Apogee Enterprises, Inc. (APOG)
NASDAQ: APOG · Real-Time Price · USD
35.61
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Apr 29, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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15th Annual Midwest IDEAS Investor Conference

Aug 29, 2024

Moderator

All right, we'll go ahead and get started with our next presentation, Apogee, APOG on the Nasdaq. This is another really good example of kind of how we find companies. We went and saw a bunch of companies in Minneapolis, and this was one that was suggested by one of our investors that we visit with. They did our conference first time a couple of years ago, and now they're back again. So, I'm gonna turn it over to Ty, the CEO, to tell us the story.

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me okay? Get this mic adjusted. Thanks for joining us today, and I do want to thank Three Part Advisors for hosting us. We're really happy to be part of the conference. We had a great session here a couple of years ago, which is why we're back again, and hopefully, you guys are getting some value out of this as well. I've got to do my basic reminder, so that forward-looking statements that we make today are subject to risks and uncertainties, so encourage you to review our SEC filings for more information. I'm gonna go through our presentation, and I'm gonna assume that, for the most part, everyone in the audience is not familiar with Apogee Enterprises.

So those that are familiar, bear with me a little bit as we reground other folks in the room. Apogee actually is celebrating its 75th anniversary. This past July, we turned 75 years old. So this is a company that has been around for a long time. It's a company that has also transformed itself a few times over that period. We're based in Minneapolis. We primarily serve non-residential construction, and that's where we generate about 90% of our revenues. Heavy U.S. profile and mostly North America. We do have a few facilities in Eastern Canada. We do have a small glass fabrication line down in Brazil, but most of our activity tends to be in the North American market. Some of our businesses do ship outside the U.S. as well.

We go to market through these four segments. These operating segments, three of these four are focused in on non-residential construction. We've got a strong portfolio of market-leading brands, which provide us with a broad range of products and services. Our largest segment is Framing Systems. They provide commercial windows, storefront and entrance systems, and also provide what the industry refers to as lineal stick systems. So someone that's going to fabricate curtain or window wall on-site, we will actually provide those aluminum sticks in a kit, in a system that they can assemble, and glaze on-site. That business is fairly vertically integrated, so we actually extrude our own aluminum to create those aluminum framing products or those lineal sticks that we sell.

We actually can anodize, which enhances the performance of the aluminum, and helps it perform better in the elements from a weathering standpoint, and then we can coat and paint that those aluminum products ourselves as well. We do that all in-house. We do that for the products that we create and sell, and we also do some of those coating capabilities we actually sell as a service, sometimes within the industry and even outside the industry, if they need aluminum anodized or coated. Our Services segment is actually the largest fabricator of curtain wall in North America. So if you look at a skyscraper that's mostly glass, that is curtain wall.

That's not just the insulated glass unit or the architectural glass, but it's all the aluminum and framing that goes around that glass, and then that glass is hung, literally hung on the skyscraper to enclose that building and create that. Our Services business, which goes to market under the Harmon brand, is not only the largest fabricator, but they are truly an end-to-end project management service, and what that means is that as a developer and architect decide that they're gonna build a building and they start to work with the general contractor, our Harmon business will actually engage at the front end and help and assist in design and engineering work, and actually will get paid for some of that design and engineering work, on that curtain wall.

If they win the job, and they bid on that job, they will actually then fabricate that curtain wall. So they will build that curtain wall in one of their manufacturing facilities, and then they're a bit unique, is that they go all the way down to the downstream, and they will actually install that curtain wall. So once the steel goes up, the concrete's poured, that business will then also come in and provide the labor on-site, and they will actually enclose that building with the curtain wall product. Our Glass business really extends from the roots of Apogee. When Apogee first started, it started in the auto replacement Glass business.

That allowed them to start to look at glazing operations and glazing opportunities in storefront and other things, and eventually, they decided that they had core capabilities that they could leverage in doing their own architectural glass and build that business out today. That business today is really focused on premium glass offerings. So where we can differentiate, we buy float glass from glass manufacturers, but it's completely untreated, so we do our own heat soak, we do our own tempering, and we put our own proprietary coatings on that glass. Those coatings provide unique color, look, how they perform in different types of sunlight, and then most importantly, they also add, and when we assemble the insulated glass unit, it also creates the energy efficiency and the thermal properties that a lot of the building developers are looking for today.

And then our fourth segment, Large-Scale Optical, is really an outgrowth of that Architectural Glass business. So they took some of the coating knowledge and capability and actually downsized it, and so their coating lines are about 1/2-1/3 of the size of our architectural glass coating lines. But they take those anti-reflective coatings and the UV coatings, and use that and built that business to sell into framing art in museums.

So if you got a large print and you go to a framing shop, your local framing shop or the back of a Michaels store, and you're picking out the glass, you're more than likely picking out Tru Vue, a glass or acrylic, because then they've figured out how to take those coatings and actually apply them onto an acrylic substrate, which is an upsell from the glass because it's more durable, it's lighter. That's a big push from a museum perspective as well. And then we've been working, and I'll talk a little bit more of how we can extend that application capability into different market opportunities to grow that business. Let's talk, since most of our business is non-res. I just want to make sure we're all grounded in the non-residential construction market. These are U.S. numbers.

The U.S., you know, is non-residential construction, it is a large and diverse end market. There are a lot of players, a lot of private companies that play in this space. If you think about non-residential construction, you'll hear terms like commercial buildings, so think office buildings, retail outlets, lodging, hotels, recreation, which could be an amusement center, it could be a stadium, whether it's an indoor or outdoor, stadium that's being built. Institutional buildings, so think healthcare, think education, think government buildings, and then transportation hubs, which primarily for us, it's airports. So if you see a new airport terminal being built, it's a lot of glass. It kinda looks like a skyscraper on its side.

So that fits well both for our Services business, our Architectural Glass business, and, and then even for our Framing business, there's opportunities in a transportation center and airport terminal. We do do some business in multifamily residential, a little bit more on the high-end side from an apartment or condo perspective with our entrance systems, and some of our glass window products. Non-resi construction, as you see, it's almost $600 billion. This data is a little over a year and a half old at this point, so it is a business, a market that's still growing. The glazing subsegment is about $20 billion, and that's where most of our $1.4 billion of non-resi sales plays. It would fall into that glazing market category.

So that includes aluminum fabrication, making architectural glass and insulated glass units, and then the other products and materials that would go. Mostly, when you're talking glazing, you're mostly talking about the facade. You're talking about the outside of the building. If you look at this type of market environment, there's always opportunities for growth. I'll talk a little bit about where we see the market going from this standpoint. It definitely is softening. Our business today, we still see geographic expansion opportunities in North America that gives us an opportunity to grow and take share, even in a softer market. And there's always opportunities for stronger players, even in a soft market, for us to win business. So, as some of those larger projects have slowed, we've seen a little bit of a flight to quality.

So our Harmon business is winning some work, because they wanna do if they're gonna make that building, greenlight that building as a go project, they wanna make sure it gets done, and it's done on time and done well, and they have a reputation for delivering on that value proposition. And so they're actually seeing an opportunity to take some share as a result of that. So applications, I've kinda hit these, but I'll highlight just visually for you. So storefront and entrance, think about street-level windows and doors, the windows that go around those entrance doors. We will sell those products either glazed or unglazed, meaning with or without the glass. Smaller storefronts, they will typically. The contractor will glaze on-site, and that reduces damage that might happen from the doors or entrance systems being shipped.

Window walls, so this now we really deliver product there from our lineal stick system. We used to do some supplied window wall, where we'd actually do the construct of the window wall and ship to the job site. That is a business that we decided in January we would step away from. It has been diminishing in terms of revenue opportunity for us, and it was a business that was still margin-challenged for us, and we felt the teams did everything they could to try and improve the margin profile, and we felt it was just time for us to step away and really focus on other parts of the business. Shop-fabricated windows, so there's a perfect example. A lot of hotels tend to be punch-out windows, and we will supply that through our Framing segment.

And then, obviously, the glass and the insulated glass units that we produce through our Architectural Glass, and then the unitized curtain walls really through our Services segment. So they will fabricate that large piece of curtain wall, ship it to the job site, and then they will actually manage the installation of the curtain wall. Until that building gets enclosed, they're one of the major subs on a project. They won't close the building and then hand the project back off to the general contractor, so the interior subs can get to work on that building. We're in Chicago, and good news is, we have a lot of great project examples. I won't read through all of these, but there is a lot in the Chicago skyline that includes our products, a lot of our glass.

Our Services segment has done a lot of large building projects here. The Salesforce Tower is one that they did most recently from the Services business, and then even some of the renovation on some of the older buildings from a window standpoint and entrance system standpoint, we've won some nice work there as well. If you take the river tour, the architectural tour, they're gonna point out a lot of buildings that has a lot of our stuff on that. Let me talk a little bit about the portion of our business that is not directly related to non-residential construction, and that's our Large-Scale Optical business, so I talked about before that that business is really built up around framing and museum art for both glass and acrylic.

But as we step back and look at that business, we recognize that we've got some strong capabilities in our coating processes and the manufacturing capabilities around that, that we can leverage those performance criteria into other applications. So one of the areas that the team looked at is we said, Where can you sell that UV protection, that anti-reflective? I like to use a simple example because most people can resonate with it. If you go through a drive-through, most of those drive-throughs are electronic displays now, and if you look at it closely, the next time you go through there, you see that it's not just a large TV or display, it's enclosed in an aluminum enclosure with a glass or acrylic substrate on the surface.

What's important for those displays to hold up over time is to limit the UV exposure that they get. So having a UV protective coating on that glass or acrylic enclosure, and then durability. Tend to get scratched, scraped, someone throws something at the drive-through display. Acrylic is a more durable product. So we've demonstrated that we have a great product that performs well in that environment. As we did that and we started to look at those opportunities, it became clear for us if we were gonna move into some of these adjacencies, Large-Scale Optical needed more capacity, 'cause they were running out of capacity, just supporting our core Framing art business. So we've made a significant investment to expand capacity for that business.

That capacity is literally coming online right now, and that will really open the door for them to chase after some of these opportunities and these other adjacencies as we close out this year and turn the page into next year. It's a bit more of a OEM spec-in and performance sell, so it's different than our core business, so we're actually putting a dedicated part of the organization and team to focus on that, so that we also don't take our eye off the ball on our core Framing art business as well. To talk a little bit about our capabilities and how we see these creating value. So starting with specialty finishing, so we've got equipment and processes in a number of facilities where we can apply architectural paints, coatings. We can do our own anodized finishing of that aluminum.

If you think about from a material conversion standpoint, we have vertically integrated, so we will buy billet, and we will extrude our own aluminum. That gives us flexibility in being able to do different run sizes. It allows us to go after opportunities that other competitors might have a difficult time because they can't find an extruder willing to do that type of extrusion or at the volume levels that they have. And then, of course, glass and metal fabrication is a key part of what we do, both in our Services, our Framing, and our Glass segment in and of itself. From a process technology standpoint, so we do deposition coating, so you think metal targets going through a process that you're depositing that onto the surface.

We also have wet coating process capability for some of those coatings, in our LSO segment, and then when we look at those coatings, we have proprietary coatings where we're doing our own combination of materials or even blending of coatings that gives us that low emissivity, optical quality in terms of clarity, as well as UV protection and those anti-reflective, capabilities, and then engineering project management, that's really at the forefront of what our Services segment does, because they are really an end-to-end project management service provider at the end of the day, but we leverage those capabilities, as you might imagine, into other parts of the business, 'cause a lot of those businesses are still also quoting on large projects, and they're feeding in, as a product component of that large project.

So that engineering and project management becomes not only important but in many cases, becomes a key differentiator. For those that haven't been with us the last few years, we've been on a journey. When I came in as CEO in January of 2021 , the business, even before COVID, was really staring into some big challenges. The company's always been acquisitive in its 75-year history, but we had a couple of acquisitions back in 2016 , 2017 that did not go well, did not go as planned. They were some businesses that were having some operational challenges when we acquired them, and unfortunately, those things got worse, not better. We also had an operating model at the time that as a holding company. So when we did acquisitions, it was kind of a buy hold.

We acquired a company, and we literally just let that company kind of keep running on its own. We didn't integrate those businesses, even from a back office standpoint. So they kept on their own systems, they kept on their own emails, they kept on their own payroll provider, etc. , their own benefits plans. So as we came in and started to look at where do we need to change course and what do we need to do different, we built a new strategic plan, really with an outside-in perspective. So we went and did a lot of deep market work, voice of customer work. Non-resi construction has a lot of private companies that play in this space, so we needed to use third-party consultants to really help us identify where should we be benchmarking? What does good look like?

What's the right margin level we should be expecting? And then really work to build that plan and kinda came up with this: How are we gonna deliver peak value to our customers, to our shareholders, and to our employees as we build that out over that process? We've had some considerable success with this new strategy. We've really improved the financial performance of the company over the past few years. We've gone from an operating margin in the low mid-single digits to over 10%, and reported 12% in the last quarter. From an operating margin perspective, we had a big focus on return on invested capital.

So as a result of some of the organic investments, some of the acquisitions, our return on invested capital had fallen into the mid-high single digits, and our cost of capital is about 10%, so that's dilutive. With a focus on driving profitability, getting better control of costs, and cleaning up some of the acquisitions that we had done, we're now seeing our ROIC performing in the 16%-17% range. So nice returns for us and for our shareholders. As we move forward, we're gonna stay focused on building on this success. So we've done a lot to really strengthen our operational muscle, if you will, in the business. We're not gonna lose sight of that, but we're also driving more of our focus now on growth.

How are we gonna drive both organic and inorganic growth as we turn the page, which is now we're in our fiscal 2025, and we turn the page into our, our fiscal 2026, and really strengthen what we have in the portfolio from a differentiated standpoint? So that strategic framework, these are the three pillars that we built around, and we're still operating in this three pillar framework, and the first was this concept of: how do we be an economic leader?

So part of that outside-in work that we did is to say, Listen, is 5% margin good, or is 10% margin good, or should we be at 15% margin? We identified some businesses and went through that to say, Hey, Ty, if you're best in class, if Apogee is at the top of the mark, in a really good year, you're gonna make 4% or 5% operating margin. Those are businesses that we said we don't wanna be in that. We're not gonna get the return on investment. We really don't wanna play in a single-digit margin, which means in a bad year, when the market's down, you're gonna probably lose money on those product lines.

As we laid that out and kind of going into this active portfolio management, we used that with the organization, the team, and we identified over $200 million of revenue that we said we don't wanna be in anymore. Some of that we exited relatively quickly in that first year, and others, through pricing and communication to the market, we exited over time. But we basically, you know, took $200 million+ of revenue out, and we've worked to now fill that back in over the last couple of years. The other piece was actively managing the portfolio, and I'll hit on each of these a little bit in the next slide, but really always looking at what are we selling, why are we selling it, how do we differentiate it?

And then this concept of strengthen the core, and we use this as a way to get the team to say, Listen, we, we need to move from this holding company to more of an operating company mentality. So where can we standardize and simplify across the enterprise, get commonality, drive more efficiencies, de-risk some of our exposure from a systems and process standpoint, and really get better in leveraging that strength across the whole organization? So that economic leadership, we did understand our markets. We've got really strong depth of knowledge in non-resi construction, and so using that, along with the data that we pulled in through the market research, helped us identify where can we differentiate and where can we get paid for that differentiation and help drive better margins on our product offerings?

Actively managing the portfolio. So when we set out, we looked at major product lines, we looked at all these independent business units. So even though we reported in four segments, if you went back four or five years, we were really operating twelve independent business units. And so we mapped these and said, Listen, we're committing to the street that we're gonna be north of 10% on operating income. We need to be comfortably above our 10% cost of capital. So we just used that as a grid to plot all our products and businesses and then said: Listen, if we're in the bottom left, we either have to have a, a meaningful improvement plan that gets us to the upper right in, in the near term, or we need to question why, why we're gonna stay in that business.

That allowed us to drive early cleanup in the portfolio and now moved all four of our businesses up into the right, and what they are selling today is now up into the right in their portfolio as well, and it's the lens that we apply every year as we're going through our operating plan process and as we refresh our strategic plan to come back and revisit not just where they are today, but where do we see it in two and three years out, so that we can either course correct or amplify or deamplify parts of the portfolio based on what we're seeing happening in the market, and really driving that focus on differentiation, which can be in the product itself, like our coatings and architectural glass or large-scale optical, or it can be how we provide the product or the service.

In our Framing segment, our entrance system business, our customers will tell us that We buy from you because you have short lead times, and we know when your product arrives on site. If you told us it's gonna arrive on Wednesday, it actually arrives on Wednesday, and when it arrived, I didn't have to rework it. It was what it was supposed to be when it got here on the job site. And guess what? The contractors, they'll pay a premium for that, for that certainty, versus saving 5% or 10% on another person, and it didn't show up on Wednesday, it showed up on the following Wednesday, or it showed up on time, but it needs to get reworked, and now they're spending significant labor costs reworking that product so it can get installed into the building.

This concept of strengthening our core around capabilities and platforms, and really a bit of a flywheel here, too. Starting with investment rigor. If we're gonna raise our return on invested capital, we have to really be confident in where we're making investments in the business, and then not kind of spreading the peanut butter across all the businesses. We come together as a leadership team, we look at all the opportunities we have to invest. We have very strong debate and discussion about those, and we align then on, we want to put more of that investment in Framing or more of that investment in Large-Scale Optical in the next one, two, or three years based on what we believe is going to generate the best returns for the company.

We launched a management system, the Apogee management system, and this is really lean, continuous improvement. We did it from the ground up, so we didn't do a top-down push of lean concepts at the executive level. We brought in an experienced leader who has deployed Lean CI at multiple companies, who really learned from the Danaher system, and took that framework, and we said, Let's start in our glass plants, and then let's build out from there across our Framing and the other parts of our businesses. And then really getting stronger around what we're doing with talent management, leveraging our talent across the enterprise instead of in each of those individual business silos that we had prior.

And then really continuing to have strong governance and deepening our functional expertise around IT systems, around human resource capabilities, platforms and systems, and then even around functional areas like procurement and centralizing that and driving standards across the enterprise. So if you followed the stock at all, you've seen that it's, it's been a nice journey for us the last couple of years. So all of that work has been paying off. From a return on invested capital, we had set a goal three years ago to be above 12%. We achieved it in two years. Fiscal 2024, we actually ended close to 17%. We've seen margins lift nicely from 6% in fiscal 2022 up to just over 10% last year. And then outgrowing the market.

You know, we had a year where we were able to exceed that one point two x. We missed that last year, and our guide right now would say that we're gonna probably be a couple of hundred basis points below where we think the market's gonna end up growing. And some of that's the portfolio cleanup work that we've done, and some of that is where we're exposed in some of the smaller project work in our Framing business has really slowed down. The good news is, because of the operational rigor we have, is even with those volume hits, we've been able to not only maintain, even expand margins in some cases, and still grow our bottom line profit dollars. And of course, that has netted out to nice growth on adjusted operating income and obviously from an EPS profile as well.

That performance allowed us to raise targets for our businesses. Both our Glass and our Framing business had been in that 9%-12% range. We raised our glass to a 10%-15% range. They're making myself and the CFO look bad because they keep blowing past the 15% the last few quarters. We'll take that. As Matt Osberg, our CFO, said in our last earnings call, he said, I hope they make me look bad next quarter, too. But we talk about this because we are putting guardrails in place, that when we look at the market, we think to stay competitive and win business, it's gonna be hard for us to be at 20%.

And so we've been very thoughtful in saying, Right now, we'd rather see that business working its way back towards 15%, especially as we see the market soften, so that we're not missing revenue opportunities, because we could be pricing ourselves out of some of those opportunities long term. And then our Framing Systems businesses continue to perform well, and as they've really now doubled down on the Lean CI work, we see opportunities to continue to improve their margin performance. So we raised that guide to 10%-15% as well. Cash flow has been really strong.

We've guided, hey, fiscal 2024 was a bit of an anomaly as we cleaned up some things in our Services segment around, and had just timing of jobs and job flow that really generated some significant cash flow, but averaging $125 million a year and kind of being 100% on cash flow generation from an operating standpoint is a good guide for you to think about from there. Where are we gonna invest our capital? First and foremost, in profitable growth. We will look at doing that organic investments. Probably the biggest investment we've made is in Large-Scale Optical right now from an organic standpoint. Then we are looking at acquisitions. Acquisitions will be a growth driver for our business.

It has been, and we can do those, and we can do those well. We've strengthened our operating muscle, and then we've built an integration playbook. So in the past, we did acquisitions kind of buy and hold. We will integrate acquisitions starting on day one so that we ensure we're maximizing the cost synergies that we can derive from that acquisition, that we really align it within one of our four business segments. And then as we look at those acquisitions, we've built a targeted pipeline on our own. We're not waiting for the phone to ring, for a banker or someone to tell us, X, Y, Z is for sale.

We think you guys should be interested. We've built our target list that we've been working, and we've been working that target list even in advance of maybe a company thinking it wants to sell or should sell, so that we can be strategic, and then we're looking at acquisitions that are accretive to our margin profile. So we want our margins to continue to improve, so we don't want to do an acquisition that's gonna pull us back under that 10% that we've worked so hard to get to. And then, of course, returning capital to shareholders through dividends, and we do continue to do opportunistic buybacks, and then really maintain a strong balance sheet. So we've got almost no debt right now.

We have expanded our credit facility that enables us to do meaningful acquisitions, and then we can flex that accordingly based on what we're doing on the acquisition front. But we will always look to maintain that strong balance sheet. Even if we do a deal and we put some debt on the books, we're gonna work to bring that down in a relatively short period of time and keep our capitalization at the right level that we can maximize shareholder return. Last couple of slides here. Increasing our focus on growth, even with the market slowing, as I told the team, all the more important reason to really be focused on growth. Where can we take share but still deliver value and hold on to our margins?

We've got geographic expansion opportunities, both in our Services and our Framing business. West of the Rockies, we've made some investment in Services. We have an opportunity to make some investment in Framing. And then really look at how can we accelerate that growth through acquisitions and organic investments. So last slide, and we'll have a few minutes here if there's some questions, but we've really been on a transformational journey from an operations standpoint, from really driving a strategic focus in the portfolio to give us much better operating and financial deliverables for our investors. And we've got some really good momentum behind the business right now.

And so there's still opportunities for us to keep driving productivity and some operational improvement, but we're in a strong position that any growth we see as really being levered down to the bottom line in a very positive way, and we're very confident in what we can do from an acquisition standpoint to accelerate that growth and really make true and bring home that promise of creating peak value. So thank you. And with that, I think we've got a few minutes if there's any questions. In the back there.

Speaker 4

Can you give me an example of a building, a building in Chicago?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Yeah, if we go back. What slide was that on? I mean, Salesforce Tower is the most recent one, the St. Regis Tower.

Speaker 3

Trump Tower.

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Trump Tower's got our glass.

Speaker 3

You name it, we're all over the place.

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Was it the airport?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Oh, the O'Hare Terminal.

Speaker 3

Terminal one.

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

One or two.

Speaker 3

Remember one that recently did [audio distortion].

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Terminal one

Speaker 3

[audio distortion] put in new skylights.

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

We did a curtain wall glass in that. Yep.

Speaker 4

You mentioned Apogee. Can you talk about what activity you're expecting in the next year?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Yeah, so we'll look at Dodge and FMI, and we kind of are aligning to that. If even if you look at the growth that's still happening this year, where it is coming down kind of into the low single digits, is where we think it's gonna end up at the end of the year, and it was still kinda high single digits at the beginning of the year. Manufacturing build-outs, data center warehouse build-outs have been a big driver the last couple of years. We don't sell a lot into those. That's in areas we're looking at what could we do organically in our portfolio or inorganically through acquisition that gives us some more exposure there.

Most of the market prognosticators think next year looks relatively flat, and then maybe settling into kind of this, you know, 1%-3% growth for the next couple of years, but we look at that, we still have an opportunity to expand geographically, to grow that way, and we think acquisitions will be a meaningful part of our growth story as well.

Speaker 5

Any big difference between the public sector and private sector?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Yeah, that's a great question. So we looked three years ago that, hey, we want to really make sure we're diversifying in the types of projects we're winning, 'cause the whole market was over indexed office, and this is in early 2021. We didn't know what return to work was gonna look like, but we knew it wasn't gonna look like pre-COVID. So we really focused on hospital, clinic, entertainment venues, transportation, like airports. The good news is, when you look at those institutional projects, you look at the airport terminals, there's a lot of government funding that has been. The Inflation Reduction Act had significant dollars available for those types of projects, so there's some tailwind in those projects, and the good news is, we've really been focused in on those projects for the last couple of years.

Speaker 5

How reasonable is the proximity of these factors?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Glass, we can ship pretty far and not have to worry from that standpoint, so we can compete North America, no problem. We do ship some of that outside the U.S., but that's usually because there is some really unique coating that someone wanted, and they could only get it from, our Viracon operation. Our Framing business, you can only put aluminum on a truck and go so many miles before the freight starts to eat into the margin. So there is a bit of a regionality for our Framing business. We don't sell a lot west of the Rockies, because our furthest footprint is Dallas and Monett, Missouri, so kind of the western part of Missouri. So for that business to grow, we need footprint, west of the Rockies. So we're looking at what we do organically or inorganically to expand that business.

I think we have time for one more. Was there one more? Yep.

Speaker 6

How much of the business is new construction?

Ty Silberhorn
CEO, Apogee Enterprises

Yeah, we right now, historically, have over indexed in new construction. And we actually historically haven't called it out, because even a total reskin on a building where they're pulling off the curtain wall, to us, looks like a new construction. It's the same. So as we look at where we invest organically, and then on the acquisition side, how do we gain exposure to R&R and start to drive that as a bigger part of our portfolio? So that's a big upside opportunity for us. I think we're out of time. Thank you very much. Appreciate the questions.

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