For Q&A, for those in the audience who do have questions, please type your questions in the Q&A box, and I'll read the question out loud at the end of Management's prepared remarks. With no further delay, Tim, the floor is yours.
Oh, thanks so much. We appreciate it, Anthony. Welcome, everyone. We're delighted to have you here with us today. It's a fascinating time to be in our marketplace. I think technology is perhaps more relevant. They're referring to this period around the AI technology as being perhaps the opportunity of a generation.
We are very excited about the space that we're in. We're optimistic about the future. That said, with the current economic backdrop and the tariffs affecting our industry, there's still a lot of churn and a lot of confusion.
We are very optimistic about the second half of the year and certainly hope that these tariffs do not cause too much of an interruption. To begin with, I'll give you a review of our business, kind of our vital stats. I'm proud to say that we are in our 43rd year in business.
We have about 26.5 million shares outstanding. Our last year's sales were $2.8 billion. We ended with a strong balance sheet and a lot of cash, and about $442 million are just in EBITDA, about $119 million, earnings per share of $3.29, and market cap at about $1.6 billion. We think about our company and our mission.
We're pretty passionate about it. Our mission is to be a leading global solution provider, connecting our customers with technology that enhances their growth, elevates their productivity, and empowers their innovation. Along with our mission, we have our brand purpose. It kind of represents who we are as an organization, why we're here.
We believe the promise of the Blue Arc is all about helping our customers calm the confusion of IT, really guiding that connection between people and technology. Take a look at our go-to-market strategy.
We serve three very distinct markets. We have three separate selling subsidiaries. We believe that expertise matters, specialization matters, and we have a large account division that focuses on employees of 2,000 seats and up. That's about 40% of our business. We have a Business Solutions team that focuses on 2,000 seats and below, also about 40% of our business.
We have a Public Sector team that's state, local, K-12, and higher ed, and that is about 20% of our business. Those three separate selling subsidiaries are supported by one cohesive effort around the company. We believe it's more efficient to support our selling subsidiaries with one centralized effort and essentially everything under one roof. We have some vertical market approaches to healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and finance. We have a global procurement offering that we call GlobalServe.
We'll talk a little about later, but it connects 174 countries together. We have professional services that run the end-to-end part of our business, from cybersecurity to cloud-managed services, data center transformation, and of course, data and AI. When you put all that together, we have about 1,600 suppliers covering about 460,000 different part numbers or SKUs. We have a large ecosystem.
Our value proposition still is to be a single-source provider of IT products and solutions that range from design in through deployment. We do that, excuse me, with the very best names in our industry today. Simply stated, we make IT work for our customers. That is our secret sauce. Yes, we have a multi-branded strategy that leads with the integrated solutions, designing, deploying, and integrating technology. We have an extensive supply chain and a great reach around the country.
We have deep expertise around our customers' core needs, and we have a loyal and diverse customer base. Some of that loyalty is shown in our customer retention, a little under 90, a little over 98%, excuse me. We're proud of some of the accolades we've gotten around being America's most trustworthy company for both the U.S. and the globe around best companies for mid-size, and of course, the Forbes Award for one of the best employers for 2025.
That manifests itself in what we think is one of the best Net promoter scores we've seen in our industry. We recently completed a new one holding thousands of customers and received a net promoter score of 79, which again is really just a tribute to our customer loyalty and our focus on customer service. Today we have about 2,600 employees, about 755 sales reps.
We have a great tenure at eight years of tenure and about 710 engineering services and technical staff. We provide a lot of training, over 60,000 hours, and we believe our people are amongst the best trained in our industry. We do and hold over 5,000 certifications. Finally, we do over 725,000 custom configurations.
In order to serve our customers, we have to have end-to-end optimization and a full line of solutions all working together: data and AI, of course, cloud, cyber, managed services, professional services, and of course, supply chain optimization. A little over a year ago, we launched our Helix business.
Helix is our center of excellence for all things, IA, excuse me, artificial intelligence related, excuse me, AI related. What that really means is that we have the end-to-end ecosystem around AI covered.
We have trained our folks in what we call Helix professionals, and we're talking about services, focus area, vertical markets, and methodology. We're helping all those customers of ours transform to AI that may be as simple as a device and giving them a device-enabled AI or that data and infrastructure across that end-to-end system.
What's unique about AI is it truly is a great opportunity, an opportunity that spans anything and surpasses anything we've seen in the history of AI. We are very optimistic about what that means for our customer base. It also means that for customers that are implementing AI solutions, that really means an end-to-end opportunity to upgrade bandwidth, data, storage, compute, software, and of course, security. Really that end-to-end ecosystem.
Finally, when I look at our drivers and our growth for 2025, we think it's going to come from three main areas. We focus on those areas. The first is what we've been doing for years: supply chain and lifecycle, helping our customers manage their product install, image load, asset tag, deinstall, warranty, and making all of that seamless for them wherever they are. Of course, the digital workspace is a great driver of growth this year.
As everybody knows, the install base for PCs is really aging now. That really started during 2020. We've seen a lot of customers realize that it's time to upgrade. The fact that Windows 10 will expire in October of this year and that Windows 11 is a replacement strategy has been a great driver of our growth. We are starting to see device numbers start to increase, which is exciting. I'd say that that upgrade is starting to happen.
For us, that modern infrastructure and multi-cloud helping our customers secure their hybrid clouds, their networks, their data centers, prep for advanced technologies. For us, that means server storage, networking software, of course, cybersecurity, AI, and all the professional services around that are the drivers of growth for us for 2025 and beyond. I'd say this is a multi-year initiative. On that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom to talk to financials.
Thanks. I'll take a few minutes to just walk through a few financial slides here. We'll start out with just our revenue trend for the past five years. As you can see, it's grown from $2.59 billion up to a little over $2.8 billion. That's about 2% compound growth.
What you need to understand in here is that a lot of the product that we sell now is netted down. What that means is, 10 years ago, if we sold a piece of software for $1,000 and it cost us $800, we'd have $1,000 of revenue and $800 cost of goods sold and $200 of gross profit at a 20% margin.
When the rules changed, that is now all of that off-prem and security software is sold on a net basis, which means that we get $200 of revenue and $200 of gross profit on that same transaction. The revenue number has become a little less meaningful than the gross profit number, which is what we got here.
As you can see, that has grown at over almost 5.5% compound annual growth rate over the past five years. That is really the true indicator of our growth. That growth has all been organic. If you look at last year alone, we increased our margins by 60 basis points. A little bit of that was the accounting, but most of that was true economics where we're just getting either better costs on our sourcing or better pricing on our sales.
If we look at the earnings per share, we've grown from $2.12 in 2020 up to $3.29 in 2024. If you look at last year with $3.15 to $3.29, kind of what's buried in here is that our G&A has actually been growing as well as we have been investing a lot in our sales group, our technical sales group, and our service delivery.
Those things are just starting to get traction right now. We expect our services and technical sales, sales of technical products to grow quite a bit faster than they have in the past. This just gives you a little bit of a picture about the distribution of our business amongst our three operating segments: business solutions, public sector, and enterprise. From a revenue standpoint, enterprise and business solutions reach about 40% each, and public sector is about 20%.
If you look over to the right, you can see on a gross profit basis, the SMB business or business solutions group contributes a fair amount more gross profit than either of the other two. What's buried in there is a lot of solutions or services or software off-prem that the SMB business delivers to smaller companies.
A lot of that is Microsoft CSP, which is invoiced by Microsoft to us based upon consumption, and then we re-invoice to our customers because there are 10,000 customers there. That's a little bit cumbersome for Microsoft to deal with on their own. That has actually become a quite nice business for us. It manifests itself in some very good cash flow, $141 million plus last year. What we've done here is we've put together kind of a walk on the components of that.
As you can see, $13 million of depreciation. Where we really have done a nice job in the past two years is on our working capital. We have brought our inventories down to a record low at the end of the year, $95 million. We have managed our DSO pretty well. It stayed in the 70-71 day range despite some of the impact of the software netting.
On the right-hand side of this chart, you can see that we paid $10.5 million in dividends and did $12 million of share repurchases. On the dividend front, I will go to the next slide. What we have done in terms of capital allocation, starting in 2023, we started a quarterly dividend program, and we started paying $0.08 a share in dividends on a quarterly basis. Last year, we increased that to $0.10.
This year in Q1, we announced a $0.15 or a 50% increase in our dividend. We have developed a logical, methodical dividend process. In supplement to that, we also bought back $12.6 million of our shares last year. In terms of deploying that program, we try to be a little bit opportunistic and not buy when the stock's at record highs. This past year, the stock gave us a little bit of an opportunity at times to buy back some more. We will continue that process as we move forward. When the market gives us the opportunity, we will step in and buy.
Thanks. It is super important to us as an organization that we let our mission point to where we go, but our values and what we stand for point to how we get there, with respect, excellence, teamwork, integrity. Of course, corporate citizenship. We have a big commitment to sustainability under our Connection Cares motion, and very important to our customer base, to our supplier base, of course, to all of our people.
We will continue to be a leader around sustainability and managing that whole commitment to community. We kind of wrap up with why invest in Connection. We feel that we are looking at one of the greatest opportunities we have seen in technology in our lifetime. To back that up, we have 40 years of experience, 43 really, in this industry.
We've got long-term recurring revenue streams, and we've got a customer-oriented, service-oriented approach to the business. As you heard Tom say, we're financially stable with no debt, healthy cash balance of $442 million. We are looking at inorganic growth. We think that over the years, we've invested in systems, people, and infrastructure. Now we're really able to do tuck-in acquisitions and do that successfully.
We think we're in the right place for that. Valuations are coming around to being a little more reasonable. I think the potential for inorganic growth via M&A is certainly on our agenda. Finally, the fact that we can serve our large U.S.-based customers with our global service solution and reach 174 countries, we think is important and certainly mission-critical for our customer base. As I mentioned, we've got that commitment to both corporate and social responsibility. I want to thank you for your time and open it up to questions.
Thank you very much, Tim and Tom, for sharing the Connection story. As a quick reminder for those in the audience, if you do have a question, you can type those into the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom screen, and I'll read the questions out loud.
I'll kick off here with some of my questions here. As you pointed out, it is somewhat of an uncertain or fluid environment with the tariffs and some other macro noise. Just wondering, even with the current environment, can you talk about market share gains that you've had? Just curious to hear your thoughts on your ability to navigate through this environment here.
Thanks. We're pretty excited about the number of new logos that we're adding, a number in particular in our enterprise space. Our forecasts and our funnels look very strong. As you've heard me say, 2025 should be a great year for technology. That's against the backdrop, though, of many of our major suppliers.
I think you saw last week, HPE, Dell, and a few others kind of guided down because of the confusion around the economic uncertainty and the tariff environment. We do have to help, excuse me, do what we can to sort that out for our customers, help them through that. That said, there's a big question around what effect tariffs will have on IT spending. We do know the desktop refresh has started. We do know AI is a significant driver of IT spend.
The questions remain, when will that really start to pick up and what effects will tariffs have? That said, we're really excited about our future and have one of the best forecasts we've seen in our history here.
Understood. Okay. Yeah. Just balancing some of the near-term noise with some longer-term positives. As far as the tariffs, obviously, we already went through the first Trump administration with tariffs being implemented there. I would love to hear your thoughts as far as how you are better prepared to handle the tariffs compared to the first time around and what else can you do to try to minimize the impact of the tariffs?
Great questions there. To begin with, we notified our customers early that it was happening, and we took orders ahead of that where customers were willing to step up and make that commitment. Clearly, it was an opportunity to reach out and talk with all our customers. That means we're engaging them in other projects as well.
The fact that we can be close to our customers and help guide them through the uncertainty is certainly a positive. However, I come back to its uncertainty. The effects of the tariffs are unknown. Largely speaking, the majority of our desktop PCs are manufactured in Mexico. The majority of our laptops, tablets are manufactured in China. At this point, both of them have significant tariffs. There is a very complex ecosystem around that. All of that comes into play.
There is still a great opportunity to continue to upgrade infrastructure, to continue to sell cloud subscriptions, and to help those customers who just can't wait or don't want to wait through the resolution of the tariffs. We need to be here for them. Tom, did I miss anything there?
Yeah. No, I think the net of it is next quarter or two probably going to be a little bit uncertain or further bumpy. I think the long-term outlook for the business is fantastic. Our funnel is good. Our funnel is actually great. We've done a lot of things internally over the past couple of years in terms of improving our technical sales force, improving our sales force, improving our services capability, and our service delivery capability and processes that are really just now in the very, very early innings of taking effect. We're ready to go.
All right. Sounds good. How much of your funnel increase is related to AI, whether it's AI PCs or other products? We'd love to hear an update on that.
That, too, is a great question. A number of customers are engaging us and through our Helix team. We've got a very significant funnel there and a very long project list. Many customers are talking about upgrading their device to an AI-enabled device. That said, it's very tricky to pinpoint how much of our growth, how much of our forecast is specific to AI. Last quarter, about a third of our devices were AI-enabled.
It doesn't mean customers were necessarily using that device in an AI application, but they were buying the device that was AI-enabled and ready to go. We expect that trend to continue. We expect the device upgrade to start to grow.
We expect that will be largely AI-enabled devices. The AI projects, server storage, networking are a little more complex, and it's too hard to call that hard and fast number around AI, but clearly, it's going to drive growth.
Can you share some examples of how maybe one or two of your customers have used AI to become more cost-efficient? We'd love to hear a case study or some sort of example in real life.
I talked with a service provider who we use ourselves to help deploy some of these solutions. He was describing a project he did for, I think it was an insurance company. What they were able to do was deploy a solution that ingested all of their quoting activity, broke it out between new quoting, renewal quoting, and was able to process the quotes back to the customers in under five minutes versus two days.
It was all automated. It essentially allowed them to shut down a contact center. These things are very, very powerful when deployed. I think people are just kind of starting to understand what the appropriate use cases are.
We've done a few here where for very short money, tens of thousands of dollars that have enabled us to deploy four, five, six people into other functions in the business. All of those things, the leverage and the ROI on some of these projects is just unbelievable. In terms of not just being able to deploy headcount elsewhere, the response times are faster. They work nights and weekends. I mean, anything anybody needs just comes through in an automated fashion.
I'd quickly add to that, Anthony, that specifically, if you think about vertical markets, we're seeing retail customers have many, many AI applications, including loss prevention as well as prospect identification. That's a burgeoning and a growth area. In healthcare, there are a number of applications where they're using AI to be more efficient.
In some cases, AI applications can do actually better than humans when it comes to things like reading X-rays. In manufacturing, with all the changes in industry and robotics, also a great growth area. Pretty much across the board, customers are looking and evaluating and looking for that competitive advantage through AI.
As the business grows and evolves, and hopefully, we get past some of the short-term noise, but kind of looking forward, given all the exciting growth opportunities that you have, how should investors think about your ability to grow gross profit dollars and operating margins?
Yeah. I mean, I think, like I said earlier, we've grown our gross profit 5-plus % a year. And that's been 100% organic. I think we can at least continue on that, especially if the market comes back like we think it will in the last half of the year.
The operating margins, to be honest with you, for the past year or so have been a little bit depressed because of the investments we've been making in our services and technical sales capability. While those costs may remain, they won't increase to the extent we improve the business.
The operating leverage should improve pretty dramatically when that demand increases and some of these investments we've made start to have an impact on the business. My point is we should be able to grow operating margins at a greater rate than gross profit.
Sounds good. Okay. My last question here. Given your strong balance sheet, lots of cash, certainly, what is your appetite for acquisitions?
We really feel like we've made all the appropriate investments internally. We have the platform, the people, infrastructure, capability. Now to do a tuck-in acquisition, we think it's a great time to do something in the solutions arena. Now, valuations are starting to come down, but as you know, interest rates are still high. We think there will be some opportunities to do some select tuck-in acquisitions over the year 2025.
Gotcha. All right. Looks like we're already over a lot of time. Wanted to thank you very much, Tim and Tom, for sharing the Connection story. Thank you also, everyone, for listening as well. We'll wrap it up here. Hope everyone has a great and productive day. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Anthony.
All right. Take care.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.