SVP of Marketing, Communications, and Investor Relations. AZZ's a real exciting story, $2.5-$2.6 billion market cap, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. A lot of transformation over the last couple of years, so I'm going to hand it off to Dave.
Thank you, Sandy. Good morning, everyone. So I'm going to take us through our presentation, hopefully get you guys back on schedule here. So AZZ, terrific story. As Sandy said, I have been with the company for 11 years. We're based over in Fort Worth, Texas, for those of you that are not familiar with the company. But just kind of a summary slide, I'll start here and I'll end here on why you may want to take a look at AZZ if you're not already aware of the company and an investor. But we are a metal coatings company. We do two lines of business primarily. It is, first and foremost, a hot-dip galvanizing company, and then also a roll coating company where we're coating coils of steel. And so those are our two segments where we go to business. We are positioned only in North America.
All of our locations are either in the U.S., and then we've got three in Canada. So that makes the story pretty simple and pretty clean. The business has been growing both in sales and margins. We've got a lot of multi-year secular tailwinds that I'll walk you through that I think you'll find exciting. We generate a tremendous amount of free cash flow, something that really piques a lot of interest by several investors as we walk through it, certainly punching up above our weight class in terms of an industrial stock. Looking at just the capital stack, we have been very focused on reducing debt. That is primarily because two years ago we did a big transformational acquisition of Precoat Metals, moving our debt-to-EBITDA ratio down now to 2.7 times debt-to-EBITDA, improving the leverage, focusing on higher ROIC investments.
I'll talk a little bit about our greenfield plant build that we're doing just outside of St. Louis, Missouri, to focus on the aluminum coating market and focusing on returning capital to shareholders. So kind of with that, here's a snapshot of the company. Got the typical scatter map on the left. You can see the locations here in North America. The two different colored dots represent, the dark blue is our metal coating segment. The light blue represents Precoat Metals. But as you look at this, the company is largely split equally between the two segments on sales and EBITDA. Sales for the past trailing 12 months ending in August, which was the end of our second quarter, $1.57 billion, $346 million in adjusted EBITDA. And again, you can see the adjusted EBITDA margin on a blended basis of 22%. So nice EBITDA margin for an industrial stock.
I know most of you past Sandy here in the front row probably can't see all the fine print on here. This is just a 10-year kind of look at the look back and where the company has been when Tom Ferguson, our CEO, started 10 years ago. We were just a $571 million, kind of very small, almost micro-cap company, and then have since moved all the way up to $1.5 billion, as I said today. Most of that through a big strategic transformation of the portfolio. We used to be known as sort of a small little bag of mixed nuts is kind of how I would describe it. We had some electrical assets. We had some welding assets. We, back in 2022, divested the majority of all that and acquired Precoat Metals to set us up to where we are now as a focused metal coatings company.
The stock has really taken off ever since that transformation. As you look forward in the far right, where we're going, I think, is even more important than where we've been. We are going to continue to focus on strengthening the core and investing in the business. We're doing that through a few things. One of them, as I mentioned, I'll talk a little bit more, is the greenfield Plant. We're looking at continuing to invest in technology to make the business more productive and more efficient and making sure that we're deploying capital in the most efficient manner possible and focusing on high ROIC opportunities. Very quickly, this is just our scorecard.
So for those of you that are new to the story, one of the things that we did after we came out with the acquisition two years ago is we put a stake in the ground on leverage, cash flow generation, an acquisition policy, dividends, and debt reduction, and really said, you can read through all these. These are the things you can measure us by. And by every measuring stick, we have hit or exceeded our stated commitments to you, the investor community, as you look through here. So we're very pleased with the growth that we've seen in the business, the leverage coming down. When we did the acquisition, we had popped up above four times. We're now, like I said, down to 2.7 times debt-to-EBITDA.
And again, tremendous cash flow generation has been a central portion of that, as well as taking out more recently the preferred that we had with Blackstone when we did that acquisition. Earlier this year, we did a secondary offering, offered up $4 million additional new shares, and that allowed us to make that happen about two years ahead of schedule. Quick look at the management team. What I'll tell you here is when you look at this, five out of the seven of us have been together for over a decade at AZZ. The two new people to the story would be Jason Crawford, our Chief Financial Officer, and Kurt Russell, the COO. Both of those, however, came to us through the Precoat Metals acquisition. So they've been with the company with AZZ for two years, and they've been with Precoat Metals for about eight years each.
So a long tenured group here. Everybody is really focused on growing the business and a lot of industrial expertise amongst the team. Quick look at end markets. What you'll see here is we look very overweighted in construction. What I would tell you there is we are focused both on non-residential as well as some residential exposure. But construction for us is a big bucket. There's a lot that goes into there. Several of the things that are of interest and growth areas today, for instance, data centers and data center construction, is something that falls into there. Similarly, there's a lot of things in here in terms of industrials and bridge and highway growth and expansion falls into the construction sector as well. So don't think of this as just building construction. There's a lot of things that we kind of lump into there.
And then we've got several other segments that you can see are around 8%-10% each. Some of the secular drivers, though, that are really underpinning the growth story for us that are long-term growth drivers are things like infrastructure. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the IIJA, has certainly helped us out. It's still very early innings in terms of those things coming through the pipeline. But we're very enthused by even most recently in October, there were four more awards that were announced around transmission infrastructure projects. Three of those are going to be here in Texas as ERCOT integrates the grid with other grids. And then there's another one up on the East Coast. So in total, just looking at transmission projects alone, there's over 1,000 miles of transmission infrastructure projects that are approved and moving forward.
So that's a tremendous tailwind for us because we galvanize all those structures, the monopoles, the lattice towers, anything along the transmission infrastructure that you see that's gray, we make it gray. Similarly, reshoring of manufacturing as things come back online here in the U.S., we're certainly benefiting from that. Emblematic have been things, for instance, the CHIPS Act. We've been doing a lot of work with both Intel and Samsung to build and galvanize those structures that they've been putting up here in the U.S. Prepainted steel migration. There's a lot of manufacturers that are moving towards the use of prepainted steel rather than operating a spray booth and a spray paint line in their factories, and we can provide them with that metal as a coated metal product that they can form and shape into their products without it messing up the finish.
And then finally, the conversion from plastics to aluminum. I'll save that one for our greenfield plant when I talk about that a little bit later. A couple of things just with IIJA. There is a lot of investment that has already happened. If you kind of follow that, about 50% of IIJA monies have already been awarded. I was recently on a call with the previous Speaker of the House last week. Paul Ryan sat in with him, had a discussion about what is the new administration coming in, what's the impact going to be. And he said, "Look, anything that's been awarded and announced is going to continue to get funded." He said that what they'll do is most likely the Congressional review committees will take a look at all the things that have not been awarded. And those are things that could potentially be cut.
But make no doubt about it, there is a tremendous amount of projects that have yet to even come through that have been awarded and turned into real projects. So we feel really good about just the amount of spending that's already in the pipeline for things like roads, bridges, power, as well as airports, data centers, and other things. Real quick, if you're not familiar, again, with the company, I mentioned we have two segments. This is sort of the one chart that kind of describes both businesses for you on a high level. We have a metal coatings business with $665 million in sales. We do hot-dip galvanizing primarily. So what we're doing is fabricators in North America are fabricating their products first. So they're acquiring the steel. We do not do that. We don't have any commodity risk on steel or aluminum.
That's an important part of our story. We're an independent toll processor. So the fabricator buys the steel, the fabricator makes it into a bridge beam, an overpass, a guardrail, a light pole, you name it. Then they bring it to us. We have a batch processing business, the hot-dip galvanizing business. We galvanize it, and then we turn that right around and either send it back to them or we send it out to the job site and it gets put in place. That market size is about $2.5 billion. We have a 27% share in that market. We are North America's largest hot-dip galvanizer. We have 41 locations throughout North America. Having that number of locations is critical because, as you probably know, steel is expensive to transport, and being close to fabricators is a key differentiator for us in that space.
With Precoat Metals, $904 million in sales. What we're doing there is, again, our customers are procuring the coiled steel. You can see a little picture of one there from a mill or a service center. It is then drop-shipped into our location. It's run through a continuous processing type environment at rather high speeds, anywhere from 300-500 feet per minute. And what we do is we uncoil it, we clean it, we prep it, prime it, we paint it, and dry it, and then roll it back up and send it back to that fabricator. That gets transformed into a lot of products that you see and use today. It might be metal roofing for either residential or commercial applications, barns, you name it, metal garage doors. It can be your HVAC equipment that sits either in your attic or next to your house.
We have relationships with all of the big HVAC manufacturers in North America. So that's what that business is doing. Again, $4.4 billion in market size, 21% market share, and again, a number one market position. Important little factoid as well. Both of these businesses are twice the size of our nearest competitor. So we do have a very formidable market share and market presence in North America. Quick look at the strategic value prop of the business. What we have here is the two businesses really, again, being standout leaders in the space. I can't emphasize enough that our tolling model means that we do not have risk to steel or aluminum. Again, that is purchased by our customers. We do not do that, and then they bring it to us.
So whether steel is imported, whether it's domestic, whether the prices go up or down, it has no bearing on our business. We've invested a lot in technology. I'll spend some time talking about that in a minute. And as we kind of roll through here, I'm going to kind of skip over some of these just in the interest of time, kind of get you to this slide here, investing in the future. This is an image, actual picture now of our greenfield plant just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. This is a $125 million investment that we made in the business. We do have a contractual agreement with a customer for 75% of the committed capacity of this facility. That is a $50 million agreement per year for the next seven years and at an EBITDA margin that is at the very high end of our stated range.
So the stated range for this particular segment being 17%-22%. We do have line of sight to filling the other 25%. The customer who already has the committed 75% of this capacity, who we've been doing business with for a number of years, would love to take all of it. But we just have held back the other 25% because we want to make sure that we don't get ourselves stuck seven years from now when we renegotiate our agreement with them. So we're very excited about this facility. I'm happy to report it's ahead of schedule and on budget. We just recently pulled our first strip of aluminum through it and coated it. And that ran at the highest line speed of any of our lines. It ran at 700 feet per minute. So a lightning-fast line for this type of an environment.
And like I said, we are very excited to bring this thing online. We'll spend our fourth quarter of this year, which we'll get into beginning December 1st. And we'll spend that fourth quarter kind of fine-tuning the line, finishing up the plant, and then look forward to it producing in our first quarter of next year. I mentioned technology a couple of times. What I want to just share with you is that we've spent a tremendous amount of time and effort investing in technology in the business. We have two state-of-the-art technologies, one of them called Digital Galvanizing System, or DGS as we refer to it, which is a customer-centric tool that we use on our hot-dip galvanizing side. Basically, the Domino's Pizza tracker, for lack of a better comparison in the industry.
So it's allowing our customers to know exactly where their steel is in the process, when it's going to be ready, when they can pick it up, and also if there's any exceptions along the way, anything that happens where we need their input, we can communicate with them in real time back and forth. And it's really helped the business move forward and also provide better customer service. Similarly, on the Precoat side, we have CoilZone. It's doing essentially the same thing. It's a customer portal. They can log in, tell us which coil they would like us to paint, what color they'd like us to paint it, and when they'd like it done, and we'll make that happen for them. And we'll do that and several other value-added services. So really excited about the technology.
There's really only one other competitor on our galvanizing side that has something similar. Other than that, everybody else in the space really doesn't have this type of technology. So it really sets us apart. For those of you that have an ESG bent to your investing style, we did just put out our most recent sustainability report. We have put that out last week. We've been very diligent about reporting our efforts in the ESG front, focusing on Scope 1, Scope 2 reductions. We do have goals and targets associated with those, and we've been hitting those.
But on a high level, all I would do is kind of give you the three punchlines across the top of the slide, which is when you think about our business, it's not a very sexy business by any means, but it's very necessary and very essential to the industries that we serve and the heartbeat of North American manufacturing. So we sit right in between the steel guys and fabricators. And so everything is sort of flowing through us in one way or the other. And again, just often overlooked. And from a sustainability standpoint, as I mentioned, we're very committed to initiatives and reporting. Our efforts have been recognized two years in a row by Newsweek magazine as America's most responsible companies. We've been on their list two years running.
And I just received notification this past week that we'll actually be awarded that for a third year coming in 2025. So we're really excited about that. And just from a diversity standpoint, actually, the company is very diverse. We have over 51% of our workforce reports as a diverse category. So we think that's a strength, and we're proud to talk about it. Just kind of moving now from introducing you to the company to the financials and getting down to brass tacks there. This is a quick look at sales and Adjusted EBITDA for the two segments kind of stacked by year as well as the trailing 12 months. So you can see nice steady growth, 7% growth in sales and 9% growth in EBITDA. People often ask me, "What does this business kind of look like?" And that's what I tell them.
It's sort of a GDP, GDP plus type business. And so this is very steady growth. It's not real sawtooth. So if you're looking for something with predictable sales, predictable earnings, look no further. Happy to report that's what we're all about. When you look at us, I think one of the biggest sort of head scratchers or challenges you'll have is, "Who do I comp you against?" And we get this question a lot because we are uniquely positioned where we're at in both of our markets and have a big head start on everyone. We don't really have any direct peer comparisons per se. So you really have to kind of look at coatings markets, building product markets, service centers, or steel mills. And I've sort of created a cheat sheet for you here if you're interested, done some of that work for you.
And as you can see, if you look over the past three years, we've really outperformed any one of those comparisons by a far cry as you look at revenue growth, EBITDA margin, or net working capital. So anyway, it gives you a little more color. I talked a bit about deleveraging. Want to spend a little bit of time on that. Again, I think the punchline here is we're sitting at 2.7 times debt to EBITDA. We feel good about where we're at. We're not done. That will continue to come down over time. As you can see, we started at 4.3 times when we did the Precoat Metals acquisition. That was pretty high. And committed to the investor community that we would bring it down, and we have. We've been fortunate to use our free cash flow to help pay down the debt.
$115 million in debt reduction last fiscal year. We are on pace to do over $100 million in debt reduction again this year, coming from the strong free cash flow generation, and also took out, as I mentioned, and fully redeemed the preferred that we had with Blackstone earlier this year. Our debt-to-EBITDA, our sort of comfort zone, for lack of a better word, we've said we're comfortable in two and a half to three times. Barring any acquisitions, this number is going to continue to move down. If you were to just draw a straight line down and using our current paydown as sort of a predictor of the future, barring any acquisitions, we'd be talking at the same time next year, and I'd be up here telling you it's probably about two times debt-to-EBITDA. So that's kind of our glide path.
Capital allocation priorities, a few things. One of them is M&A. We've said that we wouldn't do any M&A. You might recall that from my slide previously when we talked about the commitments we've made. We said, "Look, we're not going to do any M&A for at least two years until we get that leverage rate down to where we're at today." We've now begun to fill in the M&A pipeline with some opportunities. And so we'll take a look at those. Those opportunities, just so we're very clear, are nothing transformational. They're not third legs of the stool or any new type of business lines. We are specifically looking at bolt-on acquisitions in either one of the two segments. So something we can bolt on in hot-dip galvanizing or something in the Precoat side. We do focus on high ROIC investments. We've got some targets associated with those.
It's part of the executive comp package as well. We'll continue to focus on delivering the business and then returning capital. We've been a long-term dividend payer. We don't have stock repurchase in our near term only because we're currently focused in on debt reduction and then M&A and prioritizing those first. However, if we don't see any M&A opportunities develop, then we certainly will entertain the share repurchase. We do have an authorization out there that the board provided to us several years ago that still has about $52 million open on it. So we certainly could pull that lever if we felt we needed to.
Kind of wrapping things up with guidance, where we are sitting is a sales guidance of $1.525-$1.625 billion, Adjusted EBITDA of $320-$360, and EPS range of $470-$510 for our current fiscal year, which will end in February of 2025, so we're coming up on our fourth quarter, which is seasonally our slowest quarter because construction generally slows down. But that's currently where we're at with guidance. We usually will put out revised or guidance for next fiscal year as we get into our fourth quarter and announce that after we get through our budgeting cycle, so we'll be out again with that fairly soon. So I'll kind of finish where I started, which is on this slide, and since we've got about 10 minutes left or nine minutes left, I'll open it up for any potential questions we might have from the audience.
Yes, sir. Galvan Finance gave you a strong buy this week, so just for your information. You can see that. Wise person said, "Don't try and predict recessions, but be prepared." So kind of give us some insight. As the pundits have been wrong for four years about a recession, but we know it will happen. In past recessions, what kind of drop-off in sales have you experienced? Yeah, terrific question. Thank you for that. So for those listening in online, the question was around the recessionary trends and what this business might look like in a recession. Interesting thing is in a previous investor deck, and maybe I'll reintroduce it here in the future, I actually had a slide that showed these two segments and how they performed through the last big cycle back in 2008.
What you'll see in the business is that these segments actually grew through the cycle. The reason for that is because of our very diverse customer base. What happens is, for instance, on the hot-dip galvanizing side, we'll see one industry, for instance, back then, residential construction obviously was hammered, but our exposure to utility spend and infrastructure projects just kind of came right through and performed really well. We saw modest growth through the last cycle. We think that based upon where the business is and the fact that it's a stronger business now, we would likely see the same thing happen if that were to occur. Any other questions? Okay. All right. With that, I'll give you back five minutes of your schedule. Thank you.