Good morning and welcome to AZZ's sell side analyst day. I'm David Nark, Company's Chief Marketing, Communications, and Investor Relations Officer. Today we are webcasting our morning session live from approximately 8:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. Central Time today, and our remarks will include an overview of the company and important elements of our long-term strategic plans. Our presenters today are Tom Ferguson, the Company's President and Chief Executive Officer; Jason Crawford, Chief Financial Officer; Kurt Russell, Chief Strategy Officer; Jeff Vellines, President and Chief Operating Officer of AZZ Precoat Metals; and Todd Bella, Senior Vice President of Metal Coatings. After our management presentations, we will take questions from the in-person group. Please note that the webcast and its replay can be found at www.azz.com/investor-events.
Before I begin, I want to remind everyone that management's comments today will include forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. By their nature, forward-looking statements are uncertain and outside the company's control. Except for actual results, AZZ's comments containing forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties, some of which are detailed from time to time in documents filed AZZ and the Securities Exchange Commission, including the latest annual report on Form 10-K. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, therefore, a due reliance should not be placed upon them. Actual results could differ materially from these expectations. In addition, today's remarks may include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered supplemental to and not a substitute for GAAP financial measures.
We refer our shareholders to reconciliations from GAAP to non-GAAP measures contained in today's slides. With that, I will now turn the discussion over to Tom Ferguson.
Thanks, David. As we'll talk about, we believe we've got two outstanding operating platforms. We try to keep most things as simple as we can and focus on providing outstanding quality of service to our customers so that we can provide superior value to our shareholders. We'll talk a lot about this on page four. We are the largest independent and Metal Coatings provider for hot dip galvanizing and coil coating. For us, that's important because we're quite agnostic about whose metal we coat. It doesn't matter to us whose steel or aluminum or stainless that happens to be. We're willing to paint it, hot dip galvanize it, protect it, make it look good. We have scale in both segments. We'll talk a lot about process playbooks, operating playbooks, leadership, discipline, and the deep bench of servant leaders. That's important to us.
We've continued to invest in those areas because we believe that great leadership teams are out there. As for some of you, at dinner last night, we talked about having folks that have been with us for 40 years and continue to show up and contribute and allow us to grow. Then we've got people that have been with us just a few months and are focusing on new technologies and AI. It's just a great, as you'll see today at the Washington site, facilities are important, but people are critical. Foundation for growing sales and margins. I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. We've been very focused on capital allocation, maintaining discipline as we execute. It was fairly easy to pay down debt, get our leverage down before we got back into our acquisitions.
During that time, we have been using our significant cash flows to invest in CapEx that have helped us modernize facilities and modernize lines, modernize technology. We'll talk a little bit about some of the technology we're investing in and some of the technology partnerships that we have. While we've been successful in paying down debt, we've benefited from having divested 60% of Infrastructure Solutions, which helped us immediately bring our leverage down back in 2022, and then receive a significant amount of cash from that. There's still a couple of assets left in our mail to be divested, so that story's not quite over yet. I think they've been probably over the next 12 months- 15 months in our portfolio so far. We can, hopefully, we can anticipate some additional cash coming in from a 40% share of the mail. We are committed to DPS growth.
I've got a graph in here that I'll talk to in a minute. We do try to keep things pretty simple. We are coil coating. We're hot dip galvanizing. We provide a lot of services around that, but for the most part, those are the two key things we do. You wouldn't expect it, but because hot dip galvanized metal can last, those structures can last 50 years- 100 years. You just think about, you're not continually repairing and repainting. Environmentally friendly, coil coating is just, we capture over 99% of all emissions versus, as you can imagine, anything outside. Environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and absolutely necessary to infrastructure and construction. Page five. As I just mentioned, we're the largest independent post-fabrication hot dip galvanizing and coil coating solutions company. We've got about 4,000 employees on any given day. We do use contractors and temps for flex labor, things like that.
Both segments have significant scale, early balance between the two when you look at it. Even on the margin profile, when you look at the two businesses on a return after materials, percent, they're actually relatively similar, 35%- 40% range. While one is roughly 31%- 32% EBITDA margin, the other is roughly 20%, they're very similar in terms of the amount of cash and the returns that we have on each one. Page six. This is what gets exciting for me. We show when, you know, $571 million, we're pushing towards $2 billion. I think we have a clear line of sight. We're finishing up our strategic plan next week, which we'll present to the board in early October. It's pretty much a continuation of what we've been doing with more emphasis on acquisitions and investing in significant organic growth opportunities.
That's what's going to get accelerated as we talk about ascending. We are committed to driving this business to north of $2 billion and 25% EBITDA margins. I'll talk about this in a second, but we think just continuing to do what we do, very disciplined capital allocation strategy, focus on high ROIC opportunities, continuing to provide outstanding service to our customers, develop our leadership edge, maintain and develop solid disciplined playbooks so that we can sustain our processes because we're tolling, both are tolling businesses. We don't own that metal, but it means that we have to be able to differentiate ourselves by outstanding process and discipline and continually making those processes more efficient and more productive. We talked about pursuing bolt-on acquisitions. We got one smaller done in Canton, which is fun because you would look at, and I think Todd's going to show it.
You look at the map and you would not have anticipated that it would make sense to buy a galvanizing plant in Canton, Ohio, when we have a plant less than five miles up the road. It was focused on different parts of the market and a different piece of it that with our large structural kettle, they could go after opportunities. As we're becoming very focused and trying to be very disciplined about how we approach these opportunities, refining that to a lot of things that didn't look all that attractive a couple of years ago look attractive to us now. We're very good at what playbook and integrating on the galvanizing side. We hope to get a pre-coat acquisition done in, yeah, somewhere in the not too distant future. Page seven, and you've heard me say this before.
We've got dark commitments, we execute against those commitments, and we want to be doing what we say we're going to do. We're ahead of schedule and, as we've committed, if not sooner. A lot of leverage down. We're now in the fun situation of let's figure out how to deploy that cash to provide possible growth. We do, we both businesses, strong cash flow generation, solid margins. We continue to believe there is some margin upside as we get through the tariff uncertainty, and I'll talk about that in a sec. Acquisition policy, whatever we buy is going to bolt on to one of these two operating platforms, in the two existing segments. We're not going to get too exotic out there. Don't look for us to be building a third leg anytime soon, and we've had all the transformation I want to go through.
I think we have a good pipeline. For the first time in a while, we increased our dividend. We're not a high dividend paying stock, but that is something we're committed to now. We do it every year, hopefully continuing to increase as we generate these cash flows. We are buying back shares, mostly to minimize dilution. We have a 10b5-1 in place. It has not triggered, but we can also be opportunistic because we buy shares. That's mostly just to offset the dilution that comes off of the shares we issue for compensation. With that, I'm going to turn it over to David to talk about the markets. We do have tailwinds, and as I was about to say around the tariffs, those have provided probably more headwinds than tailwinds, and it's mostly around the uncertainty.
It's created some opportunities, so we've taken advantage of that to some extent on the galvanizing side or infrastructure type things. On the Precoat side, it's been more of a mixed bag as fewer mills import. It's always a mixed bag, but I think we see projects delayed mostly because of the uncertainty of what they're going to be. Obviously, we've talked about this before, any kind of a rate cut, we think would start to trigger some of these projects to get close. The infrastructure stuff is moving forward. Other things that have more discretion, our view is they're just being delayed and not being canceled. With that, David.
All right, thanks, Tom. One of the things that I love to talk about are our end markets and some of the drivers.
As you look at slide number eight, starting off on the left-hand side, one of the questions that we always get is what has made this business so stable. We have some slides later on. We go through the financials that you see the stability of the business on a consolidated basis. It really is a reflection of how diverse our end markets are. Although construction is 55% of our important end markets, when you break that down, there's really three components. There's infrastructure construction, non-residential construction, and residential construction. Those are about a third each of that 55%. Going around from there, you can see the rest of those industrial. We touch on transportation. We have consumer-related items that we're coating steel and aluminum for, like HVAC, appliance, and of course container, which you'll see that plant later today.
Electrical infrastructure, a lot of T&D bolts, and then other things, the smaller nuts and bolts and other accessories that we need to galvanize. Collectively, that broad base gives us a very stable earnings growth. When you look at the secular drivers that Tom had mentioned, certainly infrastructure investment is helping us. I won't go too much into that because I have a slide on the next page. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Reshoring is taking place. We think that it's going to still take some time for people to reshore just because they've got to build plants. You've got to certainly go out and acquire the equipment that needs to come in and mission for that. There's no doubt about it that that's a trend that's occurring and will benefit us over time. It's for North American focused. There's certainly a migration.
We've all talked about the migration from pre-painted steel to aluminum that's happening in the manufacturing space and also conversion that's happening both on plastics to aluminum and the conversion from using wet spray, as Tom mentioned, and things that are not as environmentally friendly to coil coating, which is a much more environmentally friendly process, which you'll see demonstrated later today. Talking about IIJA and the impact going forward. As you kind of look at this, we're three years into a five-year legislation. Collectively, there's been $454 billion that has been allocated to over 60,000 projects across 50 states. How that really affects us is there's about $110 billion in roads, bridges, and major projects that's been announced and awarded, $65 billion in energy and power, and then $75 billion allocated toward data centers, water, airports, and other types of infrastructure projects.
We are well aligned to take advantage of that as those things move through the pipeline, and they are moving through, some of them a little faster than others. As Tom mentioned, infrastructure seems to be doing really well, and we do a lot of galvanization on the infrastructure side. We're encouraged by that. We think, again, when we talk about tailwinds in the business, this will be a tailwind for us for some time. Moving forward to slide 10, strategic value proposition. Oftentimes, we are asked about what makes these businesses logically put together going forward and why Metal Coatings and Precoat Metals. I think as you look at it, we do have a number one position in the marketplace with both the segments that we operate today. Both of the businesses fundamentally are tolling-based businesses, which means they have minimal if any commodity risk.
Again, we don't buy paint for our roof work. We do buy paint. We don't buy aluminum or steel. Our customers do that, and we are just really caretakers of it as we paint it or galvanize it. Fundamentally, tolling-based businesses is what we aim for. We have a lot of technology that's proprietary. I'll talk about that going forward here in a few minutes. As Tom mentioned, we really focus on a servant leadership culture and a service-oriented culture focused on customers and the company. Just a brief touch on technologies. I mentioned we have some proprietary technology that we believe gives us an advantage in the marketplace, starting with our pre-coat galvanizing system. You've heard us talk about that in the past on several calls, but this has eliminated nearly all the people in our operations.
It's integrated into our backend systems, and it's providing us with real-time decision-making process from the frontline individuals who are scanning and taking pictures of steel as it's approaching our yard to the time that steel is leaving the yard and providing customer notifications. Similarly, on CoilZone, that's the industry-leading tool that is in the Precoat Metals business that allows those customers to log in. We also have a lot of EDI connectivity with those customers, so our systems are seamlessly integrated into their systems, which makes this very simple. Finally, as we kind of talk broadly, look across all businesses about IT infrastructure and AI. We have been investing in systems architecture and getting ourselves future-ready for AI.
We do have policies and procedures that have already been established and communicated to our organization around appropriate use of AI, and we've already begun to deploy it in areas like my talk about it. That's helping us make better decisions. Really quickly on R&D, we're really proud about a partnership that we've had with Texas A&M since 2019. That partnership has allowed us on the hot dip galvanizing side to really advance the ball forward in a lot of different ways. Some of those include operational activities and safety procedures, on the product quality side and also fixed strand that we use in the galvanizing process. The other things that we're really excited about have been the ability to reduce costs and improve quality through reduced usage, better use of things like acids and other consumables that we use in the process.
It certainly helped us with reduced emissions as well. One quick note on sustainability. I think what I'll do is just hit the highlights on the top three here. We have been, you know, are a very essential and environmentally friendly operation. We are very mindful with that in the way we conduct our business. We have been leading the industry with respect to our initiatives and reporting. We have had three years and now working on a fourth year of communicating our ESG efforts through our ESG reports, which you can find on our website under the sustainability section. That includes scope one and scope two reporting, and feedback on that. We have targeted a 10% reduction. We're on track to exceed that for our goals. Of course, with sustainability, a key aspect is people, and we recognize that people are the key to driving a sustainable business.
We are actually a very diverse organization as well. With that, I'm going to tip it back to Tom, and then he can talk about the team a little bit. Yeah, it's great when you've got a good experienced team, and it makes life a lot easier for me. We have Jason, EVP of Finance here at Precoat. A little over a year ago, we brought him in as CFO in Fort- Worth. You know, you could tell he's developed that Texas accent quite quickly. His business focus is finance support. Just, you know, as we move to get more aggressive in full growth, it was a good year. Bryce Dobal, Todd's representing him. He had a little minor surgery earlier this week, but about 35 years with us. Tremendous experience. Jeff took over for Kurt, and we were fortunate.
Kurt's been driving strategic opportunities, which we won't talk too much about, but I can tell you it's a key part of why we're more excited about the shorter-term opportunities for growth. Because he's come up with some really good opportunities that we're looking forward to pursuing over the next 12 months or so. Tara, Chief Legal Officer, also manages our ESG and has been with me since almost the beginning. David was here just before I got here, and we just keep adding responsibilities to his pile. Chris, he's our Corporate Development guy. He's done a lot of deals while he's been here. Haley runs HR, and Roy, just an outstanding experienced guy on the IT front. We anticipate doing some really good things with, I won't claim to understand AI all that much. I'm going to go off to a conference to learn more.
I think it brings, because we've got so much data through our systems, processes, and things like DGS and CoilZone, that's what gives us the opportunity to get us excited about how we utilize AI going forward. Good team, solid leadership, and we basically work well as a team. We get along great. A family, this is kind of the first family of AZZ , and sets the tone, especially with that. I'll turn it over to Kurt.
Thanks, Tom, and thanks again to everyone for joining us. I'm going to curb to St. Louis, hear the AZZ story, and hopefully be excited about the flight that they've exceeded in just a little bit. You got a few of us between you and that, so we'll try to hurry through it. On slide 16, I'll expand a little bit on the strategic journey that Tom mentioned. I'll give a little bit more color to that. Rightfully so, our focus over the past seven years has been debt reduction. Clearly, that's been the priority, and we've been strategically rough-lined around that. We continue to grow organically through that period, and you'll see it come through in Todd and Jeff's presentation, the organic growth that we've seen while we're focusing on the debt reduction.
We've definitely demonstrated the ability to grow organically, and that continues to be a focus of ours. David highlighted the markets. We really like the markets we're in. We like the diversity, as well as the performance of the market and the outlook of the markets going forward. That's not the only driver for the organic growth. Both businesses have a business development function that is integrated inside the business and a pipeline of organic projects. The ability to grow greater than GDP organically, we feel comfortable with that. Jason will talk about the capital allocation strategy in just a moment. We plan to continue to invest and accelerate the high-value, high-ROIC projects for the organic growth. Tom has mentioned, I guess, probably the last three or four investor calls, that we're moving more to shifting focus to M&A.
Clearly, the AVAIL divestiture of the electrical business was a big catalyst for accelerating that. Over this time period, we really started out by honing our investment thesis. What do we want to be in terms of M&A strategy? We've got that aligned, and I'll talk about it in just a moment. As well as developing the investment thesis, the guardrails, evaluating the opportunities, we've been reviving the pipeline of opportunities that are in front of us. Both segments had a pipeline. We know where the opportunities are, what we'd like to do, but we've revived that as well. If you flip to slide 17, this is a little bit about our investment thesis. Like I said, we like the markets.
We are going to continue to focus on opportunities that are aligned with the current markets or complementary to, aligned with the current processes or complementary to, i.e., we are not looking for a third segment, right? We feel comfortable that there is opportunity in the existing segments. We do like geographic expansion inside of North America. That does not say that we will never look outside, but we feel comfortable that there are opportunities there. This kind of sets the funnel or the filter, if you will, for evaluating the pipelines. We have identified over 68 opportunities that we like. A robust feed into the filter of pipeline. When you apply those filters to that and a view of actionability, with M&A, that is a key point. You have to have the capital. Again, Jason will talk about that.
You have to have the opportunity, and it has to be actionable. We have filtered it to a point that we have 13 opportunities under evaluation at various stages. As Tom alluded to, we just acquired and closed on Canton Galvanize. What I will say about these opportunities is they vary in scale. Like I said, there are different phases of the process from NDA to due diligence type activity, but they also vary in scale from Canton Galvanizing single site to something much larger than that. There is a lot of energy and excitement around that. I will finish that with, we are very mindful of our target leverage range. We have not lost sight of that. If you look at the most aggressive scenario inside of this M&A strategy, we are going to be comfortably inside of that leverage range.
We feel like we are in a pretty privileged position. We have the opportunity, we have the ability, we have the capital, and we have a strategy now that we are going to focus on M&A to supplement the proven track record on organic growth. With that, we can talk about the exciting stuff, and Jeff and Todd can get into the segment. I will turn it over to Todd Bella. I think he can tell you a little more about that.
Okay, that's all right. Thank you, Kurt. The picture on slide 19, I think, is a really good snapshot of what many of our sites look like. You'll see a wide variety of fabricated products arriving from our customers that we galvanize. Have the number one market share in North America with a strong reputation for quality and service, and we're proud of this success, growth, and expanded markets over the past five years. Talking about our value proposition, our goal is to be a one-stop shop for our customer needs, and that could involve a big project with very large pieces, or we receive a high quantity of small parts, or it is in transportation to the job site or to the customer. We're aided by continuous enhancements to DGS that help with customer communication and operational efficiency.
We definitely lean into our large footprint and size to provide unmatched service and quality. Slide 21 shows that footprint a little bit, and you'll see how we feel well positioned in the U.S. and Canada. Our large customer base and diversified end markets are a big strength. We continue to look to grow with both our current customer base and pursue new end markets. Taking a look at our financials and the positive trend, the large majority of that growth has been organic. Our stated EBITDA margins were 25%- 30%. This is raised to 27%- 32%. On to slide 23. As David said, we have the wind at our backs currently and moving forward with reshoring, infrastructure spending, and the data center work. We're going to continue to focus on organic growth through sales activities and operational excellence.
Pounding the pavement on M&A opportunities, vertical integrations, and partnerships. Our general preference has been to buy into a market with synergies or brownfield expansion, but we've had success with greenfields, so we'll keep our options open for any opportunity to.
Morning, everybody. Welcome to St. Louis. Like I said, I'm really looking forward to the group getting a chance to head out to the Washington facility later this morning. If you don't mind turning to slide 25 for me, that'd be terrific. In terms of, as Tom mentioned, we're a toll processor where all of our operations are a continuous processing line. While we do primarily coat steel and aluminum, pretty much if it's a flat rolled substrate, we have the ability to coat it. There's not a market that can be coil coated that Precoat doesn't participate in. The great news is, just as David touched on with the markets, we love the markets that we're in, and we love the customers that are in those markets even more. That provides a lot of opportunity.
You see kind of a picture down below, for example, of our finished goods warehouse in West Virginia. Switching over to slide 26, some very common themes go to Tom's point in terms of the culture value proposition over the last three businesses that Todd just talked about. We've got a tremendous value proposition in terms of what we have to offer to our customers. As Todd mentioned, similarly, we have a one-stop shop where at the end of the day, what we do is we paint and provide great coil coated services, but more than a third of our customers utilize an additional processing service that we offer to add value and provide better supply chain and more flexibility. In addition to that, we embrace complexity. We know that our customers want to delight their customer.
Our ability to be fast and flexible and nimble, that is what is continually on our mind every day. We're building our supply chains around our customers. When you think about the things that David talked about with 24/7 highly customized access to technology, or you think about our operational flexibility, where we allow our customers to be agnostic, as Tom mentioned, set substrate in from anywhere that they need to, and then late point identify, which basically means they're able to utilize our warehousing capability and our ability to toggle between very flexible runs quickly and give them the finished goods exactly when they need them, as close to as close as they need them for their customers. This is a very, very important value. It requires a little bit of planning and work and understanding of our customers' business to be able to do that.
As I mentioned, I'll kind of toggle over to slide 27. If we had the opportunity to build our footprint again, and if you see the way that the map is laid out, it's a purpose-built footprint that if we had a chance to start over, we'd build it in exactly the same place. The vast majority of consumption in the addressable market is in this space. To that point, it doesn't mean we're not looking at other places in the map that may not be shown right now and things like that. This is where the demand and the opportunities are. We're in the flight path of the inbound substrate, outbound freight lanes, which can be truck, rail, boat, and a lot of other areas. As David already touched on, there is tremendous exposure in terms of the markets that we're in.
I suspect as we talk in the future, the container share will continue to rise as we participate more in that market as Washington ramps up in that space. Turning over to the financials briefly, Jason will touch on those a little bit more. As Tom mentioned, we're looking to continue to deliver value to our customers. As we do that, we continue to expect that this chart will move in a direction we're pleased with in terms of our performance and doing a nice job for our customers. I'm definitely not going to talk a lot about this, but I will just say that I'm going to talk a little bit about the people instead.
I would just say that for a beer construction project to be completed on time and on budget, and then with the added little caveat there of achieving a profitability ahead of schedule, I couldn't be more proud of the team and just looking forward very much to continuing to ramp up with our valued customer partner and providing great value in this market in the time ahead. Looking forward to showing it to you, and I think it'll speak for itself. There are only four bullets on this final slide, but I would say they are fairly compelling bullets in terms of what gets me particularly excited about the team and about the business. As David talked about, we've got some really nice tailwinds. No example is smaller in terms of the shift from plastic to aluminum, which justified the investment that you're going to see later this morning.
When I think about what we're really competing with, it's really alternate materials. We have a team that's really focused on finding out how does coil coating stack up versus alternate curing technologies and other options. There are so many opportunities in that area for us to grow in North America. It's a very, very exciting pipeline of activities to continue to evangelize the benefits of pre-paint coil coating and Precoat .
We can see Jason if he wants.
Last but not least, I would just say that as Kurt talked about, there's an exciting pipeline of opportunities. I think we've got a solid track record that you're going to see later this morning. Friends will continue to consider greenfield plant expansions if they exist. With that, in front of my friend Jason Crawford.
Perfect. I'm Jeff. I guess turning to slate today, I think the key element of that slate is the big, of course, comment in terms of consistency. I think you're back to a comment that Tom made earlier on. We set our goals, we set our objectives, and we deliver against them. I think you've seen from both businesses the consistency that we've demonstrated coming through our transformation phase. If you look at our CAGR from a sales point of view and then leveraging that from an overall earnings point of view, up to 10% CAGR. And then just take a quick look at the margins. The margins are something that we've continued to invest in, albeit that, you know, as you think of our transformation phase, we're solely focused on paying down debt. It's an area that certainly provides an opportunity for us going forward.
Moving across to the next slide, as you look at another key element that's not really been demonstrated in the most recent past, you need to go back to calendar year 2009, 2010 in terms of our resiliency. If you look at our overall business model, there's a lot of components that make up who we are as a company. If you start to think about some of those elements, the tolling model, the highly variable cost structure, when there is an element of going through a phase in the markets, we weather that storm very well. As you look at coming out of that storm, position ourselves as a company to take an opportunity of the available market space. This is a cycle that we generally go through on an annualized basis.
Given our concentration in the construction market, coming through our summer phase to our winter phase, we're consistently ramping up or ramping it down to accommodate the markets that we participate in. When we do face a potential cycle, we're uniquely positioned to manage through that. Across to slide 34, obviously this has been the key focus for us over the last number of years. As you look at that transformation phase, obviously a lot of key elements that go behind the success and our leverage taking us out to 1.7x in our most recent financials. Consistently generating key cash flow and allocating that key free cash flow to paying down debt. Equally, as you look at the joint venture, very upfront we sold, for 60% of the AVAIL joint venture. Most recently we transacted that and received the, roughly $217 million worth of cash.
That stuff is in a position where we're very, very comfortable, in terms of where we sit from an overall capital structure point of view. If you move across to the next slide, you start to look at where we're deemed to where we're going. I don't think our value proposition changes, as you look at the superior returns that we provided back to our shareholders. We're going to consistently provide that. Really, where we start to do is we start to spend a little bit more time and effort, in the returns of capital investment projects and strategic M&A. As you look at the last number of years, most notably the last two years, between the roughly $60 million of spending in the new facility and the north of $100 million of paid down debt, that's no longer a sucking aspect of our capital structure.
We then start to look at where do we deploy that. Again, I go back to our gross margins and the profile. There's a number of projects that we've continued to invest in, support the businesses, et cetera, but there's a number of projects that are sat there in the sight line at the same time. We get the opportunity to really lower the bar to invest back in the business and the health and the strengths of the business. As Kurt highlighted, there's a pipeline of M&A opportunities that if you take our capital structure into account and our free cash flow generation, there's a tremendous opportunity to bring those two together. Moving across to the next slide, we talk about being a unique coatings company. We don't really sit as well with many of our tiered groups.
Certainly, we participate in each one of these segments, but as you look AZZ as a company, we don't necessarily sit in any specific segment. When you start to look at our financial returns, whether it be revenue growth or even the margin on net working capital, no matter who you're comparing us against, we sit at the higher tier of that. Again, a lot of the structure here that we've developed over the last couple of years is the foundation of where we go going forward. It's really about building on this and continuing to grow our sales and our margins. Finally, just reiterating our guidance, obviously in the last financial report and Q1, we upped our guidance and see our sales number between $1.6 billion and $1.7 billion, adjusted EBITDA between $360 million and $400 million, and then our adjusted EPS between $5 and $5.5.
With that, I'll pass it back to David.
Okay, that concludes our remarks and presentation. What we can do now is open it up to any questions you have for anyone in the room. Since we are live broadcasting this, if you would just state your name and the company you're with before you ask your question so we can work.
Global Capital Markets. If you've been successful in with the Volcon acquisitions, I was just curious when you talked about the 68 opportunities you've identified and 13 other considerations. What's happening with the profile of the Volcon acquisitions within the Metal Coatings division? A little bit about the opportunities and the Precoat levels.
Yeah, I'm happy to address that. When you look at the, we've tried to take a balanced approach in filtering down to Metal Coatings and Precoat levels. I would say that the landscape doesn't look dramatically different on the Precoat side than the Metal Coatings side. There are some small, you know, single-site high quotons, but additionally, there's multi-site opportunities out there as well. I would answer it simply that it's very similar in terms of the population. You don't have to do much math to kind of see that the ratio of a coil coating line to a galvanizing line is about three to one in terms of the investment to build, the amount of revenue it can generate. Similar financial profiles, and there's three times more galvanizing sites than coil coating.
There's that aspect of it, but there's kind of a mixed bag in all of that.
Yeah, good morning. My name's Ghansham Panjabi at Baird . You know, Tom, you had started off the conversation with the similarities between the two segments, and the EBITDA margins are quite a bit different. 10 percentage points roughly between the two. What do you think would drive, do you think it's reasonable to expect an emergence in terms of the margin profile between these two segments as you embark on the acquisition activity, etc.?
I think there's outside opportunity on the Precoat side. We're continuing to invest in modernize, like this investment in Washington, that's going to be a higher margin business, partly because of the customer base and the value-added services that it provides. I think that hopefully it may not be that much convergence. I think there's still some upside. We have not pushed through any general Metal Coatings yet, but I think as we now look at it, some of the focus on what else we can do, how much we can use, the amazing amount of data that we have to pull out of that business. I would anticipate, as we think strategically, that there's opportunities to push Metal Coatings up just a little bit.
As I mentioned, the biggest issue, and it's not that we, most of the paint, which is over half of the cost on the Precoat Metals side, is more of a pass-through. We do have some margin on it, but it's typically specified by the customer, so we're accommodating their requests, which means we don't have nearly the margin on it. We don't pass through as we do. Versus zinc, which is a commodity, 20%- 25%. While I see improvement opportunity pushing towards the upper end of the current range, and hopefully being able to expand beyond that as we get some of these deals done and just continue to build scale without increasing our overhead structure. We're going to continue to look at both the overhead.
Within both segments, you are also leveraging that corporate overhead structure that you maintain, that efficiency.
Long answer to a straightforward question. Thank you.
Adam Thalhimer at Thompson Davis. I was curious if you could comment on the two times GDP growth potential organic. Was that for both segments? Maybe you can just give some color on what drives that.
Yeah, I see it for both segments. I think on the Metal Coatings side, it's going to be a continuation of just maintaining market share. There's a growth in it, continued growth in infrastructure. We see those tailwinds. We might be able to grow beyond that because we've got the size, the scale, the network, and we're continuing to add services. Everything from transportation and freight, just, you know, get bigger wallet share. That's how I see Metal Coatings getting to above two times GDP. On the Precoat side, I think we've got the ramp-up of the new facilities. We've got the ability to invest in CapEx to continue to modernize and expand and also expand services and opportunities. As Jeff alluded to, there's some technology things that we can do with some advantages, and then maintain that flexibility as an independent supplier. It really is on both sides.
Obviously, I think there's acquisition opportunities on both sides, but they're going to move the needle more on the Precoat side.
Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities. You know, you've had such success with the bolt-on strategy. Can you just kind of walk us through what that looks like from day one after you make that acquisition? Kind of what are you doing on day one versus day 60, day 90? What does that look like?
Yeah, and that's where it's going to, I'd say, on the Metal Coatings side, typically, you know, because we are significantly, for the most part, we're significantly higher margin than most of the companies we're buying. That comes down to the playbook and leadership. We don't have to take that too much of it. We went to as quickly as possible, brand them AZZ, get them on Oracle so that we can utilize DGS. Usually, and typically, particularly on a one-off, you're talking about five people in the front office. We're sending in a team that's done this time after time after time. By the end of the first week, if not at most the second week, they're on DGS, they're operating our playbooks, and we're providing the management oversight, whether it's at the regional level. Sometimes we insert one of our Plant Managers. It's a very quick integration process.
I mean, time to comment. We've owned Canton for a little over a month. I'd say they're fully integrated and functioning and following our playbook.
Yeah, I would just add that I think with our history of bolt-on acquisitions, we've learned to follow kind of a rinse and repeat approach that we can take from one facility to the next by bringing in a group of top performers to help get the plant rolling and right into AZZ.
On the Precoat side, because so much of it's going to be more dependent on what's the age of that line, what are the markets that it's in, I'm going to say, while we'll be pursuing synergies, a lot of that is just expansion of marketing customers' capacity. Some of these opportunities might not be as synergy-rich, if you will, which means we're also not going to, we may not be able to come in and say, this is how we're going to run it because of the technology. It's just a wider range of approaches that we're going to have to take. I don't know if Jeff wants to.
No, I agree. I do think we are able to take advantage of our centralized structure, in terms of the way that we're organized. I think that we're able to take the best practices because I think the fact that we participate in every major market, to Tom's point, depending on what the opportunity is, we're going to be able to apply our playbook and our best practices to that. I think it speeds the integration, which we'll customize to the opportunities.
I think the key to look for there is we're going to want to buy it something less than our multiple. I mean, it's the same on the Metal Coatings side. Typically, the multiples there, they used to be in the five and six range. I'd say they're probably in the eight to nine times range. Obviously, either way, we're going to get both a multiple as well as find synergies.
I'll make maybe worth mentioning on the Precoat side, while it's not in the public space, just because of our ownership structure prior to AZZ, there's a long history of M&A in Precoat . If you go back to the cycle slide that Jason shared, you kind of noticed the EBITDA for Precoat Metals at that point in time was $40 million compared to touching $200 million now. A huge part of that growth was M&A, both multi-site, an acquisition of [Napel], and that was integrated in about six months from when we synergized. The most recent was probably 2017, 2018, the OMBS side. Very similar to what Todd Bella had described, we were operating on the Precoat centralized system within the first week. It's not that much different, but the difference is, you know, the public.
Dan Rizzo from Jefferies. You said the target is 22% of the total EBITDA margins, but given all your efforts and what you're doing going forward, that seems a little conservative.
That's why I kind of threw 25 out there. I think that's as we look forward strategically and move forward, particularly from a business perspective, maintaining a corporate entity as it is. I think that's going to lever it up, particularly as we're looking for acquisitions, and we can acquire those without any significant increases in the corporate overhead. I think there's opportunity there.
On the Precoat side, with the acquisitions you're going to make, are these more like turnaround stories where they're kind of an underutilized asset that you can make better, or is it something that just seamlessly goes into your network, so to speak?
Kurt, you want to take that one?
Yeah, so there's both. To be honest with you, there's, and I would add complementary to Matt's side on other than the marketing capabilities. I'm speaking obviously inside of the things that we're focused on, but it kind of ties to all of the above. There's some that are turnaround. You know, Metal Coatings, the one beauty of both businesses that you're definitely talking about is the ability to leverage best practices. You know, when you think about any business or any plant that has the ability to look inside and complete transparency with top five competitors and know what they do well, most segments haven't.
[Airboys], Evercore. I appreciate the look back on slide 33 of the prior cycle, now with Washington and maybe more kind of consumer packaging mixed in there. Does that kind of dampen some of the variability on the Precoat Metals side even more in the cycle?
Yeah, I would think so. I think there's growing demand for those assets, which is why it's ramping up nicely. I think now also outstanding work from the team that's brought that online and overcome a lot of challenges. I think it does probably protect that mix, if you will. We've talked about the fact that because so much of our costs, on the Precoat Metals side, in a downturn, quit buying paint, cut shifts, and so then variable costs can adapt quickly. I would see modern assets, we can run a lot of these new modern assets today that we are. I think it becomes another protective layer and you can turn to work on it.
[Paul Braatz], Kinzie Capital . On the coating business, I don't think there's a lot of new galvanizing facilities coming out of the stream. Can conditions, if the secular winds play out the way they are, can the conditions in the galvanizing business get tight and allow for some pricing?
Yeah.
Has it in the past?
It has in the past. I think, for us, we always talk about the fact that we've got 42 sites, and I want to win two-thirds of the battles every day. At any given time, we're probably averaging two shifts where we're in the heaviest season. The capacity constraints ebb and flow a little bit with the construction season. We've been known to put price through up and down cycles. We're seeing zinc as a commodity. The cost of zinc rises. I'd anticipate product sales teams are going to be as aggressive as they can. We talk about it. We have to earn that short cycle time to outstand quality and service and making sure we're there. The advantage, of course, we have in capacity constraint situations, which are occurring in some areas right now, is we can flex across our sites.
In North Texas, we've got four kettles, three sites. I can guarantee you all three sites are not equally busy every single day. One of our strengths is we can move capacity to the sites and accommodate it and meet the customer's schedule and then charge for that.
Am I correct that there are no new galvanizers?
There's a couple. One of our multi-site competitors and then Nucor has a line going in. Of course, it's going in with their initial company. It's one more integration. There's been a couple. I'd say over, if you just look at it, there's always going to be about, they average about one a year. In the overall scheme of things, it's not huge. Sometimes if it's in our backyard, then we feel the effect. If it's more of a vertical integration play, we don't feel it.
I'll ask one. Gerard Sweeney, ROTH Capital , a little different tact. Talked about tailwinds, but you also mentioned business development. Even on like the Galvanizing side, there's a lot of value add in terms of voluntarity. Is there a way you can actually pull through some business on the business development side, go out and market that, that benefit and maybe drive additional demand?
We've talked a little bit about this. Some of our customers have at least a portion of their galvanizing that isn't vertically integrated. We think we could probably do that better than they can do it. We just have to prove that. From a business development standpoint, approaching customers to take over the different vertically integrated galvanizing operations and commit our galvanizing capacity, whether it's nearby or requires some transportation support, we see that as opportunities for us because of the strength of our network and the breadth of it. There are just not a lot of places out there that we don't cover with capacity. The need for somebody, and we see it because when their kettle goes down, particularly these days to get a new kettle, it used to take about six months. It could take a long time.
What used to be something that was relatively routine before we got into the disruption from whether it's tariffs or just capacity for machinery, furnaces, kettles, things like that, that used to be more attractive for businesses, is becoming less so when you're down for 12 months and you have to buy from us or you have to buy from somebody. You may find at that time that the capacity is relatively constrained. I think those are opportunities. That's why business development is such an issue for us.
How big is that opportunity?
I'd say we're still quantifying it, but you know, it's back to if you looked at them as acquisitions, that's also how we see getting to two times the EBITDA on that. We think that's part of the how. There are lots of them out there. It's just, and they can be really small kettles. They can be relatively larger at the moment. That was just stuff that we used to just, it's not that we walked by it, but we would pick up on it because, yeah, they're having a kettle change. We're picking up their business for a couple of months. Versus now, okay, we pick it up. Can we go in and convince them? Just let us do this for them. I think, and also with the cost of capital for them is in most cases higher than our cost tomorrow with them. We've got different opportunities.
I could ask another one, kind of shorter term. Could you maybe talk to the interplay between what was maybe a slowdown in orders after pre-buying ahead of tariffs versus maybe some incremental business you guys are getting from people no longer importing already coated coil?
I'll let Jeff take that one because he's on the front lines of it right now.
I think you kind of quantified the question of water. I think it would've allowed the uncertainty in some of the tariff actions that had taken place. It does seem like some of the statistics that maybe David had shared in the last draft release supported that there was maybe some buying ahead in advance of some of those changes. That's going to drive up the inventory levels, to your point, around orders. I think that customers are pulling from inventory as a result of that, standing on the sidelines in some cases a little bit, trying to make sure what is going to happen next.
A lot of the uncertainty in terms of, potentially, both Tom and David touched on it, standing on the sidelines right now in some cases for some of those projects to say let's wait and see, or maybe they have a little bit of extra inventory than they would've had previously because of some of those actions. I think it kind of goes to some of the customer sentiment. They're outlets or they wanted to make sure that as they replenish and then support their customers is to see a clear path in front of how the supply chains should and need to develop an underlying cost structure given all the changes there are right now that there seems to be a daily update one way or the other.
Mike Kupinski, Noble Capital Markets. You mentioned interest rates as being somewhat of a fuel for the prospect of seeing some acceleration in revenue growth. I was just wondering, what are typical lead times in terms of that? Typically it would be obviously some, if we're anticipating some rate after September. I was just wondering in terms of how far do you see the lead? Are you starting to see a pickup now? It would kind of indicate that it shouldn't be if people are anticipating that.
I think that's just one of the, we want to see the rate reductions, which hopefully will trigger some of these projects to move forward. I think the issue on trying to figure out the timing is just as I mentioned, lead times aren't major according to that. If you're having to get major machine tools from a U.S. supplier because of the cost of the tariffs, maybe something that maybe you could import for. We're seeing those lead times for even stuff that we buy stretch out to 24 months. That used to be sub 12 months. We need to see it because we need that signal for people to start placing purchase orders. It's going to be a few, at least a few months, if not a few quarters before that turns into galvanizing opportunities and paint opportunities on the whole side.
We like to see that as a positive signal to start triggering some of these things. Hopefully with reshoring and other things, that'll start to bring some of these lead times back down. I see that as kind of 18 months out. That's in some of the reshorings actually creating some of the new demand on heavy machinery and things like that. While these are all positive signs, and I was talking to them at dinner last night, the good news is it'll extend this cycle for several years beyond what it might normally be. The bad news is it's probably 12 months out before we start to see the real significant benefit. What I do think happens in the short term is things have been held up because nobody wants to commit that billion-dollar project and then find out, oh, we just had a big rate reduction.
A lot of what's going on with tariffs is it up? Can we buy it from Mexico or not? Unfortunately for us, very little of our supply comes from outside the U.S. It hasn't been, most of everything we're dealing with hasn't been exactly. A lot of our customers really.
I think we're all together.
Thank you, everyone. That concludes our analysts' day Q&A, and we'll look forward to moving on to the client clinics.