Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today at the Oppenheimer Conference. With us today from AZZ is David Nark, who is the Chief Marketing, Communications, and Investor Relations Officer for the company. Just to give you a little background, AZZ is the leading independent galvanizing firm in the U.S., but with its recent acquisition, not so recent, a couple of about a year ago, they acquired Precoat Metals, and they are a leading player now in the metal coating, pre-coating steel and aluminum business. Results have been very, very good over the last two, three years, and I look forward to seeing even better results going forward. With that, let me turn it over to David, and he will give you a little background on AZZ, and we will have a Q&A session afterwards. David, it is all yours.
All right, thanks, John. I appreciate it. I appreciate you dialing in and listening in on the web today.
It has been very, very good over the last two, three years, and I look forward to seeing even better results going forward. With that, let me turn.
All right, thanks again, John. I appreciate it. We'll get started on the presentation. Real quickly, if you're not familiar with AZZ, just to give you a quick overview, as John mentioned, we're a metal coatings provider based here in Fort Worth, Texas, specifically focused on the North American market. We coat both steel and aluminum through two segments, a metal coatings division.
Lovely presentation. Real quickly, if you're not familiar with AZZ, just give you.
Okay, we'll give this a shot one more time with the technology. I apologize, everyone. We seem to have been having some technical difficulties this morning, but as I was saying, we'll get through the presentation here. I'm going to go much quicker in the interest of time since we've spent a little bit going through trying to resolve that. Jumping ahead, just to give you a quick snapshot on the company. Again, we've got two segments, as I mentioned, a metal coating segment and a coil coating business called Precoat Metals, which we acquired back in 2022. This gives you a quick look at the sales, the adjusted EBITDA, and the blended EBITDA margin for the company. Next slide, on slide five, gives you an idea of our strategic journey over time.
Again, starting back well over, this slide shows you about 12 years of history, but more focused on the slide on the right here in 2025 to 2028, where we're really focused on strengthening our core and investing in our future. We're going to do that through a couple of things. One of them is just growing faster than GDP, also bringing and ramping up our new investment in our Washington, Missouri plant, which is a new aluminum coil coating line. Then focusing on, again, getting back into acquisitions and growth mode through inorganic opportunities, which I'll talk about in a minute. Quick look on slide number six. This gives you an idea of some of our achievements, what we've set it out to accomplish and our achievements to date. Again, bringing leverage down, cash flow generation has been tremendous.
Our acquisition policy, again, we've said we're not going to do any acquisitions since we had acquired Precoat back in May of 2022. We're back into the M&A pipeline now and building that. Again, looking at our dividend policy and continuing to reduce debt as well. Last year, we reduced debt by $110 million. We've done that two years in a row. We've committed to reducing debt by at least $165 million again this year. Quick look at the management team. This gives you a list of everyone on the leadership team at AZZ. Again, we've all been together for a good bit of time. The new additions, of course, were Kurt and Jeff, who came to us through the Precoat acquisition, along with Jason, our CFO. The rest of the team has been a long-tenured team here at AZZ.
I myself have just recently had my 12-year anniversary, and Tom Ferguson, our CEO, has as well. Quick look at end markets. We do lump a lot of things into the construction end market. That does include both residential and non-residential. You will see everything in there from work that we do with data centers and things like bridge and highway projects to building products that, again, are focused on the Precoat side to the non-residential and residential markets. Industrial generally tends to be industrial processing plants, whether those be ag or oil and gas type assets. Transportation for us generally is truck and trailer, buses, and motorhomes, motor coaches, and RVs. Consumer includes not only the beverage can market for Precoat, but also things like HVAC and appliances. Of course, electrical includes things like transmission and distribution end markets.
Other things that are going to help drive the business forward is going to be continued focus on roads, bridges, and major projects, clean energy and power, and then water, airports, and other things. A lot of these were receiving funding through the AIIJA. We believe that that funding is continuing to pass through ultimately and has been already allocated to states, and those states have been continuing to fund different projects associated with these type of major investments. Quick look at our metal coatings and Precoat Metals segments together. Again, I'll start with the top line here. Metal coatings is a hot-dip galvanizing business, $665 million in sales last year. The production method is a batch processing method. We have numerous value-added capabilities, including our core, which is hot-dip galvanizing, and then several other things like spin, powder coating, plating, and anodizing.
You can see the market share, market size, number one position, and the historical EBITDA to the right. With Precoat Metals, again, $912 million in sales. The difference here is that we're processing coil-coated steel through our continuous processing format. Market size quite a bit bigger, 21% share, and again, a number one leading market position. I think what's most important is that as you look at AZZ, the thing to remember is that we're an independent toll processor. Whether it's metal coatings or Precoat Metals, we do not purchase steel or aluminum. That's purchased by our customers, and they provide it to us, and we're just caretakers of it as we're processing the steel. We have no risk to the fluctuations in those prices, and we also have no commodity risk associated with tariffs associated with steel nor aluminum. Our strategic value proposition, a couple of things.
Again, standout market leader, number one market share position. I already mentioned the toll processing model. We have invested a lot in technology. We have some proprietary systems on our metal coating side. We call it our Digital Galvanizing System. On the Precoat side, we refer to that as Coil Zone. Those things are providing a lot of customer efficiencies and visibility to our processes and notifying customers when things are ready to be picked up, when they are completed, when they have been coated, and also a lot of different ordering capabilities that customers can place orders against their material. We are very much focused on a service-driven culture. Customer satisfaction, I can tell you, is a priority. We do Net Promoter Score on all of our customers as we are processing things. On the ESG front, we do have a good ESG initiative here.
We have, for the past three years, also issued a sustainability report, which is available on our website, and you can read more about it there. Going to skip over a couple of slides in the interest of time. Again, quick look at metal coatings, historical EBITDA, and sales. You can see a 6% and a 7% growth for sales and adjusted EBITDA over the past several years. The other thing I would point out is the margin profile right across the center of your screen here. Again, very consistent margin profile for the business. We have guided to 27%-32% adjusted EBITDA for this segment. As you can see, we've been very consistent at maintaining that over time. As we move forward to Precoat, again, same slide, different numbers, 8% and 11% growth respectively for sales and EBITDA.
The margin profile is slightly lower, but again, this is really a function of one of the factors is their paint is the largest cost driver of the business and equates for about 50% of costs for this segment. A little more challenging to get the margin profile up to the level of our metal coatings business. Again, these are very, very strong margins for an industrial business, and we're quite proud of it. One of the things I do want to touch on is our Washington, Missouri plant. We have invested $125 million over the past two years. It's now been completed and is now operational just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. This plant is specifically dedicated to coating aluminum for the beverage can market.
We do have a large customer in place that is a take-or-pay contract for $50 million exiting the fiscal year that we're in today. We are growing to that number over time this year as we continue to ramp the facility. Again, that's for about 75% of the committed capacity, and we've got line of sight to filling the entire plant. Very exciting to be adding a new coil coating line into the market. Again, happy that this has been on time and on budget for a project this size. I mentioned technology a little bit earlier. Again, just a quick deep dive into that technology differentiator for our business. We've got Digital Galvanizing System, again, on our metal coating side. Really tremendous tool. It's eliminated paper throughout our entire operations. It's integrated with our operations as well as Oracle.
It's providing real-time updates to our customers as well as internally on several things. I've often joked that it's sort of the Domino's pizza tracker of the industry. We're really the only people in this space that's providing technology to the extent that we are in the galvanizing market today. Coil Zone, very much a similar story. It's an industry-leading tool on the Precoat Metals side. Integrates with our ERP system and again, providing customers with real-time visibility to their steel and aluminum, allows them to schedule different coils to be painted and integrates oftentimes with customer back-end systems through EDI exchange as well. I did mention sustainability a little bit earlier. Again, in the interest of time, we'll just let you know that I think the headlines are across the top here. We are a very essential business as well as being environmentally friendly.
We have been very committed to continuing to be transparent with our sustainability initiatives through our sustainability reports that I mentioned we've issued for the past three years now. That effort has been recognized by Newsweek. We have now, for three years in a row, from 2023 through 2025, been recognized as one of America's most responsible companies. We continue to embrace diversity and understand that everyone is valued for their contributions at AZZ. I already showed this previously, but again, as you look at these two slides that were shown for Precoat Metals and for metal coatings on a stacked bar chart, this is what you see. It's a combined CAGR of 6% and 8% on adjusted EBITDA. Again, very strong business with a nice strong growth trajectory over time. A couple of other things, and I'll wrap up and leave some room for questions here.
As you look at AZZ and you evaluate us compared to other industries, what I've done here has shown AZZ on the left side for revenue, for EBITDA, and for networking capital, and compared that to either coatings industries, building products, service centers, or steel mills. As you can see, as you look through over a two-year period of time, you can see that we've been head and shoulders above all of the other areas with respect to revenue growth, EBITDA margin, and then a lower networking capital as compared to sales. Again, a very strong business and a very formidable position. We've also been very meaningful about deleveraging the business. We now, as we talk today, had finished our fiscal year back in February of this year, fiscal year 2025, as we call it, at 2.5 times debt to EBITDA.
That number will come down even lower as we just announced that we had completed the sale of a minority stake in a JV that we owned that should net us more than $200 million in additional proceeds, which we, again, will use for debt repayment as well as opportunistic acquisitions. That number will go even lower. We think that the business will be somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half to two and a half times as a normal run rate going forward. A couple of other slides. One of them is just the resilience. I know there are a lot of people that are concerned about if we are entering into a cycle or not, particularly as GDP was just recently announced as coming down.
Just a quick look at how this business collectively performed through the last cycle back in 2008 when we had the big housing market crash. As you can see, the dark blue bars down here is metal coatings, EBITDA, and it actually grew through the cycle, whereas Precoat Metals also grew over the five-year period of time, had a modest decline between 2008 and 2009 just because of its exposure to the housing market, but again, a very strong recovery from 2009 and outwards. We feel really good about the business and its ability to weather through times of economic contraction. Capital allocation, again, what you can see here is we're focused on several things. Certainly, strategic M&A.
We have announced that we're back in the game looking at bolt-on acquisitions in both segments, making sure that those things are high ROIC investments, continuing to manage our leverage, and again, returning capital to shareholders through dividends as well as share repurchases. We do have a 10b5-1 program out there right now where we're opportunistically buying in shares. That program, currently, it was a $100 million authorization from our board. We have $52 million still outstanding on it to work with. Give you an idea about guidance. Our guidance for the fiscal year is sales of $1.625 billion-$1.725 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $360 million-$400 million, and an EPS range of $5.50-$6.10. With that, I'm done.
I will open it back up, and hopefully, we can get John on the line and see if there's any questions or anything that's on your mind.
David, can you hear me?
I can.
Okay. Just a couple of questions, and maybe we'll have some from some of the in the audience that are participating today. When you think about your M&A activity, would it be fair to say that maybe the Precoat Metals might, you might be more active in that area and maybe a larger acquisition coming in that area as opposed to the galvanizing area just because there's more opportunities and just a lot of mom-and-pops in the galvanizing area?
Yeah, I would say, John, we're looking at both segments for sure. The M&A opportunities on the metal coating side are certainly, there's more of those. They tend to be smaller in nature.
Single-site locations, although there are some multi-site facilities in North America, they're just not in a position right now where they would be open to being a target. We continue to stay in touch with several on the metal coating side. To your point on the Precoat side, they generally tend to be larger in scale, multi-site locations, and tend to be larger in terms of the acquisition cost as well. We are managing both of those. As Tom had mentioned, our CEO on our Q4 earnings call, which was just about a month ago, we do expect to close one acquisition here in our Q1 of this fiscal year. We are continuing to work on that in earnest. We will have more to talk about when we actually get something done and announced.
We are looking at an acquisition right now and hopeful to close something in Q1.
Okay. David, you mentioned that you see much impact directly from tariffs. What are you hearing from your customers who might be more impacted by tariffs and how they're handling the tariff war, so to speak? Anything? Patterns?
Yeah. A couple of things. For us, as I mentioned, we do not buy steel and aluminum, so we do not have any exposure there. Our number one input on the galvanizing side is zinc. That is listed on the Annex II list currently of articles that are exempt from tariffs from the administration. Precoat, their number one input is paint. That also has not seen tariffs.
However, we are seeing tariff impact on sort of secondary and tertiary items, things like wire and acids and other things that are used in the galvanizing process. We will see some of that. Again, not as big of an impact, but it is something that we are looking at and have looked to offset through price increases that we have announced, particularly on the Precoat side, too. The other thing we are hearing from customers is, to your question, is a few things. One is that customers did buy some steel ahead of the tariff or the estimated impact of the tariff and have brought in imported steel. There is a bit of a build, an inventory build that they are working through now with us. We have seen that on the Precoat Metals side.
On the galvanizing side, really what we're seeing there is since our business is largely in North America here, all of our plants are based here in the U.S. and then three up in Canada, we're galvanizing here locally for the market and have seen a lesser impact from customers and what they're saying there. Okay.
Okay. Lastly, you spoke a little bit about the new Washington, Missouri facility and that you have a large beverage customer that'll take, I think, about 75% of the production. How quickly do you think you might be able to ramp up to full capacity? And I guess if you get to full capacity there, is that facility expandable, so to speak, to meet even greater demand, or would maybe another facility, another new facility be possible?
Yeah. Great question.
We are looking to exit our fiscal year, which again will be February of next year, at full run rate capacity for the plant. We will continue to build that up to that number from where we're at today. We are in production now and producing. We are excited about that. As you think about capacity or even constraints, we have other plants in the area in St. Louis. Some of them, in fact, our first line for Precoat was an aluminum line that still exists today in the area. What we can do is balance any additional capacity that we need between the multiple plants that we have in the area. We will do that, and we can always add shifts as well and run the plants 24/7.
Okay. Okay. Sounds great. Let me see if there's any questions from the audience.
I don't see anything right now. I guess we're up to our limit, David. So I'll let you go. I thank you very much for the presentation and look forward to your get-together in August in beautiful St. Louis.
Terrific. Look forward to it. Thanks, everyone. See you, John. Thank you.