Okay, great. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Sidoti & Company May 2024 investor conference. My name is Julio Romero, and I'm the Building Products and Industrials Analyst here at Sidoti. Really pleased to be able to host Apogee Enterprises today. Their ticker is APOG. With us today, we've got Ty Silberhorn, Chief Executive Officer; Matt Osberg, Chief Financial Officer; and Jeff Hemingway, Vice President of Investor Relations. So we're going to do a presentation for about 20 minutes or so, followed by Q&A at the end. If you have any questions for Apogee, feel free to type them into the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen, and happy to ask on your behalf. So with that, Ty, Matt, Jeff, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Really greatly appreciate you joining us this morning, and thanks, Julio, again, and, and Sidoti for, for hosting us. Sidoti's 25th anniversary this year, Apogee's 75th anniversary, so glad we get to, celebrate some big milestones between the two firms. If you go to the second slide, just a reminder: forward-looking statements we make today are subject to risks and uncertainties, and we do encourage you to review our SEC filings for more information. So with that, let me start with a quick introduction for those of you that might be less familiar with Apogee Enterprises. So we are based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As I mentioned, we're celebrating our 75th anniversary. And we've really got now, you know, 75 years of providing value for our customers with a collection of market-leading brands, primarily serving non-residential construction, where we generate over 90% of our revenues.
We do have a heavy U.S. profile, some operations really in Eastern Canada, and then we do have a small glass facility in Brazil that really just services Brazil and, and neighboring countries. So if you look at our, our core business in North America, we do have a substantive footprint in our key geographies, but we still have the opportunity to expand geographically, particularly Western U.S., Western Canada, both from a market penetration standpoint as, as well as an operational footprint standpoint. We are organized into four operating segments, and, and so this is how we report our business, with three of these four providing architectural products and services for non-resi construction.
Like I said, strong portfolio of brands, which you can see represented, in each of the segments here on this chart, with a broad range of capabilities, really for enclosing commercial buildings, as well as providing high-performance optical-quality coatings on glass and acrylic substrates through our large-scale optical business. Our largest segment is framing systems. This business provides commercial windows, storefront, and entrance systems for a wide range of building types and, and varying building project sizes. Our services segment is really an integrated project management services business. They are the largest manufacturer of fabricated curtain wall in North America. They focus on providing upfront engineering and design services, working with the architects, developers, and general contractors, then building and fabricating that curtain wall, and then providing the project management.
Once the steel is up, the concrete's poured, they actually will manage the project site and enclose that building with that curtain wall and hand the project site back off to the general contractor. Our glass segment is really focused on offering premium insulated glass units, and we've really refocused that business (I'll talk about it here later in the presentation), on more of our premium differentiated offerings, and that has also kind of driven them to really focus more on kind of midsize building projects. Our fourth segment, Large-Scale Optical, it's really an outgrowth of our architectural glass business, so leveraging some of the technology and coatings, know-how, and capabilities, and using that to provide a smaller format solution, both with glass and acrylic substrates, predominantly for the custom picture framing fine art markets.
But it's an area of opportunity for us to leverage that technology into some adjacencies, display markets, and some other opportunities where we can leverage those coatings, those performance coatings, and provide some differentiated value into some adjacent markets that I'll talk about as well. So our architectural segments really serve a large and diverse end market, so primarily supporting non-residential construction.
This includes commercial buildings, things like offices, retail, lodging, recreation, institutional buildings - so think healthcare, education, government - transportation hubs, especially airports - and then we also provide entrance and window solutions for some multifamily residential projects. Non-residential construction spend, as you can see on this chart, this is really just a reflection of the U.S. market, nearly $600 billion, and then we mostly play in a subsegment that folks will categorize as the U.S. glazing market, which is still a large, over $20 billion in the U.S. alone.
These market segments are very large, very fragmented as well, so there are a lot of small regional players and a lot of privately held companies that play in this space. With that environment and kind of market backdrop, we always see an opportunity for growth. So some subsectors of these markets are always doing better than others. Typically, some geographies are performing better than others, and that creates opportunities for larger players like ourselves to really have an opportunity to take market share even in a down market. As we look to take that share, that could be in our current space through geographic penetration or moving into adjacencies. So we see a lot, a lot of opportunity to really expand our business both organically and inorganically. Now, if you look at our business and the applications, for our business, we typically, as I said, are really architectural markets-focused.
We drive applications for storefront and entrance systems. Window wall is a step above, just providing a fabricated window solution. Our fabricated window business, we can serve new construction as well as restoration and renovation projects. We can do stick curtain wall, so you see, aluminum stick systems that we can either provide piece parts or we can provide a finished system that can be assembled on-site, insulated glass units through our glass business. And then, as I said, our services segment is really the player for unitized curtain wall, both the design engineering of that, and then as well as doing the installation, as you can see, in the photograph here, for that part of our business. Our large-scale optical segment, like I said, it's a technology outgrowth from our architectural glass business. We've got unique capabilities to add high-performance coatings to both glass and acrylic substrates.
Historically, core market, they really built a premium offering in the framing and fine art markets, and now we see opportunities to leverage our technologies and process capabilities into new adjacencies where optical quality, durability, UV protection, or other functional coatings that create other properties such as electrostatic dissipative, ESD, sorry. And then we have embarked on a significant organic investment in this business to expand the coating capacity so that they could go after some of these adjacent markets. Historically, with that focus on the fine art and framing art business, they've been able to achieve some very, very strong margins because of the differentiation, and they've been limited in going after adjacencies for two reasons. One, they needed the capacity to chase those markets.
And then two, in our old operating model, going back four or five years ago, where Apogee operated a little bit more like a holding company, they saw those adjacencies as being dilutive to their existing business, businesses that would be in the mid-high teens from an operating margin perspective. With where we've transitioned the business and how we're running the business more as an operating company now, we've made the investment for them in that capacity, and we are looking at margins that are accretive to Apogee as a whole. So we are all in now on building out those markets, and that capacity's coming online late summer, and we see some nice growth opportunities for this business as we turn the page and move into next year as well. One thing I do want to highlight is some of our core capabilities outside of the product offerings themselves.
So these capabilities really help us drive performance in what we can offer to the market and, in many cases, offer some ways for us to differentiate, both from a product solution standpoint as well as from a service capability. So specialty finishing of metal substrates, which we actually can do from an automated and semi-automated process for paint and anodizing. Material conversion, so for us, it's really around aluminum extrusion where we can actually provide our own aluminum and then coat, anodize that, and build that into our entrance system, window, or even curtain wall opportunities. Process technologies around deposition coating that we've been able to not only do on glass but are able to do some unique coatings on polymer substrates, kind of taking that performance coating and taking it to another level in terms of optical quality, low emissivity, and UV protection, or even ESD.
And then we do have strong engineering and project management capabilities, particularly on our service segment, where we can support design configuration, do customization, as well as then provide some integrated project management support for those large projects and services. Now, over the past three years, Apogee has embarked on a new strategic direction to really better position the company for long-term profitable growth. So we've had a strong foundation of market-leading brands, broad-based capabilities that we built through our own organic investment and through acquisitions over the last, you know, 15+ years. However, we went into a period of underperformance, and that really got amplified during the pandemic and the subsequent downturn that happened with construction. That created an opportunity for us to really pivot our strategy. And beginning in our fiscal 2022, our calendar year 2021, we went through a deep strategic review of our entire business.
We did a lot of work to bring an outside-in perspective from customers and the market, really looking deeply at competition, bringing in the right consultants to help us get some of that data and input since a lot of our competitors tend to be privately held. And then we used that to take actions to simplify our organizational structure and really simplify our portfolio and really focus the business on where we could differentiate, bring more value to the customer, and hence drive more value for Apogee and its shareholders as well, and then strengthen our core capabilities and systems.
So the idea of, instead of a holding company and having 10, 11, 12 business units that we just reported into four segments but all kind of operating on their own, really strengthening the core capabilities and systems that we could support those businesses from the center and then really drive stronger operational execution and efficiencies across the business as a whole. That has led to some significant improved financial performance over the past couple of years. Now, as we move forward, we are focused on building on this success. So we want to maintain our focus on that operational execution, manage our costs, continue to drive productivity. We want to increase our differentiated product and service offerings, both organically and inorganically, and then continue to make strategic investments to drive our long-term profitable growth.
This strategic shift has really made our ambition clear to both our customers and our shareholders that we want to create peak value and build differentiated businesses that have strong operational execution to ensure that we can deliver sustainable, profitable growth. We're executing that through a three-pillar strategy: become the economic leader in our target markets, actively manage our portfolio to drive higher margins and returns, and strengthen our core capabilities so that we can enable that profitable growth. These pillars really stand on a foundation of key enablers as well, starting with a results-driven culture centered around a new management operating system, investing in talent development with our employees, and then taking a really strong approach to governance. Let me just touch on each of these three pillars briefly.
Moving to become an economic leader in the markets starts with really making sure we understand our target markets and then doing the work to align our businesses to have clear go-to-market strategies that drive value for our customers through differentiated products and services. In doing that, to really be an economic leader, we need to have a relentless focus on operational execution, driving productivity improvements, and ensuring that we maintain a competitive cost structure. That enables us to bring more value to our customers and allows us to improve our own profitability. The second pillar is about actively managing the portfolio. This chart gives a view of our portfolio through the lens of operating margin and ROIC, return on invested capital.
Like most companies, we've had a mix of underperforming and high-performing businesses, and we've been shifting, doing this work to shift that portfolio to higher EBIT and higher ROIC performance. We've been doing this in three ways: accelerating growth of our top-performing businesses and giving them the resources that they need to scale and expand, and then address the underperforming businesses by implementing focused improvement plans that drive higher performance.
And then, where we've been unable to meet those performance goals, we look to reposition those businesses, or in some cases, we've exited some of our product offerings, just where we looked at, even if we're best in class, the margin is not accretive to our long-term goals, and so we've made some decisions to exit out some of the product offerings in our portfolio, and then continuing to invest to add differentiated offerings to that portfolio through a combination of organic investment and then, in the future, acquisitions. So those first two pillars are really about what we are doing. This third pillar, strengthening core capabilities and platforms, is more on how we're doing it. This has meant moving from that historical kind of a decentralized holding company model to one with center-led functional expertise.
That allows us to leverage the scale of the enterprise to better support our businesses. The second is a systematic approach to capital allocation to ensure that we're delivering value by investing in the best return opportunities with a strategic lens. Other elements: building out our management system, the Apogee Management System, which has Lean and CI as its foundational elements, having more robust talent management and development programs across the company, and then building even stronger governance with a broader ESG lens. Taken together, these efforts are driving more efficiencies, they're allowing us to scale, and they're helping us deliver sustainable, profitable growth. We've made significant progress toward the financial targets we set in fiscal 2022. Return on Invested Capital in fiscal 2024 reached 16.5%, exceeding our goal of 12%.
Operating margin also exceeded our 10% target, and we achieved these goals one year early than what we had laid out in November of 2021. Now, last year, we did fall short of our revenue growth target. Some of this was a function of our purposeful strategy to move away from some lower margin, lower return product offerings, and some of it was just the dynamics of our end markets. That 10% growth is representative of the total non-resi construction growth, and we really just used calendar 2023 as a snapshot. That was heavily driven by growth in manufacturing, data centers, warehouses, and distribution centers. These are sectors where today Apogee does not have a lot of offerings to support those types of buildings, and so we, as a result, we have a low participation rate.
In the other sectors of the market, we have seen some deceleration, and this impacted our shorter cycle business, especially our framing segment. Now, as we move into fiscal 2025, our strategic framework remains well-positioned, and we intend to build on our progress, and we have even more focus on driving growth as we move ahead. Execution of the strategy has driven some significant growth in profit dollars and earnings per share. Adjusted operating income dollars have grown 68% since fiscal 2021, and adjusted diluted EPS has nearly doubled from $2.40-$4.77. Historically, we've also had a strong track record of consistent, strong cash flow. We've averaged $125 million of cash from operations over the past six years, and in fiscal 2024, we had a record year delivering $204 million. This provides some significant financial flexibility to execute our strategy and drive value for our shareholders.
This strong cash flow gives us a lot of flexibility, and our priority is using it to invest in profitable growth. We also remain committed to returning cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, and we intend to maintain a strong balance sheet. Through executing this strategy, we've established a strong operational foundation, and we are shifting our focus to driving growth as we turn the page to fiscal 2025 and beyond. We've made investments in our services segment to allow them to better compete on projects west of the Rockies. We're strengthening our service model and looking at ways to enable our framing business to also push west of the Rockies, and we are looking to continue the diversification of our business mix, focusing on the most promising opportunities for growth.
We also have an active acquisition pipeline that we see as a catalyst to not only drive further diversification of our architectural product offerings but also potentially to accelerate Large-Scale Optical's push into new adjacencies. So to wrap up, Apogee is committed to delivering peak value. We've got a strong team, the right strategic framework, and great momentum toward achieving our goals. By executing our strategy, we've made significant progress, and we've got plenty of runway ahead for more. We're transforming Apogee to be an economic leader and building a business that has the potential to outperform our industry throughout the cycles. So with that, we'll open it up for questions.
Excellent. Thanks so much, Ty, for the excellent and comprehensive rundown. Really appreciate it. Again, if folks have questions, feel free to type them into the Q&A section. Happy to ask on your behalf. I'll kick it off here with maybe talking about Project Fortify. Talk about, you know, how you turned around the glass segment over the last few years and how you're applying that to the much larger framing segment today?
Yeah, Matt, maybe you want to talk Fortify, and then we can dovetail into that framing and glass.
Yeah. So you probably saw in January, we announced Project Fortify, and Project Fortify is primarily focused on our framing segment and is a continuation of some of the work that was done about three years ago. That business had the most proliferation of different production facilities and different business units under that umbrella. And as we continue to bring that together, I think this Project Fortify is kind of the final step to bringing under one AFS, a unified leadership team, an ability to approach the market in a more consistent way, really focus on our brands and our differentiated product offerings, and then to be able to be more efficient from a cost structure perspective and a production facility perspective as well. So, you know, I think that is it's a big lift for that business. It's another big step.
But I think as we continue to execute, it's going to give us a, you know, a more concentrated focus, and we're going to be able to, you know, as Ty said, look to how we expand that business west of the Rockies and continue to deliver on our product offerings. So we're never like to be in those situations where you're reducing costs, but, you know, we think it's going to make it a more efficient business going forward.
Yeah. Then I think the glass business is a great example of really all three of our pillars. So as we launched the Apogee Management System, we started with glass and really focused on operational improvements in the plants. So if you go back three years, they, you know, had a nice year where they saw margin improvement with really no revenue growth, and it was really productivity in the plant through the AMS efforts. As we got into the second year, that shift to premium strategy started to take hold, where they started to be able to win projects and focus more on selling our premium offerings, which we have more differentiation, and that tends to allow us to also capture a higher selling price and a higher margin. Then this past year, fiscal 2024, was really everything hitting on all cylinders.
So they had great mix. Most everything was premium product offerings at really good price points and margin levels, as well as some great continued productivity in the plants that allowed them to really overachieve from a margin perspective. We still see margin opportunities in framing, so Fortify allows us to accelerate some of the work to get after that. There's still a lot of opportunity for AMS to continue to drive productivity improvements. So we see margin expansion opportunity in framing with what they have today. And then, obviously, we want all of our businesses to grow now, and so that focus on growth should bring some leverage as well and help drop that to the bottom line.
Just as part of that, Julio , to follow up, as we looked at we announced our guidance for the next fiscal year, one of the things we did also announce is we moved our architectural framing segment target margins up. They used to be 9%-12%. We now moved them to 10%-15% to reflect some of the improvements from Project Fortify and some of the other things Ty talked about.
Yeah. No, absolutely. And you're well ahead on most of the investor day targets you rolled out a few years ago. So kudos to you guys. And for those of us who followed the name for a while, I mean, glass pre-pandemic, this glass segment was arguably the "underperformer" of the overall Apogee business from our seat. So that was no easy lift to do what you guys have done in that segment. I feel like it's still kind of underappreciated how much of a turnaround that's done. Earlier, you guys talked about this being, you know, Apogee's 75th anniversary, and historically, Apogee has been viewed as a glass company and also historically kind of viewed as one that serves the office construction market primarily. But just thinking about, you know, all the changes and the transformation you've done, how should we look at Apogee as it stands today?
Yeah. It's a great question, Julio , and I think I'm new to Apogee or newer, right? I mean, I joined 3.5 years ago. And if you really go back 75 years, I mean, we started in the auto replacement glass business. I mean, that is the foundation of the company. So that's just an important point for people to recognize that this company has transformed itself a couple of times over that 75-year period. And even when I joined, that was a lot of discussions, "Hey, Apogee is about glass, and you really it's about building new office buildings." That wasn't really even true three, four years ago, and I would say it's even less true today. So glass is still a core part of our business, both through LSO and our architectural glass business.
But if you look at what we've done through acquisitions and organic growth, our framing business is much larger today. That has continued to improve. It gives us different product offerings in the market. And then we've really, I think, underappreciated our services segment, which, if you look, last year did take a big step back on margin as they absorbed an old acquisition Sotawall and kind of flipped the business model, which meant they had to take $100+ million of revenue and basically watch it go down to zero and now build it back up with their operating model of really being an integrated project management and service provider, which meant a new set of customers and a new way of bidding on projects for that business.
So now we see them turning the page on that, and we expect some nice margin improvement this year and some growth as we go forward. 3.5 years ago, as part of that strategy work, we knew office was going to look different post-pandemic. We didn't have, you know, the magic crystal ball that could tell us for sure, but we made a concerted effort to say, "Hey, if office is there, great, but we want to purposely chase after other building types and other applications to diversify that." We've seen our revenue tied to office, which we don't report the percentages, but if you look at our backlog and our revenue generation, the percent of office five years ago versus today is down dramatically. It has been replaced with transportation, so think airport terminals, institutional, so think government, education, healthcare, hospitals.
A number of those have government funding programs through the Inflation Reduction Act and some other bills that have gone through Congress, and we're seeing tailwinds for that. And I think that is helping kind of, you know, from an overall business perspective, help us mitigate some of the downturn that we have seen in office. That said, Class A office space, there's still been a healthy demand, a decent demand to build out Class A office space as a way to attract employees to come into the office on a more regular basis.
Perfect. And then just you talked about some of your organic growth initiatives, your westward expansion, west of the Rockies in services, and also you have your capacity buildout in Large-Scale Optical. Kind of as you execute on those, fair to assume the increased exposure to transportation, healthcare kind of continues?
Yeah. If you look, you know, from an acquisition standpoint, as we look at the opportunities, things that help us expand our geographic penetration, so give us footprint in geographies where we don't have footprint today. Those are higher on our radar, as well as, as you said, absolutely, things that would give us the opportunity to go after different types of buildings that we have a limited product offering today and/or help accelerate penetration for LSO into some of these adjacent markets that we can leverage our technology know-how and capabilities with as well.
Excellent. With about 30 seconds or so, if you want to just give me the kind of part of your business that you're most excited for the next 3-5 years.
I'm really excited about all parts of the business. I mean, we've done a lot of work to strengthen each of those four segments, both from an operational performance standpoint, and then really Large-Scale Optical is a great example of really opening up the aperture of what types of applications they could leverage their know-how into that suddenly defines a much larger market space opportunity for them.
So with Project Fortify behind us, I'd say what we have in the portfolio today, we pretty much like everything that's in there, and we're looking to add to that through acquisition. Our priority now is really growth. Even with some softness in the market, meaningful growth probably will come through acquisition, but we do see some tailwinds that we think there's some organic growth opportunities as we turn the page and go into our fiscal 2026 as well. We see a lot of upside with what we have today and how we can build on that.
Excellent. Well, Ty, Matt, and Jeff, thank you for taking the time.
Thank you.
Thank you.