What we do, and then I'll share some financials, and then I'll leave some time at the end for Q&A. All right. Brady is a leader in the research, development, manufacturing of high adhesives and printing solutions that are intended for safety and identification applications. That's very broad to describe us. We have a very broad product consists of wire identification, specialty adhesive labels and printers, safety and facility ID products, which would include things like floor marking tape, lockout devices, and the safety procedures that go along with those lockout devices, pipe markers. We also develop and manufacture product identification labels, printers, scanners, healthcare identification wristband, patient ID wristbands, and other people identification type of products. We sell into a wide variety of end markets, and our products are ideal for many, many different applications.
Ultimately, the more specific and the more challenging the need for an adhesive product and a printing solution that identifies or marks something, the better it is for Brady because that is really where our products stand out. We're very diversified. We have a very diversified customer base. No one single customer comes even close to 10% of our total sales. We sell thousands of products, and 48% of our revenue last fiscal year was generated outside of the U.S. At the same time, our competitive landscape is also very fragmented and is often specific to a very particular type of product or geography, or sometimes even both. We're also very focused on producing long-term sustainable results, which I'll go through as we get into the financials later.
We've refocused our attention on innovation, and I'll show you that our R&D spend was up to an all-time high of 5.3% of sales in the fiscal year 2025, which is incredibly important to us as we work to improve our organic growth profile as a company. Also, if you look back over the eight years from 2016 up until basically we started doing a couple more acquisitions in 2025, we reduced SG&A as a percentage of sales by 800 basis points over that period of time. Around 100 basis points per year. This has been fantastic for our bottom line. We're coming off of five consecutive record years of EPS. 2021 through 2025 were each record EPS years, with 2025 EPS up by 9% over 2024.
We're on a very nice run from an earnings standpoint. We're also incredibly focused on cash generation, and that shows in the strength of our balance sheet. We're in a net cash position of $98 million as of our second quarter of fiscal year 2026, which ended on January 31. This allows us to continue to invest in our organic business, and for us, that means salespeople, R&D, and selected geographic expansion so that we can improve that rate of top-line organic sales growth. We return dividends to our shareholders. At the beginning of this fiscal year, we announced our 40th consecutive annual dividend increase, which was a milestone that we're incredibly proud of. We have actually increased our annual dividend every single year since we went public. We also take a disciplined approach when it comes to acquisitions.
The opportunity must provide some level of technology or a product offering that we don't currently have. Price needs to be right, it needs to be a logical fit with the rest of our specialty identification products, and it needs to help us move forward. If we don't find the right deal, then we step aside. We also return funds to our shareholders in the form of share buybacks. In 2025, we returned $96 million to our shareholders in buybacks and dividends combined. In 2024, we returned $117 million. In 2023, $120 million. In 2022, we returned $150 million in buybacks and dividends. Returning funds to our shareholders is definitely a focal point of our capital allocation approach.
Overall, we believe we have a well-balanced organization that's very diversified, which also tends to give us a level of protection throughout the economic cycle. All right. One second. All right. If you look at the geographic layout of Brady, I mentioned that 48% of our revenue was generated outside of the U.S. in 2025. 52% was in the U.S. Internationally, 30% of our revenue is in Europe, which is mostly Western Europe, and then the remaining 12% makes up Asia and Australia. We're geographically diverse for a company with $1.5 billion in revenue. All right. We operate our business geographically within two regions, which is shown here on this slide with a little bit of information about them.
One geography is the Americas and Asia, which represents about 2/3 of our total revenue, and the combination of Europe and Australia represents the remaining 1/3 of our total revenue. We sell the full suite of Brady products throughout each of our geographies. We break this down further into five major product categories, which you can kind of see grouped on this slide. The first is safety and facility identification. Some examples of the products are shown in the upper left or kind of the center of this slide, the upper center part. This product category is rather broad, but an overall summary is that it consists of kind of all of the signage, safety, and identification products that are present and often required throughout a manufacturing facility.
Safety signs, floor marking tape, pipe markers, lockout devices, and labels to ensure that machine guarding and machine safety is following OSHA or country equivalent of OSHA standards, and many, many more examples. We offer a full suite of hardware, which would be our printers, software for those printers, and then, of course, our high-performance specialty adhesive materials, which are run through the printers and then printed upon. We manufacture those specialty adhesives at our coating facility here in Milwaukee, and then sell that throughout our global businesses throughout the globe. The next product category shown on the upper right-hand side of this page is wire identification.
This category consists of a wide variety of materials that can be printed upon and then applied to a multitude of different types of wires, cables in many different applications and industries. The printers that you can see here, just a couple of examples, and throughout all of our other product categories, are for the most part the razor blade model. We manufacture both our printers and the keyed consumables for those printers so that only Brady materials can be used within most of our printers. Some of our best-selling products within this product category are our portable printers, which are durable handheld printers that are designed to withstand day-to-day at something like a construction site.
Think of something that an electrician would use every single day to label wires and panels with currently right now data centers being an area of growth right now that is in need of this very critical product. Product identification, kind of in the center of the slide. This primarily consists of barcode labels and other brand protection type labels. We manufacture RFID-enabled labels, the label design software, 1D and 2D barcoding software, as well as the RFID readers and barcode readers, which came along with two acquisitions that we made a few years ago. Over on the right, healthcare identification.
This mostly consists of patient identification wristbands and other labels that are intended to ensure that all of the care that a patient receives in a healthcare setting is accurate and what is actually intended for the patient. Data accuracy, reliability is absolutely key. We also source and resell a variety of other healthcare supply and PPE type products within our healthcare business. Last, our last major product category would be what we refer to as people identification. Some of the products that you can see here we would manufacture, and sell would be employee badges, building access badges, lanyards, wristbands for special events and things like that. We also offer a printer lineup that's designed for this product category, which came along with another acquisition from a few years ago.
Overall, there are a lot of common themes between our product categories, with the primary being that we manufacture high quality, long-lasting identification products that are intended for a wide variety of end markets with a particular specialty in adhesives that are designed for harsh environments, where the cost of failure or the cost of non-compliance is very high. You want to, you wanna come back to the reliable product, the high quality product that you know is going to help you actually comply with what you need to do. All right. I touched on most of the items shown here, which is basically kind of pulling our product offering together in a different view.
The acquisitions that we made a few years ago that I touched on, which are called Code and Nordic ID, brought along with them the optical scanning capabilities that we were missing at that time, which now allows us to offer to our customers an integrated solution that consists of a printer, a scanner to read 1D and 2D barcodes, as well as RFID-embedded labels. Our specialty adhesive materials within the printers themselves would also come along with this, and then the software to tie everything together. Our most recent acquisitions from the beginning of last fiscal year and just six months ago are called Gravotech and Mecco, which you can see here on this slide.
All of what I've been referring to from a product standpoint has been about identifying something, whether that be a product, something within a facility, a machine, or a person, but always using a label or some sort of a material as the medium for that identification. In certain circumstances, a label just isn't the right solution. Think of things like metal parts and components of autos or engines and things like that. We purchased Gravotech, which manufactures laser and mechanical engravers, engraving machines that perform precision direct part marking directly on a product or a part or a component of a product. The applicability and the use cases are vast with it, within this product category as well.
Then we also added Mecco about six months ago, which designs and manufactures a very complementary set of products to Gravotech. We're really happy with these acquisitions, and they both filled an identification gap that we previously had in that direct part marking space. All right. Just a brief summary before I'll move on to the financials. Where we are today, we're highly focused on improving our rate of organic sales growth to GDP Plus. We're investing in innovation, we're investing in automation, and we're focusing on making the right decisions today that'll pay off for our shareholders in the long term. We're also driving profit improvement, and you can see this in our results. I mentioned that EPS was up 9% in fiscal 2025. Efficiency opportunities are constantly being tackled throughout our businesses.
SG&A is down significantly from eight years ago, but the key to all of what we're doing within our cost structure is that the reductions are sustainable. We're always about simplifying what we do and how we do it. We're keen on looking for opportunities to automate more, and all of this has been paying benefits. We're returning funds to our shareholders. We believe we're positioned really well for the future. We have a diverse product portfolio, and we believe when you combine that with our niche product offerings, that we're in a great position for growth over the long term. All right. Let me just touch on some of our financial trends on these next few slides.
From a revenue standpoint, we've had a nice upward trend of organic sales growth coming out of the pandemic with 5.5% organic revenue growth in 2023, and that was followed by 2.6% growth in 2024 and 2025. Through the first half of fiscal 2026, our organic sales are up 2.2%. We have very strong gross profit margins. Historically, pre-pandemic, we were pretty much right around 50% annually, which you can see here on this slide. During the inflationary period and the logistics challenges in 2022, we dropped below this level slightly to 48.5%. In fiscal 2023, we recovered to nearly 50%. In 2024 and 2025, our gross profit margin improved in both years to above 50% despite the impact of incremental tariffs, in particular in 2025.
We did still see a net negative from tariffs at the end of the day, but we've worked really hard to continue to execute operational efficiencies along with strategic price increases. We're also getting the most sales growth from our highest gross profit margin products over the last three and a half years in particular, which has brought along this really nice result. A big reason because of that growth and our improvement in gross profit margin is our investment in R&D. You can see this on this slide that we've increased it steadily on, you know, and purposefully over the last nine years, which shows our commitment and our belief in the return from our investment in R&D. You're seeing it in our profit results, absolutely.
We closed 2025 at 5.3% of sales, which was our highest year ever and the largest annual investment in research and development in company history. Our R&D investment is really paying off, and it's an area where we'll continue to invest because it absolutely drives a nice long-term benefit to the organization and continued growth in our high gross profit margin products. All right, so moving to SG&A expense. We have reduced SG&A as a percentage of sales by 800 basis points over an eight-year period of time. The chart you see here really brings this to light. In fiscal 2016, SG&A was over $400 million. We did come back to that above that dollar threshold basically in 2025, and that is because we acquired three companies over the course of 2025.
You can also see that step-up in dollars in 2022 because we did make three acquisitions in that fiscal year. These are all GAAP numbers. The point being, we have line of sight to continued efficiencies in our SG&A structure. We continue to work on efficiencies and improvement projects, in particular throughout back office support, and also within our sales function enable our salespeople to make the process simpler for, in particular, our customers. We still have some automation opportunities and expect to continue to drive improvement in this area. Okay. Pre-tax earnings have been moving steadily in the right direction. This is a GAAP number as well, and we made a note here that we did record some reorganization charges in 2025.
I'll show some non-GAAP EPS results on the next slide. This trend is the end result of everything that I just went through around our focus on organic sales growth, our continued improvement in gross profit margin, and our reduced SG&A cost structure, all while increasing our investment in R&D. We usually also like to show pre-tax income here, even though we have a little bit of additional charges in 2025 due to the actions that we took, but then this kind of reduces the noise from prior year tax rate changes as well. All right. Moving along to earnings per share. This is the exact same story, and then you can see kind of the clarity of the trend. In fiscal 2021, you can see we were at $2.75 of EPS.
That was an all-time record high, which repeated in 2022 as you see the trend go up, culminating in last fiscal year, which was our fifth record year of EPS in a row at $4.60 per share. We're extremely focused on converting our organic sales growth into improved gross profit margin, and then ultimately improved bottom line growth, and then doing whatever we can to offset inflation and tariffs. Okay. To touch on cash flow from operating activities here on this slide, we steadily increased cash flow following the supply chain crisis in 2022, where, which in that year we intentionally increased our inventory levels in order to ensure that we had supply and could service our customers.
We kinda made that decision to hold a little bit more inventory and make sure we were there. We took a step back in 2020. Skipping ahead, you can see the nice increase in 2023 and 2024 as we got back to kinda normalized working capital levels. In 2025, we took a little step down as we modified our working capital decision-making at some of the acquired companies, and basically are carrying more inventory there intentionally. We also utilized some cash for some reorganization and facility closure activities, which is now paying off for us this year in our profit results. You can see that our cash flow from operating activities is up 35% through the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of 2025. All right, our balance sheet.
We are in a net cash position as of January 31st of $98 million. Even following acquisitions of $145 million last year, and I believe about $17 million in this fiscal year, we're still in a net cash position as a company. We have an incredibly strong balance. Two regions overview that are shown on these next two slides. You can see fairly, pretty consistent results in terms of growth in sales and profitability over the last three years. These are GAAP numbers as well, so we did take some charges in 2025. You can see the upward change in our quarter-over-quarter results in the current year as you kinda look in the lower left-hand corner of the slide.
We've definitely been executing well in both regions, and the organizational changes that we made, in particular in Europe and Australia, you're seeing come through with significantly improved segment profit in the current year. Stop pausing on the Europe and Australia slide. All right, with that, I'll just add a couple of closing thoughts. We're a very financially strong company. We're diverse from both a geographic and end market standpoint. We're super focused on organic sales growth and improving that trend from these over these last couple of years. Our profitability has improved tremendously, our cash generation has been fantastic, and it really does show the outcome of our constant focus on making cash-based decisions as a company.
We're returning funds to our shareholders, and as we sit here today, we do believe that we're in a great position. With a strong balance sheet, we're focused on execution, we have a great product line-up with new products coming to market all the time. We just talked about a recent product launch on our earnings call last month, which we've been super excited about. We just believe we're set up for a strong future. I'll turn it back over for any questions.
Thanks so much, Ann. Appreciate the
No problem.
The overview over the last 20 minutes. We do have about five or six minutes remaining. If you do have any questions, press the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Type them in, and we'll get to as many as we can, time remaining. I do wanna kick it off, Ann. If you can just break down, obviously, there's two very significant markets you serve, the U.S. and Europe. They seem to be going in slightly different directions the last couple of quarters. Can you just discuss a little bit the trends you're seeing that are different in those two markets and how they could shift?
Sure. Absolutely. Yep, you're right. We have, and you can kinda see that on the quarterly trending slide, in particular for the two regions. Really what we've been facing, and I think probably what a lot of companies have been facing as well, is the macro environment in particular in Europe. Also Australia has been pretty weak over the course of the last year, maybe five quarters or so is what we've been seeing. Manufacturing is down. We sell into every single end market, literally every single end market, with more of a concentration in industrial manufacturing. If manufacturing is down in Europe, and it has been over the course of the last year, that absolutely does have an impact on us from a top line standpoint.
Our business leader in Europe saw this coming well over a year ago, really made you know went through a very thoughtful exercise to take a look at cost structure and where we might you know not be as efficient as we probably could be. We did take some charges last year to kinda right-size, close a couple of facilities and get ourselves set up for basically that reset level of volumes that we're seeing. From a profit standpoint, you can absolutely see this improvement in the Europe and Australia region in particular in our results this year.
I think we do need a little help from the macro side to improve that top line and just get back to a little bit of organic sales growth. We'll see a really nice flow-through due to those actions we took last year.
Got it. Obviously you've had great success with the newly released products. The engineered products clearly are higher margin. We see that in the gross, the really significant gross margin improvement in recent quarters. The question I always get, and I'm sure you do as well, which is, Are there still more to come? What are they?
From a product development standpoint?
Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah. For sure. I mean, we, you know, I can't reveal a ton of details.
I understand.
What's in the pipeline, but absolutely. I mean, if there's one thing I mean, it shows in our results. You see it in our investment in R&D that we remain committed for sure to new product development. It's not just throwing more dollars at something, it's being smart about how we're throwing those dollars at our process as well, and making sure that we're being efficient and.
Yeah
Focusing on, you know, a few high priority items and churning those products out more quickly than we have in the past, and I think we are seeing that. The product that we had talked about in our Q2 earnings call, the i4300 is. There's really nothing like that on the market in terms of its size, its portability.
Yeah
Its ability to kind of last all day without being, having to be plugged in. You can, you know, wider widths are needed throughout a job site. We're really excited about that one, 'cause that's just been something that's not been on the market. It doesn't really exist out there in the spaces in which we play. We were, you know, really trying to fill a need for customers who are, you know, just trying to get things done on a daily basis. We're really hopeful that this'll kind of check a bunch of boxes for them. More to come.
Thanks.
Absolutely.
I think we talked quite a bit to investors about the name. They may not completely understand the razor blade model or how it applies, which is if you're rolling out a ton of new printers and they're selling at higher rates than before, you have a much larger base in which to sell all your high margin consumables, which would imply.
Exactly
There's a pretty significant tail. Fair?
Absolutely fair. You summarized it perfectly, Steve. That's exactly what we're going for. The printers are very long-lasting, very high quality, super durable. We want them to last as long as possible for our customers to, you know, have a high quality product that they can continue to use. The longer they're using them, then that creates that tail and that consumable pull through revenue. Absolutely.
We are running out of time, but last one I have to get in. We've been asking everyone this. Higher WTI prices, significantly higher than what we were expecting six weeks ago.
Yeah
How do you manage that? Any impact from the conflict in the Middle East immediately?
Yeah. For sure. For us as a company as it relates to oil prices, we're further down the supply chain where you know, as a direct input, the actual oil as a direct input to our products is not really applicable to the vast majority of our products. So in that.
Yeah
In that respect, we're a little bit protected. Apart from, you know, if we're seeing
Transportation costs, right?
Exactly right.
Yeah.
Yep, exactly right. We have a presence in the Middle East, and we're watching that carefully, you know, obviously from a safety standpoint.
Right
You know, as it impacts the actual oil industry. We sell in it. It's a key end market for us. It's a smaller one in the scheme of things, but you know, it's a key end market for our products. I think the larger impact for Brady will just be larger macro, if.
Got it.
If in the event that this continues and goes on for a long period of time and, you know, macro is impacted, then inherently we will be as well. But from a direct input standpoint, apart from logistics, we're not. It's not as much of an impact to Brady.
Perfect. That's helpful. We do have to just about wrap it up. It's almost noon. Any closing comments, Ann?
I mean, I'd like to thank everybody for joining today. You know, we're really focused, very focused on that top line. Try to control what we can control when the world's kind of doing what it's doing.
Yeah
Try to stay focused on our key priorities and kind of keep moving forward.
That's it.
Thanks so much for joining. Thanks so much, Steve. If you have questions, please go to Steve. He does a tremendous job, or he can get in touch with me anytime. Happy to talk more.
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Ann Thornton from Brady Corporation. Hopefully everybody found the presentation useful this morning. If you have any follow-up, please reach out to me and I can certainly direct you to Ann. Thanks so much, everyone. Enjoy the remainder of the conference. Thanks, Ann.
Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Bye