be in one of the major retailers in the United States. The sharpener area is one that is growing for us, and we've recently introduced a sharpener that is electronic, and it will compete with, say, a Chef'sChoice. Unlike a Chef'sChoice, its sharpening stones are diamond-based. The quality is, in our mind, far superior, and the price is outstanding. This product line, it was introduced in the spring, is now beginning shipping. We're very excited about the DMT line. Expanding into the kitchen and culinary area made perfect sense and we're winning. Here are our priorities. First, develop and introduce market share gaining products. I gave you some examples of them, whether it was the smart compliance kits or it was the grab-and-go AED kits.
You saw the Vibees kids scissors. These are all new, the new sharpeners. Of course, we've got coatings that continue to be delivering market share gaining performance. We're building on our solid growth opportunities. We have a who's who of customers, so, with the larger chains or our Amazon business, you add to what you have, you build the shoulders, and you find more opportunities. We're driving our e-commerce business, and in the industrial and retail area, we're pushing first aid kits and now direct to consumer with our My Medic acquisition. Finally, the craft market expansion, which I spoke briefly about. The direct-to-consumer opportunities will stay in the first aid area for now, but we'll broaden the products that we offer to our direct to consumer.
You can picture with a half million followers, you have people tuned in on training, safety, new products, success stories, and we'll broaden the offering to other items that keep with that core. We're generating new productivity and cost savings. That's been several million dollars of savings this year from robotics that we installed last year, in the packing of the components that go into the boxes of first aid kits and automation of simple things sometimes, like the cleaning of some of our big floors, like our Rocky Mount facility has a robot doing that now. Well, that might sound kind of far-fetched, but it saves people, and is a quick save payback. Another one is our drones that are flying throughout one of our big facilities, and what they're doing is keeping track of inventory. They're doing basically rolling controls every day.
Lost inventory, theft is minimized, and when we report numbers, we have a pretty high confidence that these numbers are accurate at the inventory level. The payback at year-end when we do physical inventories is it shortens the cycle, not only for accounting, but for the period where you're not shipping. We look to continue to increase our dividend on a regular basis, and we're actively seeking other tuck-in acquisitions. You net all this, and I think we're very well positioned to deliver strong long-term results and growth. Love to answer questions.
All right.
Please do so.
All right. Thanks, Walter. I guess we'll just start off with an obligatory tariff question. I guess in July you had mentioned that tariffs would cost 100 basis points to the U.S. gross margins. Obviously, oil's up and maybe there's been some more inflationary pressures around freight and some other items. Has your outlook changed and what's the outlook for closing that price cost gap and recovering those margins?
Yeah. The tariffs last year fluctuated a lot. They started very high for our products, as high as 145% on imported items from China, which basically stopped cold many of the promotions that were going to be happening because customers didn't know what price they would be paying for it. They couldn't pay 145%, and we didn't have it in stock. On others, we held also. In April 2025, we kept our factories producing. We just didn't put them on the water, and we paid the factories so that they could continue to be solvent. When the tariffs were dropped to 30% for our items in China in the end of April, we put 50 containers on the water within days, and had an excellent delivery. But the 30% tariff was being applied to everything that we brought in since the beginning of that in April.
That goes into inventory and it then is capitalized and as the inventory is sold, it shows up in higher costs. Then tariffs dropped for our products to 20%, and most of the inventory that is still impacting us is the 20% tariff, which dropped to 10% in June. You may remember the tariffs were completely eliminated by the Supreme Court. This was a change, and then we were at 10%, now it's at 12.5%. What we're working through in our inventory is stuff mostly that we bought at 20% tariffs, and that will eventually be normalized at 12.5%. So that's the pickup to us. We did something else. When the Iran war started, we added about a third more to our inventory, and we placed massive orders for items that are A and B sellers, our best-selling items.
We did that with the intention of locking in a price in the event that there were things that would increase or be short of during the war. That turned out to be prescient. In fact, we have deliveries that have come in where we have not paid the current shipping rates because we did it earlier. Currently, it's about $9,000 a container from China. We were paying about $4,500. Freight was based on the old diesel freight, not the new diesel freight. So we brought it in, and then there was inflationary and shortage pressures, not to the extent that some predicted, but this 30% more inventory buffered us and gives us built-in profits as we sell this now into the market going forward.
On a steady basis, we believe our current pricing lends itself to a little bit of margin improvement, even with the cost increases that are going on from the war and from gasoline and freight. It's a long way of trying to explain. Tariffs were a complicated problem that we addressed, and we did it proactively, and we're coming out quite strongly.
All right. There's another question around some certification work you're doing for Med-Nap to get possibly cleared to serve U.S. hospitals. I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit and what that might mean for your overall business if that does happen.
Yeah. There's a couple of things there. First, you saw the lens cleaners that we sell at retail, and we're doing very well with that business. Made in the U.S.A. The similar item that's sterilized would become an alcohol prep pad. A little bit different components, but basically that's an alcohol prep pad. There you've got a lot of FDA requirements, and we've spent about $1.5 million in the past year, all expensed, to bring ourselves up to the point where our facility comfortably and truly meets the requirements of the FDA for sale into the U.S. hospital market. We're nearing the completion of that, which is excellent. The headwind to it is that the tariffs have dropped so low on these products that now China and India have an advantage over the U.S. production.
We'll have to see how that works out, but we are getting orders for the business, and we are excited that as we broaden the footprint of the product family, that more will be able to be sold into the hospital market.
All right. We are at the end of our allotted time. Thanks, Walter, for presenting. Thanks everyone for listening in. I do not know if, Walter, you had any parting comments before we close shop here?
Yes. I would like to thank you for joining us, and know that this is serious. We are building this company for the long term. We have been successful. The people investing, the institutions investing, are investing with us. In my case, I bought my shares in the open market many years ago, and we treat you that way. Thank you for joining us.
All right. Thank you, Walter.