Welcome back from lunch. Next up, we've got AZZ Inc, traded on the NYSE as AZZ. With us today is the Chief Marketing Officer, Communications, and Investor Relations Officer. AZZ has gone through a tremendous transformation over the last several years into a pure-play metal coatings business. I'm excited to introduce Dave to share the story. Dave?
Thanks, Sandy. Good afternoon, everyone. Happy to be here. I am going to walk you through our IR deck and answer any questions. I will certainly make sure that I leave enough time. I have got the full IR deck in here and loaded that up to the conference schedule. I might blow through some of these just in the interest of time. For those of you that are not familiar with the company, first and foremost, yes, it is pronounced AZZ. I will just clear that one up for you real quick. That is usually the first question we get. What we are, we are based here in the Dallas, Texas area, actually over in Fort Worth. We are, as Sandy mentioned, a metal coatings company. We are a pure-play metal coatings company. What we do, as you will see in the presentation, are two things.
One is a hot-dip galvanizing business, and the second one is a roll coating business. We're, again, coating steel and aluminum on both sides of the business. What you'll see in the presentation, we've been growing sales and margins and gaining share over time. We think we can continue to do that both organically, driven a lot by some secular growth drivers that we'll talk about, but also inorganically. We're back on the M&A trail again after having taken a pause for the past three years to deliver the business after a big strategic acquisition that we did in 2022. I'll run through all that, and we'll just kind of keep going. As I mentioned, based in Fort Worth, Texas, about 3,700 employees in the business.
On the two segments, as you can see on the top right, metal coatings, which I will use that term interchangeably with hot-dip galvanizing. Forty-six locations, forty-one of those locations do hot-dip galvanizing. The other five are doing powder coating, plating, and anodizing. Our coil coating business, which I will also refer to as Precoat Metals, has fourteen locations. We have seventeen coil coating lines. All of these locations are based here in North America. All but three are in the States, and we have three up in Canada. If you're looking for a very North American-focused infrastructure play, you're in the right room. You can kind of see the sales and EBITDA split fairly equally amongst the two segments. Our sales are a little higher on the Precoat side and the margin profile a little lower.
On the metal coating side, the sales are a little lower, but the margins are higher. We will get into describing all that. Collectively, about $1.6 billion top line, $392 million in EBITDA. When I started there 12 years ago, we were at about $525 million in top line sales. You can see a pretty good tremendous growth in the business and growth in the margins as well. Sandy mentioned the transformation that we went through. I will not spend a whole lot of time on this. I do not think it is that important about where we have been as much as where we are going. What we did back in 2022 is strategically transform the company. We had owned another segment that we completely divested through a JV.
That segment was really a kind of a compilation of electrical assets as well as a welding services business. It had a lot of international exposure, single-digit margin profile business. We spent a whole lot of time and energy trying to improve that business, but it just was sort of subscale. We felt that really our efforts were best spent trying to focus as a metal coatings company. Our sort of nirvana was if we could find something like our galvanizing business that had high margins, a large presence in North America, was a toll coating business, and had room to grow, that would be sort of nirvana for us. We found that when we purchased Precoat Metals in 2022. That really set us up well. We have delivered the business since that acquisition. I will get more into that through the presentation.
We are really setting our sights now on driving growth in both segments, both through organic and inorganic opportunities, as well as continuing to improve the margin profile of the business overall. Real quick, just some of the things that we have done since the strategic transformation. When we purchased Precoat, which was a $1.2 billion acquisition, that spiked our leverage up to 4.2 times debt to EBITDA. We are now down very comfortably to 1.7 times debt to EBITDA. We have signaled to the street that we would like to run the business in a range of 1.5-2.5 times debt to EBITDA. We are very comfortably at the lower end of that range, which we have arrived at this year. That is two years ahead of schedule. We feel really good about what we have accomplished in terms of delivering and strengthening the balance sheet.
We've talked about how our guidance would be somewhere around $360 million-$400 million around adjusted EBITDA. We're already sitting at $357 million, so check the box there. Margin performance. What we've recently said is now that we're back in a comfortable range, we can go ahead and start looking at acquisitions. We've completed one this year as a small bolt-on galvanizing acquisition in Canton, Ohio, that we acquired back in July. We're still on the M&A trail looking to add in more opportunities both on both segments and are hopeful that we can get at least one more accomplished this year. We have raised the dividend this year. It's the first time we've done that since 2017. With respect to share buybacks, we do have a 10b5-1 in place, opportunistically looking to buy in shares.
We do believe that the stock at its current rate is undervalued and a good investment. We are taking a look at that. We'll move on. Quickly on end markets. When you take a look at the slide here on the left, our biggest end market is construction. We break that out into three areas: infrastructure, construction, and residential. Each one of those represents about a third of that 56% of the total, so about 18% each. We also have industrial as an end market for us. Industrial are basically processing plants. Think about LNG terminals. It could be agriculture, all sorts of different industrial processing. Transportation for us is truck and trailer as well as U-Haul. That basically represents the 8% that you see there, as well as some school bus business with Blue Bird and others.
Consumer for us, the 8%, is three things: HVAC, appliance, and our container market, where we're roll coating clear coat as well as a tinted clear coat over aluminum that's used for the tops and the tabs of just about every aluminum beverage that you might consume today, whether it's alcoholic or non-alcoholic. We'll talk more about that. Electrical is everything and all things electrical infrastructure that you see that are typically galvanized: transmission and distribution poles, anything within an electrical substation. As you think about those products, they always have one thing in common. There's a nice gray color to it. We're the folks that make the steel gray. Finally, other is just sort of a catch-all.
IIJA, just real quickly, what I would say here is the business is a late-cycle business as it relates to IIJA, really coming into its own recently in the most recent two quarters because of IIJA spend that, again, was announced a couple of years ago, finally got awarded. Those projects, which I do not know too many people that know any shovel-ready projects, either back in the Obama administration or the current administration. As you know, those projects take a while to get going, and they are. We are seeing an uptick in activity associated with galvanizing steel as well as painting steel and aluminum associated with IIJA awards. Our strategic value prop, we are first and foremost a toll coating business. By a tolling business, if you are not familiar with it, what that means is we do not purchase steel nor aluminum. Our customers do that.
We are just keeping it at our facility for the time that we're coating it and passing it right back to them or sending it off to the job site. We have no risk on steel or aluminum. We do not care if it's imported or domestic. It makes no difference to us. We're going to coat it just the same. Both businesses, as you'll see, are industry-leading providers. We have a number one market share in both of the segments that we operate in, a pretty big competitive moat around both of the segments that we're really proud of. It's driven by not only our footprint, but also the technology that we have invested in the business with some proprietary technology that's helping us out both operationally and with customers that's built on top of our Oracle stack that we run for the mainframes.
Spend a lot of time with customers and customer satisfaction. We do net promoter scores. We've just put out our fourth annual sustainability report. We are mindful of ESG. We do not go overboard with it. We make sure that we are doing the right things with respect to ESG. Those efforts have been, I think, recognized by Newsweek for the past three years as one of the most sustainable companies. I mentioned technology a bit. With technology, we have two leading platforms: Digital Galvanizing System on the galvanizing side of the business and then CoilZone on the coil coating business. Both of those have basically eliminated paper within the organization. We are doing everything electronically. We have EDI and API hooks into our customers, particularly on the CoilZone side. It is virtually a seamless order entry and transaction process with them.
On the Digital Galvanizing System, we are using that to not only help us operationally improve the business, particularly zinc utilization, but also provide our customers with near real-time information on where their steel is in the galvanizing process and any issues or concerns along the way. Finally, just a note to AI. We are embracing AI. We started with setting policies and procedures first on the do's and don'ts for our employees. We did all-employee training on exactly what to do and what not to do and what to use. We have then pushed those out, and we're leveraging things like Microsoft Copilot and Teams in the organization to help us make decision-making faster, as well as leveraging other things in the business, the AI Oracle infrastructure, as well as other future-ready applications. Quick note on R&D. We've had a long-term relationship with Texas A&M since 2019.
We actually invested in and built a small hot-dip galvanizing kettle at Texas A&M. The students are performing a lot of research at the engineering lab. Those results have proven themselves out pretty handily for the business. We have implemented some of those into our operations already. We have already kind of touched on sustainability. I think the main thing here to note are kind of the three bullet points across the top. When you think about AZZ and its footprint and where it is at, we are an indistinguishable and essential part of the value stream for our customers. We are absolutely essential to what is happening in infrastructure today because steel and aluminum need to be coated. We do that in a very environmentally friendly way. When you think about the hot-dip galvanizing side, we are using zinc. Zinc is a critical element. It is sustainability.
It can be reused continuously, just like the metal that it covers. Really excited about that. When you think about reporting and initiatives, as I mentioned, we're kind of punching up above our weight class in terms of the amount of visibility we provide to the investor community around initiatives and reporting on scope one, scope two. We've got a 10% reduction on scope one and scope two consumption out there. As I mentioned, we've been recognized several years in a row by Newsweek. On the people side, we're a diverse organization already, so about 51% diverse. We think that that helps us out. We really continue to focus on diversity in the organization. Quick look at the team. We're led by Tom Ferguson, our CEO. He's pictured up on the top left.
Came from us from Flowserve, a Dallas-based company here that you may be familiar with. Tom joined also 12 years ago, just after I joined. He's been very instrumental in shaping the culture of the company, putting in a servant-minded leadership culture, as well as a performance-driven meritocracy culture within AZZ. It's been my privilege to have worked with Tom for a number of years here at AZZ. Jason Crawford, our CFO, came to us through the Precoat acquisition. Some of you may be familiar with Philip Schlom, who was the CFO prior. Philip retired, and again, seamless transition right to Jason. Brian and Jeff are our two COOs that lead each of the segments respectively and have collectively, I think, between the two of them, over 50 years of experience in their respective industries combined. You can see the rest of the team.
I won't go through everybody there. Again, a corporate support team that's all been in place for a number of years. Quickly, I want to jump over to corporate strategy. One of the things that we put out recently during an analyst day at our new Washington, Missouri plant was our three-year goals. Just very high level, we want to get to $2 billion in top line by 2028. That's a two-year look from today. We're currently operating in our FY 2026 year, which will end in February of the upcoming year. In addition to that, what we want to do is continue to grow our margin. We're going to grow, but we're not going to do that at the expense of EBITDA and the EBITDA margin.
We want to add on things that are going to be accretive and move the margin profile upwards. That is kind of what we are looking at. We have got a 12% ROIC target or greater as our bogey out there. Again, we want to do all that while managing our leverage rate of 1.5-2.5 times. I mentioned that we are back playing offense and in the game of taking a look at several M&A opportunities. Really happy with what the team has done this year. We have looked at 68 different opportunities. Our markets are still highly fragmented. Both markets provide us opportunity for inorganic growth. Some of those are meaningful acquisitions, multi-site acquisitions that will continue to allow us to grow faster than GDP over time. We have got 13 of those targets currently under an NDA and in the evaluation process.
One, as I mentioned earlier, is closed this year. Again, hopeful to close another before the end of our fiscal year. Real quick look at the two segments, metal coatings. What we're doing here is hot-dip galvanizing, as I mentioned, along with a few other things. I think the key takeaway here that I want to share with you is that the market size is about a $2.5 billion market. We have a 27% share, number one market position. You can see we've been very consistent at growing the EBITDA performance as well as the margin over time. Very consistent business. It's also a strong cash-generating business. I kind of skip ahead on a few of these. Here's another look at the historical financials for you for the metal coatings business. Again, nice growth rate over time for both sales and adjusted EBITDA.
You can see the bottom, hopefully you can see those, the % margin for the businesses. Again, it's about a 30-32% margin business, which is pretty remarkable for an industrial business. Some of the strategic growth drivers helping us. One of them is certainly reshoring, nearshoring, infrastructure spend, and data centers. We do have exposure to data centers, which is terrific. We galvanize a lot of structural steel that is used in the construction of data centers and some of the related items outside of data center constructions too. We also are galvanizing a lot of transmission and distribution poles, monopoles, lattice towers, etc., as the nation continues to work on grid infrastructure and grid resiliency projects. The other thing that we're looking at and evaluating in our long-term strategic plan is white space opportunities within North America, filling in our map.
There are a couple of areas that we find attractive. We'll go after those either inorganically or even potentially taking a look at greenfield plant expansions if we can't turn something loose with the M&A pipeline. Switching gears now over to Precoat Metals, our other segment. What you'll see here is that the business is taking that rolled coil. Those coils are usually about anywhere from 30,000-46,000 lbs each that come from a mill or a service center. They're drop-shipped into our facility, paid for by our customer, as I mentioned. We'll unroll those and feed that through a highly automated process about the length of a football field. That's going to unroll it, clean it, prep it, roll paint across it, put it through an oven and dry it, and then roll it back up on the other end.
That market size is about $4.4 billion. Again, 2X the size of our hot-dip galvanizing market, 23% market share here. Again, number one market share position. Again, a nice growth rate in EBITDA. On the bottom there, you can kind of see all those different coils that are stacked up. Those are the same coils just kind of turned and ready to be shipped out to the end project. You can see the number of different colors here. That's one of the things that is unique about this business and why we stand out. We will embrace complexity with our customers. That's one of the things that they really value. For instance, we have 200 shades of white alone on our books. We have over 22,000 different colors that we've painted. We can do literally any shade, any custom color.
We do special prints and textures, all sorts of things. Whereas a mill or a service center that might have roll coating capacity is looking to be very uniform and standard, we're 180 degrees the opposite and looking for complexity and sophistication. Quick look at the financials for the business. Precoat, again, as you see, nice growth performance in both top line as well as adjusted EBITDA. Margin profile on this side of the business running around 20% EBITDA margins. It's structurally set up a little bit different than the metal coatings business. Again, a very solid performance in margins. Certainly, margins have expanded over time since we purchased the company in 2022. One of the things we were really excited about, and it's ramping production now, is the investment that we made over the past two years in the new greenfield facility as well.
This plant was completed in the fourth quarter of our last year on time, on budget. We've spent $125 million over the two years to build this plant, funded all out of cash. It is specific and purpose-built to serve the aluminum market. What we're doing is, again, receiving in coils of aluminum from a mill. We're unrolling that, priming it, painting it, rolling it back up, and then sending it off to several of the companies that you probably know that are canning companies that are then stamping the tops and the pull tabs out of that sheet material. A couple of the growth drivers, again, for Precoat. Again, reshoring and nearshoring certainly is helping them. The conversion that's happening in the beverage space from plastics to aluminum. Also the use of more pre-painted steel in the manufacturing business.
The organization has done a really good job of going in and working in selected verticals and converting those vertical markets from a post-painted environment where they might have their own wet spray booth or powder coating booth and moving them to using the pre-painted steel or aluminum. Some of those are shown there on the left side. You can see on refrigerators and appliances, whether it's also the garage door market or self-storage units. Again, you can see an example there, a close-up of the pull tab that you might be familiar with. Quick look. When you pull all that together and you look at the financials of the organization, this gives you a stacked bar. The two of those put together, 8% CAGR on both sales and adjusted EBITDA overall, blended together, 24% margin profile, excluding corporate costs. With corporate costs in, it's 22%.
We're really pleased with the acquisition that we did in 2022. Precoat Metals, again, really set up the business for some consistent growth. If you knew us prior to the acquisition of Precoat Metals, when we had the electrical and the welding services business, we were much less predictable. It was more sawtooth up and down, both on top line and the bottom line. Very consistent performing business now and a high, high cash generation business. One of the questions we often get, this is often one of the most talked about slides when I meet with investors, is just the ability for us to kind of show how resilient this business has been over time. This happens to show you during the last big financial crisis in 2008 and how the business performed.
You can see just a small decline, a modest decline from 2008 to 2009, really attributable to Precoat Metals and their exposure to the residential market, and then a strong recovery afterwards. The metal coatings business, the darker blue bar, grew right through the cycle. If you were to do the same thing and chart this through COVID, you'd see an even more consistent growth through COVID. My message to you is this is a very, very resilient and a very stable business. Quick look at capital structure. Down to one and a half times. It's where we're sitting today. The opportunity to grow from one and a half to two and a half times to focus in on strategic M&A.
Looking at the capital allocation, on the right side, you'll see our focus, number one, strategic M&A, making sure that we're hitting that ROIC target or above of 12%, maintaining the leverage rate. When we talk about returning capital, we have increased the dividend this year. It's the first time since 2017 that we've increased the dividend. We're also taking a look at share repurchases. We do have an authorization in place today. We are looking at, and we do have a 10b5-1 in place to offset dilution associated with equity comp and also opportunistically buying in shares when we see opportunities like today. Pretty attractive business. When you think about AZZ and you kind of start to benchmark us against peers, you'll find that we don't really have very many direct peers. There's no other pure play metal coatings company out there.
Oftentimes, investors are looking at us vis-à-vis coatings companies, building products, service centers, or steel mills. As you look at that against revenue, EBITDA, or working capital to sales, you'll find head and shoulders that we're outperforming kind of everybody else out there. Despite that, we still perform at generally a lower multiple. Again, great opportunity for growth in the stock. Last but not least, our guidance that we had put out at the beginning of the year and then revised upward and then held during our Q2 results are here on the screen, $1.625 billion-$1.725 billion in sales, $360 million-$400 million in adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS range of $5.75-$6.25. We'll again adjust that as we get into our third quarter results, which will be out in January, first week of January.
We'll be coming to a quarter close for our third quarter here in another week at the end of February. With that, I got about seven minutes for Q&A.
Yeah, great question. We have a JV that we had offloaded our electrical infrastructure segment three years ago. They've since transacted the vast majority of the business that we sold to them. It left just two businesses remaining. One is a lighting business. It's a small business. The other one is a welding services business. The question is, when would we presumably expect those to transact? They are looking at and evaluating a couple of different deals as we speak today. We'll see where those go. We're opportunistically thinking that those will happen sometime, either throughout the end of our fiscal year this year or maybe into the beginning part of next year. I think it's a short tail.
Yes, sir.
Talking at business stations, talk about the slowing of the economy. How related to gross domestic product is your business?
Yeah. Historically, we have said that our business, as it relates to GDP and how correlated we are, is a GDP plus type business. We have been outperforming that more recently, again, due to IIJA and some of the other tailwinds and secular drivers that I mentioned. I would say, excluding that, we're usually a GDP plus business. Because of that and then some of the M&A action, we're more of a GDP plus plus. Generally have been guiding toward a high single to low double digit growth in top line for the business, which will certainly out-perform GDP.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
Is that a 100% or?
Yeah. Great question. The question was about tariffs and the impact on the business. For us, largely, it has been a non-impact. That is because, again, we do not buy the steel or aluminum. Our customers are doing that. As we look at what we do, whether it is imported steel or it is domestic, it makes no difference to us where it is coming from. We are going to galvanize it one way or the other. I think on the roll coating side, what we saw earlier in the year was our customers on the Precoat Metals side that purchase coiled steel and aluminum from offshore bought ahead of expecting that Trump would be in the office. They bought ahead last year, brought it on shore, and have been consuming that over time. There are always going to be puts and takes on that.
I think they kind of offset each other at the end of the day and have not really had much of an impact on, certainly, on our financial performance.