Good afternoon. I'm Sandy Martin, Three Part Advisors, and thank you very much for coming to the IDEAS conference here in Dallas. Next up, we've got Apogee Enterprises, Nasdaq-traded, $1.8 billion market cap. And presenting today is Matt Osberg, CFO, and I'll hand it off to Matt.
We've got the unenviable slot of post-lunch here, but I did see a lot of cups of coffee, so hopefully that'll help bridge the gap here as we go through the presentation today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. As Sandy said, my name is Matt Osberg. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for Apogee Enterprises, and we're very happy to be part of this conference, and thanks to Three Part Advisors for hosting us and letting us join this today. Looking forward to giving you guys a little bit of an overview of what we do at Apogee. Just a reminder, we will be making some forward-looking statements today, which are subject to risk and uncertainties. Please encourage you to review our SEC filings on our website. Let's start with a quick introduction. Oh, thank you. Yep, I didn't grab that door.
Let's start with a quick introduction for those who might be a little bit unfamiliar with what Apogee is. So we're based in Minneapolis. We're actually celebrating our 75-year anniversary as a company this year. We actually started as an auto glass company way, way back, and we've evolved to become what we are today over the past 75 years. We've got an established history of providing value through customers with market-leading brands. We're primarily an architectural business where we get over 90% of our revenues. We're heavy U.S. profile. We've got some operations in Canada and a very small operation in Brazil, and we have a substantive footprint that's east of the Rocky Mountains, and we have opportunity to push west geographically to continue to grow and expand.
I'll go into it a little bit later in the presentation, but we just announced that we closed on an acquisition in early November, UW Solutions, which helps expand our business in our performance coatings area, and that's outside kind of our architectural business. So we'll go into that a little bit later in the presentation. So we have a portfolio of market-leading brands with a broad range of capabilities for enclosing commercial buildings and also providing high-quality performance on coatings. We're organized into four operating segments with framing systems, services, and glass, providing architectural products and services in our non-residential space. And our fourth segment, Large-Scale Optical, combines our Tru Vue brand, which is our legacy brand in that space, with some of the brands that we just acquired through our UW Solutions acquisition, which will help continue to expand that part of our business.
Our largest segment is framing solutions. So framing solutions provides commercial windows, but mostly storefront and entrance systems for building types. Our services segment is the largest manufacturer of curtain wall in the U.S., but is really focused on project management and is an integrated delivery because we can do design, engineering, fabrication, and we install on the building itself and enclose the building. So it's really a strong project management business as well. And then our glass segment is focused on premium insulated glass unit offerings, mostly in kind of mid-size businesses or mid-size buildings. So we believe we have a set of core capabilities that really drive our performance and our value creation. One is specialty finishing. So this is specialty finishing of metal substrates with automated and semi-automated processes for painting and anodizing, primarily aluminum.
We have material conversion through our aluminum extrusion process, so we actually extrude our own frames, and also we can fabricate metal and glass. And we have a process technology for deposition coating on glass and polymer substrates. So that's our ability to coat really our flat surfaces with unique coatings that can help improve optical quality, emissivity, UV, lots of different things that we can protect against. And then our services segment, as I mentioned, is really an integrated project management business that helps to customize, design, fabricate, and install on the building envelope itself. Our architectural business serves a very large and diverse end market. The non-residential construction spend is estimated to be about $600 billion in the U.S. alone, and we mostly play in the glazing subsegment, which is about $20 billion.
This is a very fragmented market with many small regional players and a lot of privately held companies. In this industry, there's lots of opportunity for us to continue to expand our share. Even in our core markets today, we have roughly 5% share of each of the different segments, so we have a huge opportunity to continue to expand and gain share. If you think about the different types of the non-residential construction market, we look at commercial buildings, which has offices, retail, lodging, and recreation. We look at institutional buildings like healthcare, education, and governmental buildings. And then something that's really been emerging is transportation for us, like especially airports. Those are all areas that we play in from a project perspective. Currently, our architectural products primarily serve the building façade, so the outside of the building and enclosing the building. We deliver storefront and entrance systems.
We deliver commercial windows, aluminum-engineered framing systems, insulated glass units, and then unitized curtain wall and window wall, which is kind of the seamless glass that doesn't have a break. That's the curtain and window wall. So we do serve a large variety of projects, small to large, and we have a lot of our products that can be found here in Dallas on probably hundreds of buildings. These are just a few that we have in the area and can demonstrate. So on the top left there is a building that had one of our brands for glass as Viracon, so that had our glass, and then our Harmon team did the installation, so enclosed the building. And then you can see even down in the left bottom corner, SMU University Dining Commons, we had our aluminum framing systems put in there as well.
So lots of different ways that you can see we're showing up in different types of buildings with different types of products. In November 2021, we launched our new strategic framework, which was to create peak value by building differentiated businesses with strong operational execution. We have a three-pillar strategy to executing that. The first is be an economic leader in our target markets. The second is actively manage our portfolio, and the third is strengthen our core. I'll go into each one of those here in a little bit more detail, but those three pillars are built on a foundation of key enablers for us, such as a results-driven culture, talent development systems, and an Apogee Management System, which is a continuous improvement system that we've put in place that focuses on Lean and Six Sigma. So our first pillar is be an economic leader in target markets.
This means we clearly understand our target markets. We align our businesses to have clear go-to-market strategies, and we drive value for the customers by offering differentiated products and services. We're executing this with a real big focus on operations and productivity, which we believe can really drive a competitive cost structure advantage for us. The second pillar is actively managing our portfolio. Like any business, we have a mix of underperforming business and higher-performing business. What this graph is showing here is a lens of looking at those businesses through operating margin and ROIC. We want to try and shift our underperforming businesses to a higher-performing business. We've tried to do that in three ways. First is we've invested in our higher-performing businesses to get them the resources they needed to be able to continue to grow and expand.
Second, in our underperforming businesses, we've tried to implement focused improvement plans either around cost takeout or repricing or looking at different ways we can go into market. And to the extent that we can't, we've exited some businesses. And over the past three or four years, we've probably walked away from about $200 million of revenue that had very low profit return on it. So we've been able to deliver the results we have even in that lens. And as we continue to evolve as a company and add businesses like UW Solutions, we're continuing to use this discipline as we set the bar higher and higher to reevaluate our portfolio of businesses and continue to drive everybody higher and towards the right.
So one of the ways we've been able to demonstrate that we've been taking costs out of the business and making some of those choices is in January 2024, we announced Project Fortify. So this was really to be able to consolidate our framing business, which, three years ago, that business operated as six independent businesses. So as we bring that together, we have aligned leadership, we have aligned operational and supply chain, we have better go-to-market, and then we simplified our product offerings. So that caused us to walk away from some unproductive or unprofitable revenue this year, but it also allowed us to drive expected annual cost savings from these actions of $13 million-$14 million, most of which we're realizing this year, but a portion of which we'll realize next year. Our third pillar is strengthening our core capabilities.
And the first two pillars are more about what we're doing. This is about how we're doing it. So what we've done here is we've moved from where we've been traditionally is in a more decentralized model. We're now moving to a center-led capability functional expertise so we can build some core capabilities that we can scale as we grow, and we can find some of those synergies across our businesses. We're also building out our management systems, developing a more robust talent management program, and continuing to focus on strong governance, which has always been a strength for us in the past. So as we look back in November 2021, when we kicked this off, we set a couple of key financial targets for us. One was to get to 12% or better adjusted ROIC. One was 10% or better adjusted operating margin.
And then another one was to try and grow 1.2 times the construction index. So back in fiscal year 2021, we had an ROIC that was below our weighted average cost of capital. So that's not really a sustainable business model. As you can see, we've been able to not only achieve our target, but even in the first half of this year, we're almost at 18%. From an adjusted operating margin perspective, we were able to achieve 10% at the end of our last fiscal year, and we've moved that the first half of the year to 12.7%, although we're guiding to about 11% as the finishing spot this year. We were able to achieve the targets we set out in 2021 a year early. So those were targets that were supposed to be delivered in fiscal 2025, and we delivered them both a year early in fiscal 2024.
Unfortunately, from a revenue perspective in fiscal 2024, we underachieved, and some of this was exiting some of the non-performing businesses that we've talked about, but also with some headwinds on some of our end markets. We've also been able to grow profit dollars and EPS over the past three or four years. You can see our adjusted operating income has grown 68% from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2024, and our adjusted diluted EPS has nearly doubled over that same time period from $2.40 to $4.77. We have established long-term margin target ranges for each of our segments, and you can see them here. In fiscal 2024, all segments were within or above our targeted range except for services. We've had exceptionally strong performance in glass, which had a margin of 18% last year and has started the year even stronger at 22%.
And we've recently increased our target range for framing systems. So now it's at 10%-15%. At the beginning of the year, we raised that from 9%-12% just to reflect a lot of the operational improvements that they've made, but also to reflect some of the benefits of Project Fortify, which will impact that segment the most. Services, although they underachieved last year, we still have opportunity to drive improvements. And actually, last year, through all four quarters of last year and the first two quarters of this year, they have improved their margins sequentially. So they have six quarters in a row of sequential margin improvement. And we do expect them this year to finish in the bottom end of that 7%-9% margin range. LSO is our most profitable segment.
Although we do expect that margin range to get diluted a little bit more as we continue to expand and grow that business, their margin ranges should still be very accretive to the overall Apogee margin targets. We have a strong history of consistent cash flow. Over the past six years, we've averaged $125 million of cash flow a year. Fiscal 2024 was a record year for us of $204 million. We had some one-time benefits in fiscal 2024 that could have balanced out fiscal 2023, but we still expect to be a very strong cash flow generating business. We'll talk a little bit about where we are from a leverage perspective, but even after we've done our UW Solutions acquisition, we're now at just a little under 1.5 times leverage.
We still have the ability to pay that down, and we still have capacity to continue to invest in further M&A. Talking about capital allocation, here are capital allocation priorities. We want to first invest in profitable organic and inorganic growth. We also remain committed to returning cash to shareholders. We've been a long-time dividend business, and we expect to continue to do that, and then opportunistically getting into share buybacks when we don't have other opportunities that are better available to us. We do intend to make investments while maintaining a strong balance sheet, and although before our acquisition, we were basically debt-free, we'll be around 1.5 times leverage, and we can currently pay that down about half a turn a year. We can continue to delever and look to redeploy capital. Our approach to M&A, we've developed a very focused and disciplined approach.
We've taken steps to add key talent and build a very structured process to look at and screen assets that are potentials on the market. We are looking to find assets that have growth profiles aligned with industry trends, differentiated solutions, help diversify our portfolio, and are accretive to our financial profile. We'll go into the UW Solutions acquisition, but that ticked all the boxes in terms of the capabilities or the characteristics we were looking for on potential M&A. We're targeting opportunities to expand our architectural products where we can expand our range of project offerings or expand geographically to get West of the Rockies, as well as look at continued expansion in our specialty coatings and materials where LSO plays today, so as we've been able to stabilize our business and bring back ROIC and cash flow and earnings, we're now increasing our focus on growth.
Our recent acquisition is part of that strategy. But we have made investments in our services segment to allow them to better compete in projects West of the Rockies. We've started to establish a footprint over on the West Coast. We're strengthening our service model in our framing segment and looking for ways we can push West of the Rockies in framing. And we've made investments in LSO to expand capacity of that business to be able to produce more and get some adjacent businesses they weren't able to access before without that capacity. Our fiscal 2025 first half has been very strong from an earnings perspective. Although sales have declined in line with our expectations, we've been able to expand our adjusted operating margins and grow our diluted EPS significantly in the first half of the year.
We've also been able to increase our fiscal 2025 outlook from an EPS perspective, although sales, we've held that guidance consistently as we've gone out throughout the year. So let's talk a little bit more about the recent acquisition of UW Solutions. As I said, this is a deal that checks all the boxes for us. It brings us differentiated solutions with leading market positions. It complements our portfolio, but also expands and diversifies our portfolio into new growth and markets. And it's a strong-performing business that's accretive to our financial profile. UW Solutions is an economic leader in its markets, and it does help continue to shift our portfolio towards higher margin businesses. Here's a quick overview of UW Solutions. So they look at their business in three operating units. One is HD printable materials, which has many similarities to our existing LSO segment.
It applies high-performance coatings to premium products in the graphic art market. We've also been able to expand into industrial flooring, which is a new end market for us and brings our ability to coat substrates into a new end market using engineered wood and putting a coating on that primarily for distribution centers, warehouses, and industrial facilities. And then we have the engineered coatings division, which really operates under the RDC Coatings brand. This is a real R&D coatings capability that primarily sells or distributes within the two other parts of the business, but also does have some small third-party sales. This UW Solutions acquisition, it expands our end markets and creates a new platform for growth. We're now able to offer a wide range of coated materials, including products for home decoration, fine art and displays, building product solutions and distribution centers.
We've got a new R&D capability that we can not only use within the UW Solutions business or the LSO segment, but also in some of our other parts of our business where we coat aluminum for frames, and also we do some coatings on glass. We plan to integrate this business into our LSO segment, which should give us a platform for scalable growth. We believe that bringing together these brands will really help us not only continue to accelerate some synergies that we have, but also create some new opportunities and accelerate growth. In summary, we are committed to delivering peak value. We have a strong team. We have the right strategic framework, and we've got great momentum. Through executing our strategy, we've been able to deliver significant business improvement, but we still have plenty of runway and upside for more.
We're transforming the company to become an economic leader and build a business that has the potential to outperform through economic cycles. So we're very excited about where we are and where we're going. We appreciate everybody's time, and I'd like to open it up for questions.
Projects are very large projects, it looks like, where the planning could be one to two years ahead. So when you look at what's coming up, what does that look like in terms of potential sales?
Yeah.
Even though you won't necessarily get all of them.
Yeah. No, great. It's a great question, and it is, it's an interesting part of our business. So if you think about our services segment, our services segment is a lot of what you said. So we're selling a project that will happen over maybe 18 months, right, and so as we think about, we're in our third quarter of our fiscal year right now. As we look out to our next fiscal year, we basically have sold all of our capacity for the next fiscal year in our services segment. We're starting to sell fiscal 2027 at this point in time. So in that business, we do have that long-term project pipeline and visibility.
If you look at our glass business, that is selling, we've probably got a six-month visibility into that pipeline because that's more of, hey, like somebody who's installing the glass needs the glass at this point in time, and so we can produce it, ship it in a shorter period of time. And then our framing business is probably about a three-month visibility because that's a little bit shorter process to extrude and coat that aluminum, cut it, and then get it to somebody who's either installing it or creating the window. So it's a little bit different for each of our segments. Our services business is roughly a third of our overall business, and then we have the other two businesses make up roughly two-thirds of that.
Our LSO segment is much shorter term, generally more right now consumer-driven, but it's a little bit of a mix in terms of how the visibility we've got that far out, and what we look at too in terms of just growth opportunities is, like I said, we want to outperform the market. We do look at FMI and some forward-looking businesses that are projecting what's going to happen, and we're trying to look for ways to penetrate those higher growth parts of that subsegments that they have in there, so for instance, everybody is. They understand office is challenged, right, so we've been able to diversify out of office pretty significantly. There is still some Class A office space that's being developed, and we're still winning those projects and seeing those projects, much less in Class B or C.
But we also are able. We've been able to win in medical buildings. There were some medical buildings on there in Dallas. Education, there was an education on there. And even transportation like airports. There's places that we're winning that are different subsegments that do have some growth.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for the question. Go ahead.
Is there any chance that there is transportation being a big constraint?
Yeah, yeah, transportation is a constraint. Shipping big panels of glass is a dicey business. No, we're primarily right now U.S. and Canada is our business, and I would expect it to stay that way for definitely the near term. What we think we have the biggest opportunity is West of the Rockies. It's a place that we don't have a stronghold in right now. We're very concentrated in the Midwest, South, Northeast, and the Southeast, so we're looking for ways to start expanding our footprint west and gaining some of the market share out there, which is more achievable, right? We've got a good network of manufacturing and distribution kind of in the middle of the U.S., so we're just looking at how do we start bridging into different parts of the West Coast with the right steps from a footprint perspective to serve the customers there. Thanks.
Bigger side, someone who's been up about 70-story buildings, how about who's likely to do that?
Yeah, it's a great question. So from a glass perspective, just providing the glass for it, there are, it's a pretty fragmented market. Actually, most of these markets are pretty fragmented. And we will compete with a couple of big players in the U.S. There's also some competition in China and in Europe. From a quality of glass perspective, I'd say the Chinese glass is generally reviewed as a lower quality than what comes out of Europe or the U.S. So there's a few people that can actually supply the size. And there's lots of local and regional glass players, but they couldn't do, say, a 50-story building in downtown Dallas or something like that. What we find is, and what we've done in the glass segment is looking at the range of projects that you can bid on.
If there is a monumental skyscraper, 80 stories that's going up in New York, that's going to attract a lot of attention internationally because on a job that big, the freight works. The charge to get it across the ocean actually works on something like that. So you get a lot more competition. Where we've tried to hone in on is this kind of mid-size 20, 30, 40-story building where you're not going to get a lot of that international competition, but you're going to be able to deliver more than a lot of the local or regional players. And that's driven a lot of our margin improvement there because those large buildings often drive the lowest margins. And so in this mid-market segment, we've been able to find people who are looking for more value-add and more.
About 75% this year. Can you pinpoint a trigger why it jumped so much this year?
If I knew I'd do more of it. Yeah. No, I think, look, I think we try and look at us really compared to the Russell 2000. And then we'll also look at ourselves against other industrials or construction companies. We're a tough comparable. There's not great comparables out there. A lot of our competitors are private companies. And so we tend to try and look at ourselves, how are we doing versus construction stocks, how are we doing against the Russell 2000? A lot of times we're tracking with them. I'd like to believe that part of that is we've done a great job of consistently delivering results and meeting our goals. I think there's been, as we've interacted with our investor groups, there's been a lot of positivity on the acquisition that we just did.
I think we have a lot of strong momentum, but we are impacted a lot by what's happening just in the broader markets as well. Yeah, good question.
Generally, what seems to drive your growth in your business? Is it a city-by-city, regional-by-regional type of thing, or is it the general economy overall? Does that enter into it very much at all?
Yeah, great question. I mean, it's definitely commercial development, right? Commercial development, especially where there's glass involved, right? That's where we play. We can play on that facade. We can install glass and frames, right? So a lot of that is long-term interest rates, right, are a driver because if you're thinking about as the developer of a property, how are you trying to make that job work and looking at your ability to get financing to create that job and build that building. So we see a lot of correlation between what's happening with long-term interest rates and commercial development. Those are the biggest drivers for us from perspective.
You're building a 30-story bank building here in town. Who's making the decision? The bank itself or the general contractor?
Yeah, great question. It's actually even sometimes as the architect. So it's a lot of times a decision between the developer and the architect. And what I would say is there are some buildings that are more monumental and the architect wants it to be a statement piece, right? You want something that's striking in terms of design or look or whatever. And then you have some that are more functional, like, hey, we want great energy, efficiency, and capacity here, right? And so there's different elements that people are seeking. And depending on where that decision-making is landing, it's a combination of the developer and the architect. And so we, especially in our services business, we are an integrated provider. So we can provide design and engineering upfront.
So as people are going through that thought process and the architect is saying, "I want this type of a look and feel, and I want the glass to this," we can help design and engineer that and show them what kind of the art of the possible is. And also that's great from now we're bidding out the work and we've already helped in that design and engineering. And we can also then provide the glass, manufacture it, fabricate it, and install it too and give you the whole value chain. Thank you. Great questions. Good, well, thanks again to Three Part Advisors for hosting us. Thanks everybody for taking the time to attend the presentation, and very happy to have had the chance to talk to you a little bit about Apogee Enterprises, so thank you guys.