Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the Daktronics Investor Day. I promise you this won't be the last Investor Day, but it's only going to be the best one we've had in 32 years. Before we get started, I wanted to direct your attention to the safe harbor statement. This is the traditional standard, but important statement. Please take a brief moment to review it as it covers important information regarding the forward-looking statements that you will be hearing about throughout today's presentations. With respect to our agenda for the day, we have a very full day planned for you. I hope and expect that you'll find it informative. There's a lot of detail that we're going to have here today for you with respect to the company's businesses, and the manufacturing, installation, innovative product development, and other services that support those businesses.
We will have time for two Q&A sessions during the day, one about midway through the presentations, and then a little bit longer one at the end. You'll have plenty of time to ask questions that come to mind during the course of the day. I'd like to say we're really excited. We're excited to be putting on this presentation for you, and excited about the story that the team will tell you during the course of the day today. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce Daktronics Chairman, Andrew Siegel. Andrew, thank you.
Good morning, everybody. Just to tell you a quick personal story, it's fun for me to be on this floor of this building. I worked in this building for years, and this floor used to be a very architecturally significant place called the Condé Nast Cafeteria, which is sort of famous for the way it was designed, and I ate lunch here every day for about six years. If you notice me during lunch later on being nostalgic, that's sort of what's going on in my head, but we got a lot of business to get to between now and then, so don't start thinking about lunch quite yet. Now, if you are here with us this morning, you probably know that among other things, Daktronics makes scoreboards. I happen to think we've got a pretty good scoreboard of our own.
We started buying this stock, my firm, back when it was between $3 and $4, and we started buying it because we noticed that everywhere we looked there was Daktronics. Yet at the same time, we also realized that the Daktronics share price seemed to be disconnected from its strong customer relationships, its technology leadership, certainly its service and support leadership, and the strong feelings that customers had for it, and the tremendous opportunity we saw in its massive installed base to leverage that for a high margin recurring services and software business. We've been correcting that, as you can see from this scoreboard, but I think we'd also say this scoreboard would show we're still in the early innings. Okay, we can move off of this.
What it does show is that the board is aligned with you, our shareholders, and committed to conforming the share price to the potential. Okay? The most recent activity we've taken to show that evidence is through the hiring of Ramesh Jayaraman as our new President and CEO, and he'll be taking the podium shortly as Howard showed. Ramesh brings, among many other things, focus on international growth, new channel development, and operational improvement. He and many of the senior business leaders that you will meet today will talk about the promise that the future holds for Daktronics based both on large industry tailwinds and specifically on the innovations that we're bringing to our own go-to market.
As we wrote in our Shareholder letter earlier this year, there's a lot more to informing, entertaining, and communicating than is in that device that we all carry around in our pockets. Daktronics, our vision is no less than being the leader in large format displays. When you look up, we want you to see Daktronics. Okay? Today's subject then, if I can collapse it, is the integrated story of management's plan to deliver that opportunity. Thank you all, both in person and online, for being here, and welcome to Daktronics 2026 Investor Day.
More than 50 years ago, in a small town in South Dakota, a simple belief took shape, that technology, light, and innovation could change the way the world communicates. What started as an idea became a global vision. That vision became Daktronics. Today, in more than 100 countries, Daktronics powers how organizations communicate with millions of people reliably, clearly, and at scale. From professional sports venues and global transit hubs to high school gyms and local businesses, our technology shows up where information and moments matter most. These aren't just displays. They are completely integrated systems powered by our purpose-built software and control systems. By uniting video, data, audio, and control into a single platform, we ensure every pixel responds in real-time, and every piece of content performs with absolute precision. Daktronics is more than a manufacturer. We design, engineer, fabricate, code, install, and support complete audiovisual systems.
Through a global manufacturing network anchored by local expertise, we deliver the same uncompromising quality no matter where our systems are built or installed. Our work doesn't end when the lights go up. From technical expertise to content creation for any display, any size, or any shape, we provide the professional services that bring our customers' visions to life. A Daktronics system is a promise of performance, a promise backed by global 24/7 support, and the proactive monitoring that ensures total reliability for a lifetime. From standard products to customized solutions, we relentlessly test our products and invest in research and development, defining the future of how the world communicates with digital displays. We design it. We power it. We support it for life. We are Daktronics.
It is so good to see everyone. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today in person as well as on the webinar. We are just excited to have you here. We're just honored and grateful for your support of the journey that Daktronics has taken and the journey that we are going to go take further as we accelerate growth and accelerate profitable growth. I've personally known Daktronics for about 10 years. I've been in the AV space, in a variety of companies, and my first interactions were Daktronics. It's just been an amazing relationship over time, where I've seen them from the other side and what they've done and how we can build them further. The focus today of my time will be on the corporate strategy, where we are headed.
We'll have our business leaders come in later to talk about each of our different segments, but also give you a view on our technological services as well as our manufacturing capabilities as we try to build that forward. Whether you landed at an airport, whether you took a road that you came in today, whether it was a train that you took, or a fuel station you pumped gas at, or a high school or a college that you went or your kids went to, or a large stadium that you just watched a game at, or just simply walked past Times Square this morning, Daktronics is everywhere. You look up and you'll see Daktronics everywhere. We're incredibly proud of the story. This is a company that was born 57 years ago in Brookings, South Dakota, a really small town.
Today what we do is we bring visual storytelling via displays as well as integrated software to inform, connect, and entertain our communities worldwide. On the trailing 12 months, we've done north of $800 million. We've got a growing operating income trajectory. 2,500+ amazing employees that make this all come together. I think as you look at the charts, we have a pretty balanced and diversified portfolio. Revenue is split at about 89% between product and installation and about 11% in aftermarket services and software. We go to market through various channels of commercial Live Events. That's primarily stadiums, high school, parks or recreation, transportation, and clearly our international business as we look at having a balanced portfolio. This business is unique. As I mentioned, I've been in the space for 10+ years. Most companies are either installation companies or they are pure product companies.
What makes us really unique is we are a full lifecycle provider. I call us a cradle-to-grave provider. Whether it be doing product and software engineering, whether it comes to manufacturing, doing the project delivery, and doing the aftermarket services, we are with the customer through every step of their way. When you typically look at this life cycles in large projects, it's about 10 years. We are there from the day they think about it to the day they kind of want to rebuild it. What it does is gives us customer proximity through the entire time frame to build with them and work with them to grow who we are.
We do have a global footprint. As I mentioned, we're headquartered in a humble town of Brookings, South Dakota, but I always say we are a gem out of South Dakota that shines light across the rest of the world, and we are proud of that. Our manufacturing sites are in U.S., China, Ireland, and Mexico, which gives us a very balanced footprint to manage our geopolitical movements that I'm sure everyone's aware of, but also helps us to allow to go cater to customer needs to ensure we can deliver to them in the time frames. When later some of my colleagues come up, you'll hear about some of the timelines we get to ensure that you can enjoy the sports that you do. We have a dual engineering facility, one in the U.S. and one in China, as we look at building the best of breed.
Clearly, we cater all across the U.S. and the world through our service, installation, and sales, customer-centric sales networks across the world to ensure we can do this. We operate in about 100+ countries where we have active video installations today. Today, I've got the entire management team out here. As we put the focus on today's focus will be around our business unit leaders who'll talk about each of our segments. We'll talk about our software and services business. We'll be spending time on manufacturing supply chain, as well as our design and development, and clearly with Howard, our CFO, who came to introduce himself earlier and will be available through the day for questions, and making sure that you understand the story that we're going after. As you look at the growth journey, I'm going to talk about this in two phases.
One is what we call is delivering our three-year plan, a plan that we started about a year ago. We'll give you updates on where we are, but also talk about what we see with the changing landscape and how we want to build. Two is going to be our grow beyond journey that we'll outline later in my discussion today. First, I'm going to start by talking about the right-hand side of the chart, which is really delivering the three-year plan, and how we are moving towards that. As we look at the three-year plan, we have two strategic pillars, and it's a balanced growth plan. We look at growth, and we want to optimize it with operational excellence. This is both sides of the coin that have to go together as we look at building this profitable, accretive story for the longer term.
Under the organic growth, I'll spend more time over here through my presentation, and Matt, when he comes up, will spend more time on the other section, but I'll introduce these. For us, clearly, the markets that we play in, and I think as Andrew mentioned, we've got tailwinds that are helping the market, but there are also fundamental structural changes that are helpful to what we do. That gives us clear organic growth in the core. Over the l ast 2.5 months that I've been in the company working with the management team, we've also identified areas where we feel there are further opportunities for growth as we look at this space to build us. Third, we'll talk about software and services growth. This is a critical component.
As I said, one of the unique opportunities we have is any stadium, any high school, any place you go to, the final thing you see is the display. How we control the display, the software that works on it plays a very critical part, and we want to be a part of it. Fourth is about disciplined international growth as we look at the key markets and how we go build this. As I spoke about operational excellence, those are very critical things. We're also an industrial manufacturing company. We have supply chain challenges just like the rest of the world does. Given my time, having spent about 15+ years in Asia, having lived in China, having seen what those movements are, it's critical that we are ahead of the curve as we look at it in balancing these international markets.
A, we'll look at automation. This is critical as we try to look at advanced factory automation. Two is really about lean and making sure we can improve on lean. I think some of the work the team's already done have produced results, and we want to amplify it. We want to accelerate it. Third is really looking at our footprint optimization. Mexico gives us a great advantage, but also as we start to balance the world and how the footprint works, this is an ongoing exercise for us to be successful. Lastly is looking at procurement, direct and indirect opportunities. As we come in and re-look at it as a team, this is an opportunity for us to bring the cost basis that is rightfully needed, working with the right set of partners. I'll outline a bit more in the coming slides, and I'll start with the growth areas.
What you see in this slide is just overall from a conversion perspective, we're in a great progressive as well as a growth industry. What you see is there's a clear wave of digital and connected that is happening. Two, bigger and higher resolution. This is critical as the world moves forward. I think just walk around Times Square and you're going to see that. Third is the LED costs are coming down, and now we're able to compete with LCD in some of the areas, and LED is way longer lasting and a much, much better technology as you look at where it needs to go. As well as what you see is just overall, the trends give us a very, very positive flavor as they come together. All the right ingredients that help you make the right dish, and that's what we see.
As we look to my left of the chart, what you see is all the markets that we play in, which is in the dark gray, light gray, and the white. They are our traditional markets, so that's Live Events, as I kind of mentioned, our HSPR commercial business, our transportation business. They all have growth trajectories. That's with these trends as well as the trends in the market. They put you in a forward foot. What we also see, which is the dark blue box, which is the new verticals, and I'll talk to that in the coming slides, gives us a new opportunity, and they also give us growth abilities to build forward where we need to go. These trends are secular, and these are some of the pictures.
I've had a chance over the last two and a half months to be out in the field with our teams, be out there. We were at Miami Heat, and that's just a picture from the Miami Heat. What you see is those center hangs, as we call them, are getting more complex. You just saw a picture of the Intuit Dome before the Miami, and we can give you multiple examples. When Jay comes up, he will. What you will see is they're getting more complex, and as you flow video through this, you need software because how you need to showcase this is very, very critical. It's not as simple as taking something on Netflix and watching on a different device. This is actually customizing to ensure our content is right. That's the trend, the 154 pro teams.
As we take that down and just go down to the college sports, what I'm showing you is Auburn University, and this is our second one. Most of these, and when Jay comes up, he'll actually talk about the display sizes and where they're headed. Most of these displays are getting to be 30%, 40%, 50%, 70% bigger from one stadium to another. What this is a trend that aids us in where we are going to. Now I'm going to take you to high schools. My kids go to a high school. It's interesting. What you see is scoreboards, and that was a history of Daktronics. When I went to the high school in Watertown, South Dakota, which most of us, I didn't even know where it was, except putting it in a GPS.
What amazed me was we are augmenting a digital scoreboard that we did for scores with a video scoreboard. It's not getting replaced. It's getting put together. What you're beginning to see is a centerhung. Yes, the Miami Heat is nice and beautiful, but if I show you Watertown, South Dakota, there's a centerhung coming. What you're beginning to see is the ability to advertise is moving from fixed into digital, and this is a trend that aids the school as well as aids us. When Jeremy comes up, he'll speak more about what they are beginning to see. These are secular trends and where we are headed. The intent across the board is how do we improve fan experiences? How do we improve the experience of everyone who's coming in and what you can build on? Both of these are critical, and they're going hand in hand.
I'd mentioned about new markets. As we kind of went through looking at our addressable markets, today we cater to about 80% of the market. This is what we call as existing verticals, and my colleagues will come and talk about it. What we also see are new vertical markets. This is government, control rooms, houses of worship that are beginning to make this trend towards high-end LED, and it's getting more and more common. What Daktronics is known for is our quality, our reliability. Customers trust us. We will outlive a CapEx cycle in most cases very, very easily. They want that same reliability to be brought from the outdoor to the indoor, and that is what's making us win. It's that test of time that we've been around them.
We are a customer-centric organization, and that is a clear win for us. Today, we've catered to that 20% of that market opportunistically. A deal comes once in a while, we'll go chase it. What we're going to do is really look at this as a full-fledged focus for us in building where we would like to go to and make this a new market for us. It's going to take us a little bit of time as we develop this, but this is a clear focus as we try to build where we would like to go. Third, I'm going to talk about software and services. I think as you look at it, when we look at the relative profitability of our original equipment, our technical services, what we call as professional services and our subscription services, there is no doubt in my mind that the profitability relatively increases.
What we see out here is with our Show Control, which is in our Venus Control Suite, and what we call as Camino 8, we just released one at the Angels a couple of days ago. What you're beginning to see is these bring experiences where we're able to take our hardware, our controlling software, our embedded software, but also bring an experiential software that we can go build on, and there's a huge opportunity for us as we just look at our current customer base to try and go build this further. International growth. This is a critical focus. As we really start, I think as Andrew mentioned, I've spent about 15 years of my life outside of this country, having lived in a variety of environments.
What you see is we have to get our focus deeper on high-growth regions as well as segments that the world's beginning to move towards. Two is expanding ourselves to regionally tailored offerings. I think our engineering teams in China give us a great ability for us to think from a different part of the world and try and build out where we would like to get to. Really we need to start catering to that local market for us to be successful. Third is really looking at new partnerships coming from different industries. Other industries use different channels to market, and how do we leverage that as we bring it to this section and make sure that we're able to partner with them to grow into some of these segments, and that's going to be a pretty critical focus as we move ahead.
As we move to operational excellence, as I mentioned, it's the other side of the coin. For us going to advanced automation, whether it be automating our manufacturing processes or whether it be stitching together how we look at cycle times and other things through lean, is going to be very important as we try to build towards better product cost, better efficiency, and the right cost to cater to the customer. Really, as we look at manufacturing network optimization, we are building facilities. We've got amazing facilities in the U.S., which allows us to become locally compliant in many cases, given the requirements of certain vertical markets. But balancing that with our international locations and building this out will be critical for the right cost. The ability for us to take on projects that we can deliver given the tight timelines that everyone's under nowadays.
Last part would be the international and institutional strategic sourcing. As we look at our direct costs, I think we've made some great progress. We have work to do on our indirect costs, and also ensuring we can build this further, so that as we look at all of these four things coming together, they'll have an operating leverage on the P&L and what we can build towards. Overall, what you see is each of these initiatives would result in a revenue growth CAGR of high double- digit to low single- digit, which ties back to the confirmations we'd given last year. We pressure tested them in the last two and a half months as I also come into the role, and the intent that will be in the 7%-10% range of where we would like to get to.
Two is, as we look at the margin improvement, given where we are, the subdued improvement, that we look at a mid-single- digit improvement that can happen in order to go improve where the business can get to. Each of these line items, as the leaders come to present, will give you a better view. What you will see is we are kind of affirming our guidance that we had said last year that we're committed to the plan that we've laid out. Now I'll switch gears to the second part of our growth journey, and this will be thinking beyond the core. As you look at our cash position, we've been in a nice, we have no debt. We're in a cash position that is in the $150 million-ish range, somewhere in that range over the last three, four quarters.
The intent is, as we start looking at cash deployment, we see this in three areas. One is from organic investments. As we look at automation in the other areas that I just mentioned to give you examples, the ROIC, as we see that, is in the mid- to- high teens. That is a good way of, in our opinion, of taking some of the cash back. Two is really looking at an organic growth expansion, and I'll give you a bit more flavor in my next slide of where our initial thinking is. Third is from returning excess capital back to our shareholders in terms of buybacks. We will manage all these three depending on when the right timing is and what's the right, at that quarter, and as we look at the year, to ensure we get the right returns back to all of you.
As we move towards inorganic growth levers, part of my background is also M&A. As we go down this, we want to have a pretty structured and a disciplined approach to M&A. This is very critical because as we look at the value creation, what needs to come out, it's very critical for us that it's not just spending cash. It is about ensuring the returns are better than what we put in and give us the best returns. A clear defined approach for targeting will go through in two phases. One is from an industry screening criteria, where we kind of want to be. Two is really looking at the target company criteria, just as we go down the filtering areas. Let me focus on the industry screening. We'll look at it from three perspectives, product portfolios that tie back to certain verticals that we play in.
Two is to really look at geographic expansion, where the opportunity may be right. Third is focused on vertical market expansions, as I kind of alluded before, that will be valuable to our growth. With those high-level criteria, we want to move towards the target company criteria that'll be critical for us as we go down, vet out the DCFs and the cash flows, and understand how we create the right return. That would really focus on industrial logic, on how does that logic really fit well together. Two, we want deals that are financially accretive in terms of how we build this out. Third is about the operational synergies that have to sit as we look at all of our back-end functions and what needs to come together.
Over the next coming few months, we will be outlining as we start targeting the industry and looking where it is. If there are ones that you guys see, please bring them to us. We're open for deals. I think that's the message we want to give is we will be open for deals as we go down this area. We're in the process of building a corporate development structure as well, in order to ensure that we can give this the rightmost focus and building towards where we would like to go. In summary, what I'm going to tell you is we are a great and committed team. I'm absolutely proud of the team that's out here, of our 2,500+ employees who make the wheels turn.
There is not a day when I go out when I don't hear about how customers love us, how they call us to be humble, how they call us to be focused, and how these people are all winners in heart. That's the biggest message I want you to know, is that matters to me. Because when you get those right ingredients all coming together, I know the dish is coming out great. As we look at this, what we also see, and these are industry factors that really help us, is we are a market leader in the large format LED industry. The markets, as I mentioned, are attractive end markets for us, all with a 2x-3x GDP growth. Third, when you look at our organic and our inorganic plans and our profitability goals, we stand committed. We reaffirm them.
As we also look at operational excellence, which is the other side of the coin, just as we look at our growth side, we also want to balance with the OpEx side. Keeping this, bringing the efficiency and the cost reduction without sacrificing our reliability, our quality are important. What you will see is a capital deployment approach that's disciplined to bring the best returns to our shareholders. I want to come back here and reiterate our guidances. About a year ago, we spoke about a 7%-10% revenue CAGR. We affirm we'll be back in that range.
Two, we'll talk about our operating margin in the 10%-12% range, and this will, as I mentioned before, not just look at our structural cost reductions, but also we will be in putting into technology as we look at the years ahead, and that is critical for our growth. The last is ensuring our ROIC is in the 17%-20%, and we reaffirm our guidances as to where we are headed. I just want to thank you for the time. I think I've got my colleagues coming up next. With that, we'll have our business unit leaders come up next, as well as services, and we'll open up to a brief Q&A in between, and I'm going to pass this over. Thank you again.
Every day in the places people gather, shop, compete, and move through life, our displays help create moments that matter. In high schools, our scoring and video products make game days exciting while opening real revenue-generating opportunities. With DakClassroom, students learn to run full events using the same systems trusted by pros, gaining access to scholarships, jobs, and a pathway into our industry. Inside businesses, trust and reliability matter. Our On-Premise displays help businesses, small and large, grow their brand. Strong margins and dependable products build the loyalty that keeps customers for life.
Billboards along highways and busy urban corridors are some of the most limited and regulated spaces in advertising, and that's why digital matters. Our reputation makes us the trusted choice for customers who want a proven revenue generator standing tall above the roadway. We help advertisers of every size share their message clearly and consistently. Whether it's a high school stadium, a local storefront, or a towering billboard, our focus is the same: helping our customers win, day in and day out.
[Presentation]
I love how that video landed with the Pat McAfee quote. If you don't know who Pat McAfee is, he's a really popular sports broadcaster. He's got a big podcast. He's got a show on ESPN. About a year ago, he was looking to upgrade the facilities at his high school, and he wanted the best, and he found us, thankfully. We've developed a really nice relationship with Pat. We've done some marketing projects together, and we've got more to come. That's been a lot of fun. Good morning. My name is Jeremy Johnson. I'm glad you're all here. I'm also really happy to be here. I am the Vice President of our Commercial business unit and the High School, Parks and Recreation business unit. The two business units. I'm going to cover both of those today.
I'm going to give you a bit of an overview about what we do, our sales process, how we win, and then there'll be a few data points on market share and growth. First, I'm going to talk about commercial. Our commercial business unit really is comprised of three segments. We've got the On-Premise signage business, the Out of Home digital billboard business, and the Spectacular business. The Spectacular segment is managed by Jay Parker and his team, so I'm not going to cover that part of it, but I'll cover the other two.
First up, our On-Premise business. This is a nice photo collage of things that we do. You can see the outdoor signs on the right and on the left. That's where most of our revenue comes from, is outdoor. We're having some good success in the indoor space as well, though. It's growing. One of the nice pictures here is this Kwik Trip. You can see that's got a mix of different technologies. We got a nice message center on the bottom where the milk is advertised, and then the gas digits on the top. Culver's message center. These are all very good customers of ours. So one of the unique things about this business is that we sell through a channel. It's a non-exclusive open distribution channel through sign companies. Sign companies are very important for us for a number of reasons.
First, literally, there are millions of applications for our products. If you think of all the signs out there, every one of those is an application for our products. We can't see all that demand, and we can't expect all those potential customers to know who we are. But they know who their sign company is if they need a sign. So sign companies are usually the first to see the demand for what we do. So that's really important. Second thing is, signs are regulated. Every municipal has a sign code. Every city has a sign code, and they're all different. So the sign companies know how big the signs could be, how much square footage you're allowed, what colors they can be, all that kind of stuff would be hard for us to keep track of all that. Sign companies know all that.
They get the permits necessary to get the jobs done. We don't really build signs, sign companies do. They do the design, custom fabrication, installation, and ongoing maintenance of signs. We sell them this critical component in the middle, oftentimes in the middle, the electronic message display. They really like what we do because it adds good revenue to their projects. We don't build signs, so we need them to do that. The other nice thing is, sign companies that support us in this business unit do a lot of work for us in all of our other business units as good subcontractors. We're able to build a really nice reciprocal relationship with sign companies that benefits the whole company. Jody's going to talk about that a little bit more in his presentation in a few moments.
Because sign companies are important, we call on them. We have a field sales team. We're frequently face-to-face with sign companies. One of the ways we like to do that is with these demonstration trailers that you see in this picture here. Every one of our field salespeople has access to a trailer like this. We'll take this trailer display, and there's displays on both sides. We'll take it to a sign company, and we'll talk about the technology. We'll teach them the tips and tricks on how to promote digital. They get really familiar with it, and then we can also take it to their service organization, and we can demonstrate to them how to change critical components of the display. They really serve a nice purpose for calling on sign companies. We also use it to call on end customers.
When a sign company has an opportunity for an EMC, electronic message center, we'll take this unit with them to their end customer, we'll put custom content on it, and we'll do a demonstration for the end customer. They can come out and see the technology, get hands on it, understand how durable it is. They can play around with the software and see how easy it is. It's a great tool. It's a great way to close. We like that. Now we don't just focus solely on sign companies. We do a lot of marketing to create demand from the end customer verticals that we serve. We take that demand, qualify those leads, and give them to our sign companies, which is how we build loyalty with sign companies. To understand our differentiation, it's important to understand sign companies.
Most of the sign companies we work with are relatively small, sometimes less than 20 people, usually family-owned, second, third generation. They're in a really competitive industry. Sign business is tough, but at their core, they're expert designers, fabricators, and installers. That's what they do really, really well. When they're going to buy something expensive like what we provide and put it in their signs, it's got to be a good decision. They can't really afford to make a mistake. When they buy a product from us, it's got to show up on time. It's got to incorporate into their signage really well. When it installs, it has to fire up, has to run dependably, and if something does happen, they need to work with a company that's got their back.
It's going to be able to get them parts out quickly, get things fixed, because they really just can't afford to be wasting time on these things. We do those things really, really well, and that's why sign companies keep choosing us time and time again. Ramesh made a number of comments about software. Software is really important. We provide the software that programs our signs. They don't program themselves. Somebody's got to do it. What we have is a really good, user-friendly, and powerful system that many deem as best in class in the sign industry. With channel partners, it is really about loyalty, and we earn that loyalty by having a valued relationship that's built on good leads coming to them and good training for their sales and service people.
The end customers, well, the LED asset that they have, that's important, but they kind of just expect that to work. Their experience with us is really through the software. Every day, they're experiencing Daktronics through the software. As long as that experience is really good, they're going to choose us for their next site, and they're going to choose us again when they replace their sign. Now I'm going to pivot to the billboard business. This has really been a fun business to be in. It's filled with so many creative and exciting people, right, Barry? Barry knows. We've been in this business for about 25 years, and this is a nice collage of photos, typical things that we do. For the most part, what we sell is the outdoor billboard. The rectangle you see along the road. That's where most of our revenue comes from.
We sell to the world's largest billboard operators, as well as smaller operators throughout the country. We'll sell to all billboard companies. I mentioned outdoor. That's where most of our revenue comes from, but we're seeing some really nice growth in the indoor space as well, primarily in airports. You're going to hear more about that from Spencer when he talks about transportation because we collaborate on that work in the airport space. The digital billboard has really been the solution to the capacity problem for billboard operators. Highly regulated industry. It's really difficult and expensive to put up new billboards. We couldn't just go leave here and do it. It's very hard and expensive. They had a capacity problem. How do they grow capacity?
With the digital, what they're able to do is they're able to take one billboard that has a static advertisement, replace that with a digital billboard. Now they can have six, eight, 10 advertisers, increasing their capacity greatly, but also really greatly increasing their revenue per location. It's been a really good fit for the billboard industry. It's a nice business to be in. This last year, the Out of Home industry posted a $9.5 billion revenue, up 3.6%. 19 consecutive quarters of growth for the billboard industry, that's really good. What's interesting about that, of the $9.5 billion, 36% of the revenue came from digital ad sales. That's growing at 10.5% per year. That's impactful. Now, another interesting stat. Of all the billboards out there, only 5% of them are digital. This industry really likes what we do, and there's good opportunity there.
Our sales strategy is simple, develop long-term relationships with billboard operators. I'll tell you why that's important. Probably more than 20 years ago, a billboard executive told me that we should consider the digital billboards that we sell as like an annuity. Because once an operator converts a site from static to digital, it's always going to be digital. As long as we do what we say we're going to do, we show up, we take care of the customer, we take care of the product, we're going to earn the right to have that business when the sign needs to be replaced. That's nice because it gives us a little bit of predictability in our revenue model in a very unpredictable world, right? We're in a good spot because 25 years ago, when we sold our first digital billboard, we were the only one there.
We didn't have any competition. Now, of course, we have a lot now. During those really high growth years from like 2004-ish to 2011-ish or so, we collected a lot of wins. We collected a lot of customers. It's really nice, they're loyal to us today. We kind of know a little bit about where our revenue is going to come from that existing customer base. The lore in the industry was that the first billboards were carved on cave walls. Picture of a lake with an arrow sort of implies water over here, right? Since then, the industry's been trying to improve upon that messaging and the clarity of the messaging. If you just go back 50 years ago, when a billboard was printed, it was 30 DPI, 30 dots per inch resolution.
Today, when you print a billboard, it's 300 dots per inch resolution. Ax 10X increase in just 50 years. The industry cares about image quality. They invest in it, and it's important. When Coca-Cola buys an ad, Coke Red needs to be Coke Red, not some variant of red. It's got to be spot on. Just as important for digital. This is really good for Daktronics because we do image quality great. It's what we are known for. We've got a lot of secret sauce when it comes to image quality, and we pour it into what we do, and our customers really appreciate that. Durability and performance is also critically important. These displays that we put out there are kind of like cash registers on poles. If they're not operating, they're not collecting any revenue. That's literally true.
We learned that it is really critical that they run in. We build very good displays. We believe that we build the industry's most durable displays, the longest lasting displays. Things do go wrong. We had to build a service organization that was really robust and able to respond to the industry's needs, to be there very quickly to fix the displays. We do that really, really well. That was hard to build, but more importantly, it's really hard to replicate. Sarah's going to spend some time talking about our service organization in a few moments. Our ability to provide the industry's best uptime and long-term image quality allows operators to get the most from their investment, providing a better financial return for our customers. Because image quality is so valuable, this allows us to confidently stand on our value propositions.
People do pay more for Daktronics because of these things that we do, and that's important. Our proven track record puts us in a good spot to earn that repeat revenue when displays need to be replaced. Okay. Now I'm going to touch on High School, Parks and Recreation, the other business unit that I manage. This has been a really exciting space for the past few years. I'm sure if you've been watching us, you've seen this category growing nicely. Primarily fueled by the adoption of indoor and outdoor video. That's been the key driver. Youth sports in general is huge. Youth sports today is measured at a $40 billion industry growing at 10% annually. There are 45 million kids playing organized sports, 60% participation rate.
For those of you that are parents like me and you have kids that play sports, it's expensive. Parents are paying $1,000 on average per year per kid, and that's increasing. The reason why all those numbers are important is that means more, newer, bigger, better facilities, which benefits Daktronics. We sell in all four of these categories here. The K-12 public and private schools is really our bread and butter. That's where we shine. It's where most of our revenue comes from. We also do well in community colleges, tech schools, and municipalities. Parks and Rec, Parks and Recreation is a smaller part of what we do, but it's an area where we think we can grow. Our approach to sales is similar to what I described earlier. We have field salespeople that go call on schools.
Our sales teams are really deeply embedded into the school community. They show up frequently. They're well-known friendly faces in the community scene, and they stay very busy. 32,000 schools in the U.S. with 128,000 sport venues that need to be taken care of. We've got a lot of opportunity. Our field sales staff, very important, like I said. This is very much a relationship business. You got to show up. When schools are going to spend $200,000 on a video system, they expect you to be there and take care of them. We got to be there. Very important. One of our greatest selling points when we go to schools is that we can bring the same system capabilities and qualities that are used in the professional levels at scale down into the high school. That's huge because it gives the buyer so much confidence.
We know about schools, right? We hear about it all the time, there's not a lot of money in schools. Budgets are tight. They can't afford to make a bad decision. When they know that the Daktronics system that's down the road at whatever professional stadium that they're at is that quality and that's what they're going to get, they feel a lot better about the decision. Really important. Another key thing for us is our DakClassroom curriculum. This is a subscription service that we sell to schools, where they can, in the classroom, learn how to operate Daktronics system. This is great because it demonstrates to the school we're not just about the product sale, we're really doing something about education, and that really resonates within the school. We pair that with Crew Connect.
What Crew Connect is an ecosystem of partners at all levels of sports, from college to pros. Students can see opportunities for jobs, internships, and scholarships at facilities that support Daktronics systems. Our Sports Marketing business is huge. Again, revenue is always tight in schools. We have a team of marketing experts that helps schools understand how to monetize their audience through the selling of sponsorships. These are the dollars that are used to pay for the equipment that we provide to them. Very, very important. About 50% of all of our video opportunity sales today are monetized in some way by Daktronics Sports Marketing. I'm going to tell you how all this comes together. Imagine you're an athletic director, okay?
You just went on the road with your football team to your rival school, and they've got a new Daktronics video board, and now you want one. It looks great. You want it so bad you can taste it. You need it. You got to go through the school board, and budgets are tight. Everybody needs money. The band needs new tubas, right? You got to get in line. You want to make the pitch because you want it. You do your homework, you find Daktronics, and you realize these guys got a lot going on, and they got a lot of good value propositions. I think this is what I'm going to pitch. You go to the school board. You're ready to go. You start with school pride and recruitment.
Our stadium needs a new football video board, and if we do this, it's going to be so exciting. Fans are going to come. We're going to fill the stands. Students are going to be excited, and we're going to recruit new student-athletes to our school. Okay, that's a good start. New students at a school means dollars to school. Students equals dollars. That's a good point. Fans in the stands mean ticket sales. That's also dollars to the school. That's a strong place to start. All right. You bring in our curriculum, DakClassroom and Crew Connect. When we go Daktronics, who's the best, by the way, they've got a curriculum that we can bring into the school and can be taught in the classroom, a CTE accredited curriculum. That's important.
What that's going to allow us to do is the kids are going to learn about how to operate the system. We don't have to hire anybody to run this on Friday nights. We don't have to beg for volunteers. The students are going to learn how to create content in the classroom and run the cameras and the control system on Friday nights. Because Daktronics is so well connected in the sports industry, they've got this thing called Crew Connect, and the kids that are taking the class, they're going to be able to see opportunities for jobs and scholarships and internships within Crew Connect. Okay, this is big, too, because this is going to get the interest from other people in the school. Educators are going to see this as positive. Superintendents and principals, they're constantly being barraged about talking about CTE and career-ready opportunities.
They're going to get really excited about this. You close with Daktronics Sports Marketing. Daktronics has a track record for helping schools raise money to pay for this equipment. What we're going to do is we're going to take out a five-year loan. Daktronics is going to teach us how to sell the sponsorships. That sponsorship money is going to pay for the loan and then some so the band gets new tubas. Basically, the sponsorships pay for the displays. You put all this together, it's just a lights out pitch. The thing is, it's just not a bunch of smoke. It's the real deal. This is what our customers are able to do and get deals done. It's these things that help us grow our leadership position, hold our value, and consistently win. Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about numbers.
Maybe I'll start here. We've got about an $800 million SAM, about a $900 million TAM. Overall, if you combine HSPR and commercial, it's about a 31% market share. We've got a notably higher market share in HSPR, where we've been in that business for longer than these others, and we do really well there. I talked a lot about video boards, but scoreboards are also really important. We sell a lot of them, but we do really well in market share in HSPR, but these other areas are good, too. 34% in On-Premise, almost 20% in Out of Home. When you consider the competitive environment, I think those are strong numbers. We're not swimming in blue ocean. We're really proud about the position that we have in these areas.
When it comes to growth, this category has grown at a little bit over 7% year-over-year, and we're kind of right in the mix with our three primary segments here, a little bit north of that in HSPR and in On-Premise and Out of Home. We're kind of in the range. A lot of things are working in our favor. Youth sports surge, I talked about really moving the needle for us. Just the general digital adoption of digital jobs in general. Ramesh talked about that. There's just such a trend moving in that direction, right? People expect to see digital. LED display costs. There are costs that come at us that kind of work against us, but there's costs that are in our favor as well, and so we're taking advantage of that. The LED technology continues to look better and work better.
When it comes to the pillars of growth for us, a lot of it is about organic. We're continually innovating as a company. We are. We never stop, and so we think there's room to grow there. Remember 128,000 schools, millions of potential sign customers. We've got opportunities there, so we're expecting some nice growth. Software is important. You're going to hear that repeated by all of our business leaders. Ramesh talked about it. Sarah's going to talk about it. Brett will as well. Software is important, and we're driving features to help adopt more paid services. Break fix service and service contracts, again, really important, and I'm going to let Sarah cover that in more detail, but it's also an area of growth for us. I'm going to wrap up. Just three quick takeaways on each of the three businesses that I covered.
In our sign business, it's all about loyalty, and it's about being consistent in quality and consistently showing up. In the Out of Home space, we provide the best return on investment for our customers, hands down, and that's why people keep coming back to us. In HSPR, we've got a value proposition story that just can't be beat. Competitors can do parts of what we do, but nobody can put it all on the table at the same time. Only Daktronics can do that. Up next, we're going to hear from the spectacular world of Live Events and Spectaculars. Thank you.
Live Events are where energy becomes unforgettable, where a single moment can lift a crowd, tilt a game, or turn an ordinary night into something epic. In those moments, Daktronics is everywhere, from powerhouse college programs to the biggest arenas on the planet. We don't just operate in this market, we lead it by a wide margin. Our presence in this space is unmatched, and so is the trust we've earned that garners new business and keeps teams and venues coming back.
For the screen itself, we went to South Dakota, where Daktronics sets the standard. Daktronics and its strong local employment force shipped every single piece of this board across the country on schedule.
We work with our customers to set the standard and reshape trends the rest of the industry follows. We've helped create some of the most iconic environments in sports and entertainment. Places that feel larger than life, yet are unmistakably tied to the brands they represent.
The great creative partners at Daktronics were like, "Yes is the answer. What is the question? Let's figure it out.
Spectaculars exist in a league of their own. Giant digital stages set in the world's most energized spaces. On the Vegas Strip, they dominate the skyline. In Times Square, they wrap the streets in motion and light. Indoors, high-resolution displays turn everyday spaces into unforgettable environments. Daktronics doesn't just light up Live Events. We help create the moments that define them.
I love that quote, "Yes is the answer. What is the question?" I think it's exciting for us to talk about that because you're going to hear some really talented people coming up that, yes is the answer and what is the question? Well, my name is Jay Parker. I'm Vice President for Live Events and Spectaculars, along with Jody Kress, who's a Vice President and leads our Project Realization group. He and I are going to talk to you a little bit about Live Events and Spectaculars. We're going to talk a little bit about where we play, how we win, what our differentiators are, and then what we see for market share and potential growth opportunities. Excited to be here today. The videos that you saw, back in my day, when we were playing sports, we didn't have an instant replay.
We talked a little bit about having film. We watched film after we played, and it was in black and white. Can you imagine what video technology is doing to the sporting facilities these days? It's really making it very exciting. We're very excited to be in this space. If we talk about Live Events, we're going to start there first. 154 professional teams. That's who we chase. That's one of our major sectors that we chase. That's NBA, NHL, it's Major League Baseball, it's the NFL, Major League Soccer, 154 teams. In this country, there's over 4,000 colleges and universities, of which 1,300 of them have College Sports. We also go after minor league facilities, over 400 minor league facilities, and then we also chase some amusement parks, some theme parks.
Overall, we've got a very finite number of customers that we chase, but we know those customers very well. We've got an experienced sales team that lives within the region. We try and be close to our customers. That's how we're successful. We go in and see them often. We get in early on projects. We preach something called seven touches. Our sales team gets in and sees these customers seven times, right? We know who they are. You can count them. We've got lists. We've got who's got our product, who doesn't have our product, but we know who they are. We go after them very aggressively, and that helps us build this relationship depth. If we can build relationship depth, these projects are complex sales. They're multimillion-dollar projects. There's more than one decision-maker.
There's three to five different decision-makers on most every project that we chase. That means we need to get to know our customers, get to know their consultants, their architects, their engineers, anybody that's part of that project as we go forward. The great thing is, as Daktronics, we have great products that are proven, and they're reliable, and that helps us sell. As good as our sales team is, we've got the products to stand behind it, and we've got the best service team in the country. We take care of our customers after the sale. If you think about it, selling process could be anywhere from two to four years. Our services team will have that customer for 10 years. Ten years to make sure we take care of that customer in the process, and there's a lot of opportunities. There's a lot of games.
Major League Baseball, you have 81 home games. There are 81 opportunities that we have to perform flawlessly, and we do it better than anybody else in the industry, and we build trust with these customers. This trust is what wins. If we can get to that trust point, we win projects. I talked a little bit about our differentiators. It's our people, and it's our products, and it's our services. That is what sets us apart from the industry. It's not just our sales team. It's everywhere from our design team, to our project management teams, to our construction management people, to our services team. It's Daktronics. That's who we are, and that is where our people really stand apart from the rest of the industry. Our products, you saw them on the video board, exciting products. They work as intended.
When you invite 70,000 of your friends over for a sporting event, our products need to work, and they do. We do that better than anybody else in the industry. Our services team, we're not perfect. If something happens, our services team gets in, gets it taken care of, gets our customer moving on. That's what keeps us and allows us to sustain our customer base over time. All these differentiators allow us to have this value-based pricing. We get repeat business across many different venues, right? The best compliment is when they repurchase from us after 10 years. It's one of the biggest compliments that we can get. We can cross-sell opportunities. In the college and university space, if we can get into their football stadium, it can get us to their basketball arena.
It can get us to baseball, softball, and all the other Olympic sports. It allows us to go across that campus. If we perform well, they want to keep buying from us, and they want the consistent product within their facilities so they know how to operate it. They've got one call to make. If they have an issue, they know who it is, and we're going to come in and make sure we take care of them. That's allowed us to have a very strong win rate. I'm going to share a little bit about where our market share is at. Currently today, and these are our three largest markets that we chase. Major League Sports, we've got a 53% market share. If you look at this chart, 11% is our next competitor. That's their market share. But we do have competitors in this space.
There's over 15, 16 other competitors that have at least one, two, or more installs. We do have competitors. We've just got a large percentage of the win rate. Minor League Baseball, we've got 57%, so there's 120 teams in that space. Our next competitor has 6%. There's over 25 different competitors that we see in this space based on region, geography, where they're strong. That's where we see them at. In college sports, if you look at football, basketball, baseball, and softball. Baseball and softball are probably the two bigger growth areas within college campuses, which is exciting. If you've ever watched a women's fast-pitch softball game, it's exciting. It's fast-paced. It's really fun to watch. We're going to see growth in that potential area in the future, along with other Olympic sports. We've got a 69% market share in that space.
Our competitors, again, are at this 6% level where they're at. Our teams are not only competitive on the field or in the court, they're also competitive with the size of their video displays. We like to encourage this, right? Why not? When we walk into meetings, this customer goes, "How big is the Atlanta Falcons display?" We want something similar, bigger, smaller, or whoever your rival is, that's who you want to be bigger than. You can see on this list, the Atlanta Falcons Mercedes-Benz Stadium is the largest, and it's a halo. It's kind of unfair when you do a halo in a stadium, but they did a halo in a stadium. Then the Los Angeles Rams is the second one on that chart.
You can find on that chart where your favorite team is, and you can see where your favorite team stacks up. One of the things when you look at this list, if you have one of the smaller displays, more than likely, it's an older display, and that's an opportunity to probably replace in the future. They're talking about building a new stadium. In the professional sports area, if you watch the news, read the news, you'll see where a lot of teams are talking about trying to build a new stadium to try and get them caught up with where the rest of their partners are at. On this chart, the ones that are in blue are Daktronics installations. The dark blue are Daktronics. There's 30 teams up here. There's 32 stadiums. Two stadiums have two tenants, so there's 30 facilities.
We've got 15 of the 30 in the NFL. Strong market share there. Why not bring it to college, right? Let them look at who's got the largest displays as well. University of Illinois, we are in the process of installing currently. It is a big video board for college athletics. It's exciting to see, but it's going to set the bar for who's going to want to try and get close to that. It is 70% larger than Auburn University. 70% larger. Your alma mater, donate money to them, see if they want to get a bigger video board. I think we all would be happy. All right? That's not too far from the truth. If you've seen college and university space, there are donors that donate money, and that helps fund some of these video board projects. Enjoy that.
Major League Baseball, we had a great, successful Major League Baseball season. If you look at this chart, we had five major construction projects going on at these five ballparks. We were 5 for 5. Arizona Diamondbacks, Seattle Mariners, Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and the New York Yankees. We as an executive team, we got in on Monday into New York City. We had the opportunity to go see the New York Yankees game on Tuesday night. I thought the weather in South Dakota was cold, but your weather here in New York is chilly. We were outside, we were inside, we were outside. I even dressed for it, and I'm a larger human, so I've got my own furnace. It was cold. The displays looked fantastic.
If anybody get a chance to see the Yankee Stadium yet, get out there, go see them, and you'll see us. As Ramesh said, you'll see us everywhere. You'll see us on your drive there, and you'll see us within the stadium. This stat is absolutely incredible. I've been with Daktronics for over 30 years. I have never seen anybody, and we're the only ones that could have pulled off 5 for 5 . You're going to hear from a group that's going to come up. Jody Kress is going to talk next. Brett's going to talk, Sarah's going to talk, Matt's going to talk. I get to talk about these five installations. They did all the work. You're going to see what great team that we have behind us to be able to be successful.
Again, it builds trust and allows us the opportunity to succeed. That wasn't all we did this baseball season. We did some smaller projects at the San Diego Padres, Milwaukee Brewers, Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Guardians, and you're going to hear about a control system that we installed at the L.A. Angels. We also did a couple of Minor League Baseball parks, and I mentioned we're installing the University of Illinois. Let's just go ahead and install the Tennessee Titans at the same time because that's going to be ready for this next football season. The team that we've got is built to be able to do many projects, and have success, and be very successful doing it, because the real key is, we got to be on time, on budget, and opening day doesn't change.
This last part of March, early part of April, Opening Day game doesn't change. You cannot miss Opening Day game. That is what we strive really hard to make sure that we do. That's Live Events. Spectaculars, it's an interesting name. I always get lucky because I get to describe that I supervise a spectacular sales team. Salespeople, anybody salespeople in the room, you love that when you get called spectacular. It is this group of, you walked here through Times Square and you saw these spectacular displays. More than likely, you saw more than one Daktronics display when you walked around in Times Square or got your way here today. We serve big city centers. We sell big displays to Times Square, L.A., Las Vegas. If you're going down the strip in Las Vegas, you'll see us in a lot of places.
You'll see us up and down the strip. You'll see us in casinos. When you're around Times Square, you'll see us there. There are some other niches that we serve in the Spectaculars team. We'll sell to cruise ships. We will sell to voting systems. When we started our company, we were in the voting system world. We now do displays with another company. They do the control system, we do displays. It's a great situation for us to be in. We do cruise ships. Why not? We do sports books. Great place to put our displays. This team's got a breadth of projects and verticals, and you heard Ramesh talk about new verticals. This group gets to play in some of these new verticals, which is always fun because you're trying to build something. You're trying to pioneer something.
You're trying to move things forward and move the needle as you go forward. Here's some maps of New York City, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. The dots on there represent where we've got an installation. You can see where we've got. Go out to L.A. Olympics is going to be interesting out in L.A., so people are wanting to make sure they have their displays out there to sell advertising. It has a lot to do with ROI. If you're walking around Times Square, I think at your task, you've got a map of our installations in Times Square. Anywhere from Barclays to the Javits Center. We got some hotels, we got some rooftops all across Broadway. More projects in Broadway. We've also got some crazy sports projects in the New York area.
You got the Yankees, you got the Brooklyn Nets, you got the Islanders, the Red Bulls, and Madison Square Garden. Not only in the Square, but you're going to see us in these iconic facilities, and New York has a lot of iconic facilities. We're very excited about not only having our spectacular products, and Ramesh talked about it. When you leave your house, you are seeing us all the way. You go to a sporting event at Madison Square Garden, and you are seeing Daktronics all along your way. In this world of Spectaculars, there are a lot of influencers in this space. There's developers, Out of Home companies that are developers. We've got real estate that are developers. We had the great event yesterday, ringing of the bell.
We had some of our good customers in the Times Square area join us there that are Out of Home companies. We were excited that because of them, we are fortunate to be able to do what we do. We were very appreciative that they joined us. Architects, engineers, consultants, all these people are our potential customers. We work hard to make sure that we can chase them, we can be successful with them. They are also, like Live Events, they're complex sales. There are three to five decision-makers in these projects. We have to compete hard. We have to get in early, get in often, help with the design, make sure that we build trust, and when you build trust, you have a great chance to win projects.
ROI focus. It's about putting an advertising display up and generating revenue, selling ads, and that helps pay for it, and the more we can help these customers figure out how to do that, and have the best image quality we can, they can sell their advertising and be successful. Similar LED product as the Live Events space. We work hard. Little bit different control systems in this space because it's a scheduled and timing advertising type space, and they try and leverage all the advertising that they can possibly sell. It's an exciting space for us to be able to be in. One of the other places when you heard, or spaces and niches, Ramesh talked about these new market verticals that we're looking at. About four or five years ago, we dove into the Fed gov space, government military space, and these civilian command centers.
Daktronics, being a South Dakota-based corporation, has a strong value proposition to the government space. We're in a great position. We started in that space, started having some success, and then those customers pulled us into some of their other verticals, which is industry, hospitality, houses of worship. We started seeing some success in that area. This is a great opportunity for us to continue to grow because we have a strong presence in, they call it the outdoor space, but it's in this outdoor sporting space. We also do arenas, but this is a high-resolution product, which is exciting. We've got opportunities for growth, and we're looking forward to that going into the future. Daktronics in this space, we are TAA compliant, Trade Agreements Act compliant. That's what you need to do business with the government.
You need to at least hit that area, and we are. We've got a strong value proposition by being in South Dakota, U.S. manufacturing, U.S. assembly. We've got a great product. We've got a great engineering team. You'll hear from Brett coming up here. Whenever Brett speaks, it actually gets me excited. It gets me excited to go out and try and start selling the next opportunity that we have. Jeremy mentioned superior video processing, and there is a difference when you see our video displays and the processing that we do. We're trying to grow through these partners and see how we can get there with the partners that we've got. You can see some market successes that we've had. Times Square. It's a military training center in the middle. It looks like an arena. They use it for war gaming planning.
Those who ever thought that would be the case, but it looks like an arena, and it's an opportunity, and it's in the federal government space for us. If you take a look at some of the opportunities for us, and our market share and our growth rate. If you look at this, again, we have about a $800 million SAM, and our TAM is about $900 million. If you look at our Live Events team has got dominant. We're dominant in the space. We've got a 57% market share when we look at the SAM. Our Spectaculars team, we've got an opportunity for growth.
We're sitting at 11% market share, and we have that opportunity to be able to grow, but we are in a good position, and I think we've got good discussions going on in how do we attack this market further into the future. If you look at the growth rate in the markets that I lead, the bottom row is our college and university space. College and universities are kind of going through their own transformation today. If you've watched Final Four NCAA tournament, one of the biggest sporting events that happens, they're working their way through it. They're working their way through payroll, paying players. We'll see where that goes, but industry sources show that that can still grow at 6.2%. The next one up, the dark blue, is Major League Sports at 7%. Then the lighter blue is our Spectaculars team.
You can see the growth rates, 6%-7.5%, and we're confident that we can grow at those market rates and continue to find success in the spaces that we're in. Next up, we're going to watch a video, and then Jody Kress is going to join me on stage and talk a little bit about it. It's one thing when you sell the project, you've got to execute on that project. Back to you guys.
When we decided that we wanted to make a change with our board, my only choice was to go with Daktronics. We are the busiest arena in the country, if not the world. It's very hard to find a lot of uninterrupted time to be able to build a board like this. We were able to, in August, find almost two uninterrupted weeks to be able to build the board and be ready literally the day after we were done building for a Sparks game right after that.
It took 14 24-hour days in a 16-day span in order to complete the project, from demo to building the new board, to being ready. We had to take a couple of days off for concerts where we had to stop, raise all the work, and get it out of the way. Concert happened. Concert loads out. We're literally back to work 10 minutes after they load out. It was the biggest project with the tightest timeline that I've ever worked on. We were able to meet our deadline within two weeks, and everybody just worked wonderfully together.
Okay. Good morning, everyone. Jay said, my name is Jody Kress, Vice President of Project Realization at Daktronics. I want to thank our production team for capturing that video and that time lapse. That is exactly what our customers experience when they work with Daktronics. Execution on complex projects in some really highly visible venues from around the world. What I'm going to talk about today is how that execution is built into our delivery strategy and why that matters. As Ramesh mentioned earlier, we are a full lifecycle provider. We work with our customers through all phases of the project from beginning to end.
My role in Project Realization is to work with our solution design teams and our project management teams to take a customer's vision or an idea and make that reality, therefore the term realization. We manage everything from the early design phases all the way through the on-site installation and the configuration to make that all happen. As I mentioned, these are highly complex physical projects, so doing this well is very important, and this capability is really difficult for anyone to really replicate or copy. Therefore, our Project Realization capability, we feel is a really clear and durable differentiator at Daktronics. I'm going to take this a little bit further here in detail, and I'm going to use the Miami Heat as my example. The story really isn't this display got installed, it's really how did this get done?
We start with our design teams designing these systems using the latest in 3D modeling tools to design the systems. We're starting to use AI more as an assistant or to help us with our designs to improve efficiency and accuracy with those designs. At the same time, we develop a detailed site and integration plan to help us understand how these systems are going to integrate with the customer's facilities. Because it's strange, but every facility seems to be different and has some unique challenges to work through, and so developing that plan early is very important. At the same time, being we are the manufacturer, we work very closely with Matt's manufacturing team to develop a production plan that allows us to be successful. Like Jay said, 5 for 5 for baseball.
We had to have a pretty solid production plan to make sure we delivered all of those on time. We work closely with our manufacturing team to make that happen. We also work with managed subcontractors. We hire people to help us perform all the activities that need to come together on-site. As Jeremy mentioned, a lot of those subcontractors are also our customers, so it's a win-win situation for all of us. We do all this coordination. Our teams balance all this coordination, trying to balance the schedule, the budget, and the quality across the entire project. Most importantly, this is all led by Daktronics project managers, who do this type of work every day. This is what they wake up and they do it every day, project after project, year- after- year. We mentioned the Yankees.
The Yankees just posted a LinkedIn video yesterday or the day before, something dropped, where they talk about this experience they had with our project manager and the Yankees staff talk about that. If you have time, I would encourage you to watch it. It's a pretty powerful video. Yeah. The other point I wanted to make here is, although that I'm talking about this during the Live Events and Spectaculars segment here today, this is a capability that we can span across the business. There's some high schools in Jeremy's market, for example, that start to look like small to mid-size colleges, to be honest. We can scale this to other markets of the business too. Even in aviation, Spencer's got some applications that start to look like a spectacular application. This is a capability that we can scale across the organization.
Jay talked earlier about why we went in Live Events and Spectaculars, and here's four points on why that really matters. First, it ensures strong execution on the industry's most visible projects. These are marquee venues, iconic installs, and our track record here is really proven. Second, it helps protect margin. Because on these complex projects, it's not the product that's necessarily risky. It's the on-site work and the execution on-site that's really the risky part. Being we own that full life cycle, we have the experience and the control over that life cycle to manage that risk proactively versus reacting to that risk. I think that's a real advantage. It also expands our value proposition. Customers don't just trust us to build the system, they trust us to manage the entire outcome. That's very important too.
Finally, the proven execution is what earns us repeat business. We do what we say we're going to do, and our customers trust us to do that, and that leads to a durable competitive advantage, in my opinion, that I think others really struggle to match. I'm just proud of our teams that support us on these projects. With that, I'm going to hand it back to Jay to talk a little bit more about growth in Live Events and Spectaculars.
Yes is the answer. What is the question? You've seen a couple projects, the Miami Heat project. You saw that was a custom Flame Ball. Miami Heat logo, Flame Ball, fits perfectly. Jody and team and our manufacturing team and engineering team knocked it out of the park. That team does best in the industry, and that's definitely an advantage for us. If we look at the three pillars of success, it is continue to protect our core. We've got a strong market share in the verticals that we chase, and we need to protect that core because we do have competitors.
Believe it or not, we do have competitors, and they're highly aggressive. We got to keep protecting the core. We've also got products that can extend us not only from the seating bowl, but into the concourses. If you are seeing some of these facilities today and there's an opportunity for growth, is adding more displays in the concourses, in the team meeting rooms, in the locker rooms. Places that have traditionally been LCD within a stadium and arena are now converting more to LED. That's really our growth area. Great thing is we have customers. They want to come back to us. They want to integrate all of this together. That's really one of our strong pillars that we have. We need to grow the software side of our business. I haven't talked a lot about
The software side and what we call Camino 8, but we've got strong not only video displays, but control systems. In the college university space, when they have four, five, or six different installs on campus, they want a similar control system. It's easier to train their staff, they can produce events. If you are in a New York Yankees, for example, you want your video screen to look in-bowl like what is on TV on the sport networks. You want to see that on the sports network. Camino 8, you're going to hear some exciting stuff coming from Brett and Sarah on Camino 8, and that's going to help us with this growth to get into this high-end advanced graphics types area in that space. We also want to be able to grow our high-margin service business. You saw the videos that we saw up here.
That was created by the Daktronics teams, and they can create that type of content for our customers as well. That's an opportunity for growth. Also, Service Agreements is an opportunity for us for growth. We're excited about those opportunities. We're excited that we're the leader in the Live Event space, but we don't take that for granted. Every day we wake up knowing we've got to protect our customer base and make sure we take care of them better than they've ever been taken care of. That's what we do. That's what we try and do. I mentioned seven touches. We do that every single day. Execution on these highly complex projects, that's not simple. That's not easy, and you got to make sure you got the right team to be able to do it.
You saw the video of Crypto.com Arena, which was formerly the Staples Center, and there's a competition between Staples Center and Crypto.com in L.A. versus Madison Square Garden on what's the busiest arena in the world. Those two will fight. We had 16 days, and Jody and team nailed it, which is fantastic. We knew we could do it. We just had to have the right plan. Worked a lot of late hours, but we got it done. It was very exciting. I think our growth software and services. I think that's where we've got another opportunity for growth. With that, next step is going to be, we're going to talk about transportation, and Spencer Degen is going to be talking to you about that.
We move through transportation spaces every day, airports, highways, rail platforms, and buses, consuming information without even realizing it. Across these transportation systems, Daktronics technology is embedded in the infrastructure that delivers clarity when it matters most. In these environments, systems don't get downtime. Displays operate continuously, often in harsh conditions where reliability and accuracy are expected. From flight information displays to roadside messaging, our displays are built to perform day- after- day, year -after -year.
Daktronics is one of the few U.S. manufacturers designing, building, and supporting these systems from right here at home. That matters to our customers. Buy America isn't just a label, it's trust. It enables compliance with procurement requirements and builds long-term trust with state and local agencies that depend on consistent execution. From the roads that connect our communities to the terminals that connect our world, Daktronics provides the technology that supports the reliable movement of people and information.
Good morning. I'm Spencer Degen, Vice President of our Transportation Business Unit. During my time this morning, I'll describe the markets that make up our Transportation Business Unit and share some details about how we go to market in each space. I'll also share some market trends and some growth strategies that will influence our next few years. When we say transportation markets, Ramesh mentioned it, Jay mentioned it, we mean the customer markets that made it possible for us all to get here today. If you came by car, rail, bus, or an airplane, you were likely informed by Daktronics equipment. We include four markets in our Transportation Business Unit, our ITS market or Intelligent Transportation Systems, Aviation, Public Transit, and Parking. I'll spend most of my time today on ITS and aviation with a quick touch on public transit. I'll start with ITS.
On the far left is one of our most common applications in this space, often referred to as a DMS or Dynamic Message Signs. You'll see a couple other applications of a DMS or lane control shown here as well. In ITS, our largest end user group is our DOT customers, followed by tolling and other local transit authorities or traffic authorities, such as the Port Authority here in New York. We go to market most often through resellers, and electrical contractors that are bidding the roadway projects are our most common reseller in this space.
The remaining 20% is purchased directly by end agencies and either owner furnished into their construction projects or sometimes they self-install. Our differentiators in the ITS space are headlined by our U.S. manufacturing approach. We produce these products in the U.S., and we lead by far in compliance with the Buy America standards. In October, this upcoming October, so just six months from now, a long-standing waiver for manufactured products goes completely away and is completely removed, and strict rules for U.S. content go into place.
That will eliminate the acceptance for only assembled products that are only assembled in the U.S. That raises the bar significantly for U.S. manufacturing content and really favors the Daktronics model. We are the leader in ITS. You'll see it later when we talk about market share, but we are the leader here. We support and assist architects, engineers, and consultants as they develop specs and support our end agency customers. That work is often years and months ahead of any procurement or purchase activity. Half or more of our marketing and selling effort is on that presale activity that prepares us for the future bid process. Finally, this is a unique product line. Ruggedized or ITS grade are common terms in this space, and the barrier to entry with these products keeps our competitor list short. How do these things drive success?
Like all of Daktronics, our products are top of class in quality and reliability. Our service teams are superior to anyone in this market. Sarah's service organization has people in place to help any customer need. As the market leader, we also have the opportunity to steer the future generations of products, and that can be a big benefit for Daktronics. We've been in this business for 57 years, publicly traded for more than half of that time, and that stability is important for our customers that are looking for long-term partners. They're buying products they expect to last 10, even 15 years sometimes. For our contractors that are reselling our products, I mentioned 80% of this business goes through electrical contractors. We win with those contractors through our project support.
Jody's design and project management teams, Sarah's service teams, and all of our well-trained engineers and design staff behind them to back them up if any question comes up. In our factories, we don't miss dates in any of our markets. In this market, we don't miss dates either. We're predictable, and we meet their schedule needs. Finally, we install and fire up quick and easy. All of these things save these contractors time and money, making us the safe and most profitable choice for their business. I'll wrap up ITS with a quick market trend that we're watching. Our ITS products are expanding from a suburban environment into urban environments. As we push the boundaries of resolution and have our market leadership chance to define the next generations of products, we'll help to define the display technologies that come into more urban applications.
We're also ensuring the ruggedized high expectations of the interstate products are brought into this space as well. This is a nice market expansion that will grow the market and help grow our future. I'll touch on public transit, highlight some of the similarities we see to our ITS market. Our end customers here are the transit operators. Again, we see sales through reseller and integrator channels. We see maybe more of an even split here between contractor purchase and direct agency purchases. These tend to be smaller, often high- volume type installations, and a lot of our customers have their own capabilities to self-install and service. Our differentiators, again, include preference for U.S. manufacturing. Buy America requirements exist in this space as well, creating a preference for Daktronics, although a bit less than in our ITS space.
Another similarity is the purpose-built, ruggedized designs that create a similar barrier to entry. Maybe the most interesting takeaway or trend in this market that we're watching is a portion of this market shifted away from LED proven technology towards things like LCDs as our customers chased resolution to display more graphics and more map-type content. The problem here is LCD is a difficult technology to ruggedize enough to make last in this space. These products are having to be replaced every two to three years. They can't be quite as bright as LED technology. Daktronics is creating a trend back towards LED as we develop on our high-resolution platforms, and this will eventually obsolete these other technologies as this market grows. Finally here, when these customers make a product choice, their goal is to stick with that vendor as long as they can.
They don't want to mix products. If we get in on the first one, we benefit from years of future builds. All right, I'll shift to aviation and highlight some exciting new things here. Aviation is our fastest-growing market within transportation, and the main reason is that airports themselves are now customers for our indoor solutions, our newer high-resolution solutions. We've sold outdoor products to airports for many years, roadway, parking applications, curbside, airside with the airlines as they deploy technologies outside the airports. However, for indoor applications, Jody mentioned this earlier, most of our activity has been with the advertising concessions, the JCDecaux, Clear Channel, Lamar, that type of customer. That business is still good and growing. With terminal expansions and extremely high adoption of digital across all of our public spaces, airports are now becoming customers for our high-resolution LED solutions.
Airlines are also active customers as they expand their ownership of gate and ticketing spaces. Our strategy in aviation is really, we try to be channel first, but we see a nice mix between direct purchase and integrator-type channel purchases. We see our facility-wide projects, airline-directed projects that may cross multiple airports, and ad applications as often being procured directly. Smaller or standalone, more local installations often include decision-makers and sales through our integrator-type channels. Our differentiators in airports start with our chip-on-board design solutions. Thanks to Brett and his team, we were the first, and we are the absolute best at chip-on-board. Chip-on-board changed everything for us in airports and many of our other markets. It's half the power, it's brighter, and it's extremely durable compared to past technologies in this type of high-resolution space.
When you think about people moving through a terminal and where we want to put these products, that durability, that low heat, that low power is a complete game changer for these installations. We have a strong brand reputation, but we aren't as well-known yet for the indoor high res, and that's changing fast. Yesterday, we announced that LAWA is using Daktronics for their LAX Tom Bradley International Terminal for a huge project that will be the start of a large modernization project that they're working on for the 2028 Olympics. I really appreciate LAWA's trust in Daktronics, and the timing couldn't have been better for me to be able to mention that today. We work hard in this market to support specifiers and designers. They crave support early in design phases as airports are very intentionally and difficult to plan. Daktronics does this so well.
As the designer and manufacturer, we have all of those skills under our roof. That ties directly to the value of being the manufacturer, not just a product broker, and that holds so much weight for our customers that are making these decisions. These differentiators drive success through confidence and partnership. Again, our quality is next to none, and chip-on-board raised that bar even higher. Because we design and manufacture these products, we have schedule control that our broker competitors simply don't. All of these things create value for our customers that tend to outshine price alone. If we look at market share, we have about a 22% share looking across our four market segments of ITS, Aviation, Public Transit, and Parking. ITS is clearly our core.
Depending on what you measure us against, our market share is at least 40%, and our win rate for the projects that we chase is 60%-70%. Our history in aviation has been focused on outdoor applications, but we're driving great growth through our indoor solutions. In the public transit and parking markets, we're doing some nice things there, but we have a lot of room to grow. I'm excited to see the 9% growth in our transportation markets. Our core ITS space is very consistent while demonstrating nice year-over-year growth. I also mentioned expansion into more urban and arterial spaces that'll help expand this market and create more room for us to grow. Aviation is definitely a space with room for us to grow. I feel like we're just getting started with selling indoor applications, and the market is growing quickly.
Public transit and parking are broad, volume-based markets, and I touched briefly on some of the technology trends that are making portions of those market segments more attractive for us. I'll start to wrap this up with three growth pillars for our transportation business unit. We're growing our core. I showed market growth in the core ITS space, and adoption will be a large part of our future. We do business in nearly all the 50 states today, very few exceptions, but there are agency opportunities remaining that have yet to adopt these technologies, and that'll drive growth. We're also working to expand into high growth regions. We have target agencies with high volume that have just started to purchase from Daktronics or maybe even haven't purchased from Daktronics yet. Gaining share with those customers will be an important part of our future.
Lastly, we're expanding in the high-growth segments. I mentioned airports, just getting started with indoor. We're ramping that investment with goals to reach more customers and deliver more projects. I'll leave you with these four themes. ITS is our core and always will be. The updated Buy America standards and guidelines further solidifies our market position here.
Aviation is our fastest-growing market, fueled by the indoor applications that we talked about, and we are investing here. All of our transportation markets, our solutions support mission-critical applications, and our customers are mature, and they work hard to weed out low-cost competitors. They really value our model, and that values us, the work that they do to weed out that competition. Lastly, our customers prefer long-term, multi-year procurement methods. This lowers our cost of sales and keeps us attached to our customers for many years. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for all coming out to join us. Next, you'll hear from our international markets.
Our story began in North America, but our work has carried us far beyond it. The global journey started in 2003 with a single office in Germany. Today, with our newest location in Saudi Arabia, we've grown into a network of regional teams positioned close to the markets we support, bringing talent, service, and capability to the regions that need them most. Across the world, Daktronics supports core markets like Advertising, Live Events, and Transportation, while selectively expanding into emerging opportunities in education, government, and hospitality.
Our international group operates with discipline, delivering strong performance across priority global markets, from stadiums where legends play, city centers lit with iconic advertising, transportation hubs guiding millions of travelers, to thousands of screens powering local advertising networks, retail spaces, and community installations around the world. International business represents growth opportunities in new markets with new partners and new experiences waiting to be created. Our reach may be global, but our approach is focused, delivering the Daktronics experience wherever the world needs it next.
Good morning, everyone. I'm always conflicted when I see that video. It's like all these great accomplishments, but my life's work was condensed to a 10-second walk there, but all right. I'm excited to share a little bit about our international business. First of all, I'm Judd Guthmiller, Vice President of this International business unit. For really over 20+ years, we have expanded our international presence to really focus on the most attractive global markets. Today, we really have a network of sales, project management, and service personnel positioned in key territories around the globe. This structure allows us to really pursue opportunities across Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. All of that has really resulted in us having a very successful track record of completing over 100 installations in over 100 countries.
During FY 2025, the international LED market was sized at about $2.3 billion, of which $1 billion really aligns to the countries and segments that fit Daktronics' overall strategy. Within that $1 billion market that we play in, we have nearly a 10% market share, which obviously highlights a tremendous headroom for our future growth. Going forward, our international growth will be driven by three key pillars. We're going to focus on these high-growth regions and market segments. We're going to expand our customer-centric solutions portfolio, and we're going to extend our reach through new strategic partnerships. All in total will yield a high single-digit revenue growth. Across our international regions, we have grown our business across three key segments: large sports venue, stadiums and arenas, Out of Home advertising, and transportation.
As shown in the photos, you can see that we really excel at these highly customized and demanding projects where our customers really value having something different and unique. This is where we can bring the strength of all of our teams across the world, our engineering expertise, our product innovation, and we can really couple that with our local product execution and project execution capabilities and really deliver these solutions that is really unmatched by any of our competitors. These projects not only highlight the scale and the complexity of the work we do, but also our ability to execute across multiple market segments and meet different customer requirements. Our sales strategy really builds well on what we do in the U.S. We certainly lean into our heritage and brand reputation, which has a high degree of credibility no matter who we're talking to in the world.
Our sales team and our service team, when they're out there engaging the market, they reinforce that by being honest and helpful, which earns deeper relationships and instills a higher degree of trust. We then leverage our global manufacturing capabilities to take on these really large systems and these projects, and then we deliver them very reliably day in and day out with the support from Matt's team. Depending on the market and the opportunity, we will sell direct when deep engagement is the most critical way to do so. We'll also use strong channel partners when maybe reach or local presence matter even more. Finally, our domestic experience really translates well internationally.
By combining our global knowledge collectively across all of our teams and coupling that with our local team and our expertise, we're able to assemble the right people toward the right opportunities and consistently execute at a really high level. Our global footprint of sales, project management, and service personnel really allows us to serve our customers all the way from the idea creation phase, as Jody mentioned, developing the vision with our customers, that's a fun phase, all the way through the integration and the installation and the planning of that, all the way through the life and the support of those systems with Sarah's team. Because we're able to operate across all those phases of the customer journey and all these territories, that's an advantage to us.
We take all of that intel and we gather it, and it gives us valuable insight into market trends and, more importantly, competitor trends. We use that intel to disseminate it across all of our teams internally, so then we can rapidly and agilely adjust our strategies to protect our most lucrative and profitable markets, regardless if they're in international or the U.S. Regarding our solutions, you've heard it from my other teammates. Hands down, we got the best products in the world. They're the highest quality, the most reliable. They last the longest lifetime, 10 years and beyond. There's a set of our customers in international that value that. We also have another set of customers who are keen to be flexible on product performance, maybe a shorter lifetime, not as bright, whatever, but they certainly couple that with a lower price expectation, too.
We address that market need with a multi-tier product portfolio strategy. By executing on so many highly complex and iconic projects around the world, we have a fantastic reputation, and we leverage it every day with our sales team. We lean into that. The fun part of that is when you work with a customer and you complete the installation, I find it more personally satisfying to go back a few weeks, months, years later and see how successful they are and when they're achieving their objectives. Regardless if it was to entertain fans in a stadium or an arena, provide vital information as people are moving around their cities or their countries, or earning revenue like on an Out of Home billboard or in a retail application.
Now, I want to share a little bit about some of the growth drivers we see for this international business, one of which has been and will continue to be the growth of sports and entertainment outside the U.S. market. Since 2007, the NFL started playing one match outside the U.S. per year, and they did that for about eight years in a row, and then slowly added a few games. You fast-forward to this upcoming season of 2026, and they'll say it, they have a record-breaking schedule in front of them. They are planning to play nine games in eight different venues in seven different countries. That's fantastic. That fuels business that we excel in, not only domestically with Jay and Jody, but also in international. The photo on the screen is a highlight to that and a testament of it.
This is Tottenham Stadium in London, which is a regular host of a match like this for the NFL. More recently, the NBA just announced plans to expand a European league of about 16 teams. That's going to fuel new construction venues as well as revitalization of other venues, all of which is going to require new LED display systems, things we're very good at. Given our strong track record with the NBA, due to all the great work of Jay and Sarah and Jody, we have a fantastic reputation with the NBA, and we couple that with our strong European footprint. We're in a fantastic position to capitalize on that opportunity if it comes to fruition. Another important growth driver is the awarding of these major global events, like the World Cup or the Olympics, into new regions.
When these large-scale sports venues come about, they are exciting, right? We got a great track record of capitalizing on that demand of these systems into these sporting venues. An example I can share with you, if you thought 5 for 5 was good, we and our Middle East team, who I'm extremely proud of, in leading up to the Qatar World Cup in 2022, that team was successful in selling and installing eight out of eight stadiums. Every stadium that was hosting a World Cup match in 2022 was powered by a Daktronics solution. In addition to the growth in the event venues, which is obvious, we also have other things that get triggered, right? Broader investment into other markets leading up to these global events, and that can be across advertising, retail, and public transportation, as these host cities really want to shine bright, right?
They're going to host a global audience, and they want to look good to the whole world. This, leading up to these events, really gives us a multi-year wave of demand that we are really well-positioned to participate, since they are many of our core markets. The final growth driver I'll highlight is when governments of certain countries lead with investing into tourism when it ranks as a key strategy of theirs. As these countries look to attract more visitors, they will fund large and complex installations to make a landmark in their city, and that really just drives the global visibility of everything that they do, and they want to look good to the outside world.
Once those investments begin on the public side, the private money almost always follows. Again, it's across typical things that you would think, entertainment areas, retail areas, or general open area spaces. All of which drives demand for the good things that we do, and we are very well positioned to not only pursue, but to win, and then to execute on. To wrap things up, I'll leave you with these three key takeaways for this international business. First off, we are dedicated to diligently focusing and pointing our capital and our resources toward the high-growth regions and high-growth market segments. One of the ways that we're going to do that is we're going to invest into growing new partnerships in key locations, so they can act as an extension of our sales team while we diligently manage the expenses.
We're also going to focus on developing new products to meet our customers' expectations, not only on the performance side, but also on the price side. We're going to continue to do that through further development of our multi-tier product portfolio strategy with Brett's team. Finally, we will leverage U.S. driven expansions into these international markets like the NBA, the NFL, and the like, and we'll do that in parallel as our teams surround new upcoming world global events like the World Cup or the Olympics. I hope that gives you a little bit of a deeper insight into the International business, and we welcome any questions that you might have at the upcoming Q&A. Now you'll hear about our services and software business.
Across the world, Daktronics displays light up the moments that matter. Stadiums roar, cities move, campuses connect. These systems are mission-critical assets, deeply embedded in how our customers operate and engage their audiences. When performance matters most, Daktronics is the name customers trust to safeguard billions of dollars of investments. We keep customer systems bright and ready to perform, monitoring, repairing, and restoring with precision only Daktronics can deliver. Performance is expected. Possibility is what excites. Today's customers want to use our system as a springboard for innovation, unlocking new experiences and deeper audience engagement. That's where our professional services team transforms events. Here, technology becomes storytelling, control becomes choreography, content becomes energy.
Behind everything we do is the software that empowers our technical teams to deliver advanced diagnostics and support and equip our professional services team to ensure customers get the most from their systems. Software services are essential. It's what customers rely on to power, illuminate, and bring displays to life. Through ongoing content, innovation, and expertise, customers' systems evolve month- after- month, year- after- year. Daktronics Services, protecting value, growing value, inspiring and elevating places where people come together.
5 for 5, 8 for 8. That's success for us in customer service. That means that we get to take care of those customers throughout the life of their system. I like to talk about services as we help to light it up. We help to make sure it stays lit up and functioning and performing well over the life of the system. Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Sarah Rose, and I'm responsible for our Global Services, which includes software as well as our services. We are a lifetime provider. What does that mean as we think about it? Why is it important? It's important because our customers have a choice. We heard from Judd, we heard from Jay , Spence, and we heard Jeremy talk about it.
What they're interested is getting that sale, but it's important who they purchase from after that sale. In the services organization, we have the opportunity to either help them to get that sale or not. It's how well we take care of our customers and how we enable them to be successful from day one to the day that they replace. We want to create long-term relationships with our customers in such a way they choose Daktronics over and over again. Aftermarket services. We heard earlier today as people talked about it, we're taking care of those customers from anywhere from 5-10 years of life. We are part of that product life cycle. We support our customers, and it continues to evolve from the point that they installed it to the point that they will choose to replace with Daktronics.
It's critical that we're there for them. How do we do that? What does that look like? Well, I'll talk a little bit about that. We're going to talk about our three areas today, technical services, professional services, and our software services. When we think about our customers, they want to do more with their systems. They want to have it operating and working well from the point that we install it to the point that they replace it. Throughout that lifetime, throughout that 10 years, things need to change with that system. Technology changes, and our services team is there to help them at every step of the way. First, it needs to work well, right? No one wants to buy a system that doesn't work well. Inevitably, with any electronic, there are going to be times when there are issues. That's where our technical services comes in.
We provide our customers with preventative, proactive services. We also provide our customers with reactive services, and we do that through remote technical support, on-site services, and also what's unique and a benefit to Daktronics is we have U.S. repair. So when that customer needs a part or they need to have a part repaired, they can send it to us in the U.S., and we will repair that for them and get it back out to site. That is a critical component and differentiates Daktronics in the industry. We also have professional services. It's great that it's working, but honestly, this wouldn't have been as interesting of a presentation today without the videos. The videos brought it to life. We got to see what Daktronics does. That's the content, and that's part of our professional services that we offer.
We offer the creative services. We are in the rooms with the teams as those productions are happening. We're either helping them to produce the shows. We are running cameras. We are clicking the buttons. We are part of their production team. We also help our customers over the life. We hear this great installation that happened. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, and your first time going there as a fan. You see it and it's amazing, and you're just mesmerized by it. By year five, if they're still doing the same thing they did at year one, you're going to be bored.
We need to help our customers to evolve the show, and that's where our technology continues to evolve, and we can go in with our customers on a regular basis, meet with them, upgrade their technology so that they can produce more shows that entertain their fans in ways they've never imagined before. The last area I'll talk about here is our software. Our software really is the backbone to what we do. It enables our customers to be successful. Software is not new to Daktronics. Over the many, many decades we've been creating and installing LED displays, the software has been the component that our customers use to operate their systems, and we're continuing to evolve on that, as you'll hear from Brett later today. We do that through licensing and subscriptions. This scope and breadth of services is very hard to replicate.
We have people and competition that could do technical, but can they couple the professional, and they can couple the software? We're going to learn about some of our customers here that value these types of things. First, let's talk about our customers. When we think about who we sell our services to and what that looks like, when we go into our professional services, which Jay talked about, oftentimes we're talking to the person responsible for the operations of the facility. What is their main concern? Make it easy for me and keep it working well. You don't want a downtime when you have a game going on. When you've invited 70,000 of your closest friends, it needs to work, and they count and trust on Daktronics teams to be in the field to help them to do that.
We also, while at the facility, are meeting with the people who are the event producers or the production team, kind of what's behind that black little curtain there, the production team. That's who we're meeting with. They're making all of this happen. We're meeting with them to provide them with the content they might need, to provide them with the technology they need to put on the shows that we all love to go and see. When we meet with the school, sometimes we're meeting with the principal of the school. Sometimes we're meeting with the superintendent or the school board, and we're helping to understand what are their needs for services, and then curating the right service approach for that particular high school. We also meet with business owners, small and large.
We understand their business needs, and we help to understand what is the best way that we can serve them through our technical services, through helping them create imagery that can go on their displays, to even operating their displays for them. We work with system integrators who are responsible for installing and configuring the systems. We are there, and we understand our customers. We know our customers because we spend time with them. We don't spend two months with them and don't hear from them for 10 years. We are embedded in our customers' operations as part of our services, and therefore, we know as their business evolves and changes, what their needs are going to be, not only for services, but also for the technology that they're going to want to invest in the future.
We become a critical part of their team, and that helps us and enables us to be able to curate the right products and the right services for our customers. Services is critical. It helps drive leads into our sales teams. It also provides insight into our engineering teams, as Brett is going to be talking about. Because we are embedded with these customers, because we work with them day in and day out, we understand their business, we understand their operation. We can help to provide feedback into engineering to create the right software and the right platforms that enable our customers to be successful. Let's talk about one of those customers. Maybe six Super Bowls were a result of Daktronics. We'll take a little bit of credit. They never sent us a ring.
We'll assume that part of it was our contribution because we've worked with them for over 20 years. We have supported over 100 displays of the Patriots. What do we do with the Patriots, you might say. First, we provide the technical services. We're responsible for being proactive, going out and providing checks before the events happen and before even the season starts, and then we are actually on-site during those events. We are there to make sure that the system works well and performs as it's supposed to. That's part of our technical services. When they call Daktronics, they are not calling a call center in another country where they don't know anything about the system. They are calling Daktronics, and we have technicians who understand that system, can pull up their unique configuration, and help to support them and get them working and operating quickly.
The trust extends beyond the technical services. It extends into what we do in our professional services. They want to wow their audiences. When we go to a Patriots game, when we go to any game, we want to have a good experience. Part of it's the imagery we see. It's that creativeness, it's that entertainment aspect, and that's where we help with our professional services. We provide them the technology and the software that's necessary, but we also provide them with the content, as you see here. All of this makes a long-term relationship with our customers. Over 20 years of supporting over 100 displays. Our customers value that we are the one-stop solution. Wawa. Many of you may know Wawa for their hoagies, but they're also a good Daktronics customer, and we enjoy working with them.
We've been working with Wawa for over 20 years, over 13,000 displays. Can you imagine? What they value from us is that we can provide that technical support. We can support them and make sure that whatever they need for parts, or if they have to call us, we are there to answer that phone. We're there to be a partner with Wawa for their technical services, but it goes beyond that. As you see in these pictures, Wawa has two types of installations shown here. One is outside, as Jeremy showed, and then they also have indoor. Typically, in a convenience store like this, they would have different system software that would operate outdoor and indoor. That person who's working at that convenience store needs to say, "I'm going to program this over here, I'm going to put my advertisement for my hoagie here.
I need to move over to this system and put my advertisement for the hoagie in. I have to create it in different sizes, different colors." All of that, right? Not with Daktronics. It's a one-stop. It is we provide this integration between our software and our services, and they can use the same software indoors as they can use outdoors. I'm excited for Brett to come up later to talk a little bit about that. High schools. Jeremy talked about the excitement within high schools. I don't know about you, but I had both. I have a student-athlete, and I also had a student who was more interested in some athletics, but also in the production and creativity of the show. High schools are exciting to me.
It's exciting because at Daktronics, yes, we help them with technical support, and we are there, and we provide them with either a Service Agreement, or we provide them a Time and Materials where they will pay for the services as they go. But what's exciting about this is when we partner with our high schools, they need more than just the display to turn on. They went out and said to their community, "We're buying a video board for this field, and we want it to be memorable." I know you'd think to yourself, "Well, why is a high school game just as important to you, Sarah, as a professional game is?" Because I've been at those high school games when things don't quite work as you expected. If you don't have a scoreboard, you don't have a Friday night lights.
It is just as critical for this high school to make sure they have the highest quality of technical support as it is at the Major League level. That's what we care about high schools, and we make sure they have the right technical service package in order to make sure that things are working and operating well. It goes beyond that. You don't want to turn a high school board on and see content that isn't desirable or text on it. No, they want it to look like the Major Leagues. They bought that. They said, "Hey, look down the road. This is what they're doing at the Major Leagues. We're getting the same system." They turn it on for the first time, and someone has put some type of graphic on it that isn't sized properly. It's distorted. That's not what they want to do.
At Daktronics, we offer them a software solution, which is called FrameWrx, which they can easily edit templates, so they can use templated content that looks the same as a professional level, but it's easy for them to use. We go beyond that, though. We know that content is only part of it. It has to work well, it has to operate, and it has to perform. Who's going to run it? Jeremy talked a little bit about the schools today. Many times, it's a teacher who's being asked to say, "Can you run the system?" That teacher maybe has a lot of graphics experience, maybe has some production experience, but has never run a Daktronics board before. They're not afraid.
They know that Daktronics' commitment is with them through our DakClassroom, which is a subscription service, which not only provides, like Jeremy talked about, this curriculum, how do we teach the students, but it also provides a network of high school teachers just like them that they can collaborate with, and they can learn from, and they can work together. The high school community is highly collaborative, especially as we get into this video, because it's just growing and developing. We provide a community. We provide Crew Connect for the students. We provide them with a software as a service that enables them to be successful, running, producing, and entertaining their fans at the high school level, and that's exciting.
High schools are important to Daktronics, and we are well-positioned to be able to provide them with the services and the support that they need, as well as enabling them to be successful with their students and with their operation. I talked about these customers for a reason. I talked about them because some of these things are our differentiated capabilities. We are this one-stop solution. When they have a problem in a control room, they don't have 12 numbers to call. They have Daktronics. We have the teams who are equipped in order to understand the issue that they're having and solve that issue for them. If needed, we can send people out into the field, and if they need a part, we have a part. They're not waiting months to receive a part. We can provide that to them overnight from Daktronics.
Our software and subscription services are integrated and easy for them to use. We are not just a display provider. We also provide the software to run it. We are integrated from our engineering down to our services so that we have a full customer communication loop. Brett knows what our customers are needing from the software through our services organization, and we're able to design the systems that they need to be successful. We have a depth and scale of services that you can't find and replicate easily. Many of our service employees have been with us for decades. They have relationships with these customers. They have been at their events with them year and year again, and they are passionate about our customers and what we do.
Technology combined with our creativity builds trust, and that's why our customers choose Daktronics when they look to who they're going to repurchase from. By combining our software and our services, we are embedded with our customers. We offer expandable services as a centralized solution. We make happy customers. That drives long-term profitable growth. A few slides here as we wind it down. Services maintain a higher level of profitability as compared to our equipment orders. Ramesh talked about this earlier. He brought this graphic up. This is the relative value as we think about the increasing margins for the different services that we offer. First, it's our equipment order, then it's technical services, professional services, as well as our software services.
I'll leave you with three things. Where do we see and where are we headed? We want to continue to increase our paid software subscriptions, we want to drive professional services through Camino, as Jay talked about and Brett will talk about shortly, and we want our technical service pricing uplift. Thank you for your time. Thank you for allowing me to talk about the services, which is a critical component and a differentiator to what we offer to our Daktronics customers. We are excited, and we are really proud of our position within the industry in this space. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Sarah. If you'll bear with us for a minute or two, we're going to do a short Q&A. We're going to prepare the seats, bring up our presenters, and that'll take a minute or two. The first Q&A that we're going to have here is for the presenters that have already presented. We'll have another opportunity later, at the end of the session, to come back with everybody and field all the rest of your questions at that point. Let's get everybody up. Thank you. Okay. We're ready for some Q&A. We'll take questions both from the audience here as well as any questions that come across from the webinar. Yes, please.
It looks like we can get a mic to you first, if that's okay. Thank you.
Thanks. Very impressive presentation. I was just curious on the Live Events and Spectaculars business, the big projects. You mentioned there were four or five decision-makers, architects, developers, engineers, consultants. I'm curious who you actually have an agreement with, and more importantly, on the back end, who you actually invoice for your services. Trying to understand the follow-up money. If there are sporting facilities that are actually publicly owned and built, your check is coming from a public entity, and your contract is with one of your vendors. It could be with the team directly. The contract could be directly with the New York Yankees, for example.
That's right.
That didn't work.
It could be state agencies. There are tourism and associations that help fund sporting facilities getting built. It could be any one of those. Any one of those could be the end customer for us. It could be a public entity, it could be a state entity, it could be an actual team owner.
Is it ever the contractor actually building a project or the project manager?
Our contract could come through a construction manager that has a larger agreement back to the end customer, which could be the team, could be the public entity, but our contracts could come directly from a construction manager as well. It funnels through, too. Usually there's an agreement, there's a master contract that the construction manager points back to when they provide us with a contract as well.
Okay.
Other questions?
Hello. My first question is around the international segment, and specifically, over the last few years, from a margin perspective, has sort of lagged some of the other groups. I know it's a smaller segment compared to others, but I guess are we reaching a point where we can get those international segment margins sort of up to some of the other segments from a fixed cost perspective? Are there some of the lean initiatives and sort of reviewed focus? Should we expect sort of an international margin inflection? How should we think about that segment?
Yeah, Connor, let me take that question. There are three pieces. One is being in the right markets for us and deepening our focus in those markets. Having spent the time that I have internationally and being with Judd in the marketplace, it's clear there are some markets where we have a very unique opportunity to deepen ourselves.
The second goes into the product development cycle. What's very clear is some of the things that work in the U.S. for us, like NFL, NBA, those are very well tied to the U.S. standards. But as we look at some of the other sectors, we want to get our product development regionally tailored. The third aspect we'll kind of look at is how do we look at partnerships to expand our sales cycle, and this has kind of taken a low-cost approach, and basically using a method that's pretty common in the international market that we'll basically try and play with. Those are three things we're going to go down.
Yeah, hello. On High School, Parks and Rec, can you just kind of talk about the economics of the video boards versus the traditional boards? It seems like there's a long runway for growth there. Also kind of tie that into college, too. A lot of schools, 1,300 schools, just where that adoption is and kind of as you go up that growth curve, what that can look like from an economic standpoint too.
Yeah. Thank you for the questions. Good question. Ramesh touched on it earlier in his presentation. We're not really replacing all the fixed digit scoreboards out there. We're augmenting them in many cases. I think both product lines are good profitable areas for us. We do well with both scoreboards and video boards. It's that growth in video is just increasing our revenue much more rapidly because they're a bigger ticket item. It's a much bigger ticket item. That's really what's driving the upward mobility there.
It's been really fun to watch because it's not just big schools that have lots of money that are doing this in Texas. Ramesh showed the picture from Watertown. I think Watertown is 23,000 people, something like that. Spencer lives in a town of what, 1,500? Something like that. Yeah, they've got a video board in their gym and in their football field, and fixed digit scoreboards, too. It's nice. All levels of schools can do this. I think there was a follow-up on the college side.
Yeah, on the college side, there's different divisions, and then there's segments within those divisions. Like, Division I, when you say Division I, that's a pretty big blanket, and there's this Power Four that's within Division I. There is this other group of six, and then there's an FCS program. There's three segments within Division I. Most Division I in this Power Four segment, they've got displays in football, basketball, and then they start hitting the Olympic sports as well, baseball, softball. A lot of those sports in the Olympic sports have come from donors. Donors donate money to put it. They're baseball alumni. They're putting up dollars to help put a video board in at a baseball stadium. When you get to the FCS level, which is Division I FCS level, you see most football stadiums have it. Most basketball arenas have it.
You start getting into Division II and Division III, maybe football, maybe basketball, but I think they still have a desire. Because I think today when you go to a sporting event, people want to see replay. It's also a revenue-generating opportunity. If you can get the right advertising and you get enough local support for advertising, you can pay for that equipment by bringing in advertising with the installation of our products. It's a growth opportunity, and it's very similar. Jeremy, there's a lot of similarities between larger high schools and smaller colleges on what they do for video displays. We fit perfectly into that category, being able to provide it to the groups that want to do it.
Thanks for your presentation. You guys touched upon your net cash position and M&A as a capital allocation priority, and I was just kind of wondering if you have any color on what types of assets are most interesting to you, whether technology or vertical integration?
Yeah, we're in the early stages. All I can talk about is we're getting our criteria pretty clear, and that is important to me. Just as at a board level, we've set up a Strategic Transactions Committee, so this is not speak, this is important to us in terms of where we're headed. I'll say that they're going to be either vertically product-wise or geographic focused. That's one lens. Clearly, as we look at the industrial logic, there are a few pieces we want to make sure it's industrial logic, it's financially accretive, and something we'll get the value creation out of. Just from my past experiences, I've been in multiple deals, and I want to make sure the emotion doesn't take over, but actually, the numbers take over, and that's a critical part of where we need to be.
I would add that as we look across the landscape, there's a lot of opportunity out there to consummate, number one. Number two, as Ramesh indicated earlier, in terms of the cash position of the company, we're in the most resilient position we've been in in many, many years to actually consummate more of an acquisition strategy than has been the case in the past.
We have a question from our remote audience. Could you talk about where you have gained the most and least market share in your underlying segments over the past several years?
Each of our businesses has been growing over the last couple of years. That will continue. We fully expect to be growing at or above the addressable market in each of our markets, and that's the position we're on. We know we're gaining market share in basically each of our businesses.
I'm going to ask that a little bit differently. You had pretty strong win rates, but to the extent you haven't had very strong win rates, what have your customers gone to another vendor for?
It's interesting. I would say just coming in, the markets are cyclical, yeah? I think that's a key part. Our fiscal Q3 is typically a slower installation season. When you see our bookings, they are kind of in the high. Yeah. What you see is the summer months, given we are so construction tied to what happens outdoors, is an important time of the year when you'll see those revenues kind of creep up, and that's a cycle that we kind of go through. That's what we are seeing overall. What I see from talking to the customers is there were people who went to other providers, and they're beginning to actually come back.
I use the word, are you trying to buy a deal or are you trying to sell a deal? In this case, they're coming back to us, and that's the positive we see because of quality, reliability, things Sarah kind of expressed and what the teams do. That's what we're beginning to see more of, is this confidence level of saying, "Hey, you know what? We like our old partner, and that's the partner we want to be with." That's a trend we just see across all the segments today.
I think I would add to that we're fortunate in having in each of our businesses or relationship business, as Ramesh just alluded to, for the reasons that everybody's been talking about. Trust, being able to have a reliable product, durable products, all the things that each of our businesses have been talking about really builds relationships, and those relationships continue. We're also, at the same time, not necessarily looking to win every single piece of business on price. We're a value-based pricing selling company. We have been very successful doing that. When we're losing business, it's not because we're doing something that doesn't satisfy a customer need, it's we're just not going to chase every single transaction.
Yeah, maybe one more. Just on services, can you talk about how that influences growth and revenue margins? It sounds like maybe. Just where's attach rates? Does the services level differ between verticals? Just maybe elaborate a little bit more on that, please.
Our services business, as you've heard, is critical to the company. It affects each of our businesses. Each of our businesses is participating in the development plans. We are in the process of creating the roadmap across the businesses in terms of our service offerings and how that plays out. I will tell you that in terms of growth, in terms of percentage of the company's total revenue, this is going to be a journey. To significantly increase our service revenue and profitability as a percentage of the total, is going to depend to a certain extent on how fast all of our businesses are growing.
We're going to get growth on top of growth by building out the service aspect of our business. As I said, that's going to be a journey. That's going to take a bit of time to get higher, but that's the direction we're heading in for all of the reasons that you, as investors, would expect. This is recurring revenue. It's higher margin business. It's lower capital intensive business. By definition, it's something that's going to help the ROIC of the company.
I know you were talking about how the different business units and how the services might differ or be similar in points to them. Generally, when we think about our technical services, there's different ways we provide that. We provide that in ways of an agreement with the customer that we have, or we provide it as a Time and Materials perspective. In most of the business units, we do what we call a Service Level Agreement with the customer, which we're providing in parts or in labor. The mix of that parts and labor is really depending on that customer and their ability to do the service for themselves.
When we think about Jay's area in particular, we tend to have a heavier lift for the parts and labor because those customers prefer us to do most of that work, and that goes out throughout the life of the system. As we get into Jeremy, as he talked about some of his site companies, they have some of that capability. They rely heavily on us for making sure that they're trained and well-equipped to be able to go out and do the services, but for the parts and the technical support. One thing that's unique is our parts are proprietary, so any part that is damaged or needs to be replaced would come back through us to be repaired or to purchase a new one. We continue to have that parts business out into the life of the system.
The same would be variations within the different areas. High school tends to be based upon what it might do. They tend to rely on parts until they get into the video-type systems. Then they're saying, "Okay, now we'd like someone to come out and do labor for us." We might have that as an agreed-upon way. We do it through a Service Agreement, or we might do it on Time and Materials. There's. Regardless of how that customer might choose to leverage our services, it needs to work for them and their business, and we want them to be successful, but there's opportunities for revenue generation regardless of their choice.
Hi there. Just a bit of a comment. Jeremy had some good ideas on this earlier. I wanted to mention. You're in such a strong position with the quality that you produce. In this world of all media, where there's so much question in terms of credibility, authenticity, believability, you are at a high level and a high standard that you could lend so much of that great quality brand essence to all of your customers, whether it be the end advertiser or it's the service station, or it's the billboard company, or it's the airport.
There's a great media prognosticator, Marshall McLuhan, who's famous for his saying, "The medium is the message." You lend great medium quality to airports, to retail, to everything you're doing, and I don't know if you put that or you inculcate that in your sales pitches, but I know Jeremy does to some degree. I would suggest that because in this day of Chinese screens, let's call it that way, of AI fake, what's real, what's not real, when you're offering great credibility like this, it lends the essence to all of your customers down the line. I encourage you to do that.
Thank you. Okay, let's take a 5 minute break now if you don't mind, and we'll come back at 11:30-ish and complete the program. Thank you.
[Break]
Automation and advanced manufacturing capabilities to remain competitive across diverse cost environments, supported by rigorous quality control and in-house reliability testing. We're not focused on simply adding capacity. We're focused on delivering the Daktronics experience consistently wherever our customers do business.
Another great entry video. Those guys made manufacturing look pretty glamorous there, so appreciate that. I'm Matt Kurtenbach. I'm going to tell you about our manufacturing operation at Daktronics. The image on this slide was captured from our Sioux Falls factory. That factory produces our digital billboard solutions, and when you see this image and our test technician buttoning up that display, getting ready to ship to a customer, it really, I think, highlights the size and scale of the products we produce in our factories. When I walk people through this factory or any of our factories, it never fails. I always hear, "I had no idea these things were this big." Because when you're right next to them, you really see how big they are. If they're on a pole going down the interstate, you just don't quite appreciate it.
That is a very important foundational point in how we design our network. We build big things, so it's important to be close to our customers so we can control logistics costs and shipping times. We heard from Ramesh earlier. 90% of our revenue comes from customers in North America. Our factories in South Dakota and Minnesota are well-positioned to serve this North American customer base. As we move outside North America, our factories in Ireland and China are well-positioned to serve Judd's customers in Europe, APAC, Middle East, really anywhere on the globe. Our location in China is also strategic from a sourcing perspective. Over the last decade or so, the supply base for the makers of direct view LED displays, Daktronics, all our competitors, that supply base has really concentrated in China.
Our sourcing team in our Shanghai operation, they're constantly evaluating the offerings from the supply base in terms of cost, quality, delivery, and reliability. Our intimate knowledge of the supply base in China allows us to source the lowest-cost components that still meet our rigorous standards. Our production system is nimble. We produce standard products like the fuel light displays, fuel price displays that Jeremy highlighted in his presentation, all the way up to the customized displays for the Miami Heat, the Flame Ball that Jody and Jay talked about in their presentation. We load balance across our network, so when Jay and his team go 5 for 5 with Major League Baseball orders, we can engage our entire network to produce those displays, and we did engage our entire network to produce those displays.
We did it on time, upholding our high standards for quality and reliability and holding the line on costs. I'll talk more about the newest addition to our network on this slide right here. Here's a couple of images from our newly leased facility in Saltillo, Mexico. For those of you that aren't aware, Saltillo's about a three-hour drive from the U.S. border. It's about an hour drive from the manufacturing hub of Monterrey, Mexico. We have 100,000 sq ft of plant space. That's going to support profitable growth, and it's also going to increase our adaptability to changing geopolitical forces, tariffs, trade agreements. Our fabrication equipment is on order for this factory. It'll arrive in Q1 of our fiscal year 2027, and we'll be in production late Q1, early Q2 of the same year.
The initial focus of that factory will be producing the quick turn and tailored orders for outdoor video displays for stadiums in North America, Jay and Jody's customers. That'll be the initial focus of the factory. We have the potential to add production of other displays to that factory in the future. Our global manufacturing network is a strategic asset for our business units. We heard Spencer say earlier, we're a manufacturer, not a broker, and it's really our manufacturing network that makes that statement a reality. Our locations across the globe allow us to control lead times for our tailored solutions. Our expanding network allows us to adapt to dynamic geopolitical conditions, supply chain variations. We build quality and reliability into our systems, not just our products.
Our performance is consistent, scalable, and trusted worldwide. We're growing our capacity to produce in lower cost geographies like China and Mexico. That's to serve our customers where acquisition cost drives their choice of display provider. Ramesh talked earlier about operational excellence. I'm going to dive just a little bit deeper there on the next slides. First, advanced automation. Now, we saw in the intro video how we leverage automation in our factories across the global network. We deploy off-the-shelf automation in the areas of our factories where it's available, metal fabrication, electronic assembly, cable assembly areas. New this year, a completely automated powder paint line in one of our factories. We configure and deploy cobots like the one pictured here on this slide, where off-the-shelf automation isn't available.
Advanced automation allows us to stay competitive in our higher cost geographies, allows us to scale our capacity without a proportional growth in labor expense, and it provides consistent quality that protects margins and customer trust. Lean at Daktronics is not a one-time project or a plant-by-plant initiative. It's a repeatable operating system deployed consistently across our global network. Lean allows us to deliver tailoring at scale without sacrificing speed, reliability, or margins. Our manufacturing environment is intentionally high mix, because our customers value responsiveness and solution flexibility. Lean is how we manage that complexity with discipline so that variability doesn't translate into inefficiency or margin pressure. When we think about footprint optimization, it's really about placing the right work at the right location. We balance the total landed cost of our solutions with responsiveness to our customers and other geopolitical factors.
At scale, our footprint decisions become a strategic advantage for our business units. I think you heard that earlier. Optimizing our network supports growth, margin expansion, and resilience simultaneously. Strategic sourcing is not just about price. It's about maximizing the value across the entire spend life cycle. In a company our size, procurement is a strategic profit lever. We're focused on intentional spend management across our direct spend categories like LEDs, power supplies, as well as indirect spend categories like the onsite services that Jody and Sarah provide to our customers. Earlier this morning, we heard about the growth plans from our business unit leaders. Our manufacturing network stands ready to fuel that growth across the globe, delivering the quality and reliability that is second to none while holding the line on costs through advanced automation, lean deployment, network optimization, and best-in-class sourcing. Next, we're going to hear about innovation.
Every great display begins with a single pixel, engineered for precision, consistency, and performance. These pixels are the foundation of everything we create, from bold, iconic installations that redefine entire arenas to storefront and architectural displays that demand the same clarity, reliability, and impact. No matter the scale, quality is never compromised. As customers add more displays in more places and resolutions continue to rise, our control systems scale with them. At the Intuit Dome, more than 250 million pixels operate as one, powered by real-time processing, intelligent content mapping, and system-level control that keeps every moment sharp and seamless.
Behind every display is an ecosystem that connects everything. Control solutions that orchestrate the experience and transform data into dynamic storytelling. Processing hardware that routes and synchronizes content in real time. Cloud software that makes it easy to create content and manage display networks. By engineering a fully integrated system, we give customers the confidence to communicate boldly, consistently, and at scale. Because at Daktronics, innovation isn't just about technology, it's about shaping experiences across every place people connect.
Having an impact on an audience. What an awesome opportunity and a privilege it is to lead the R&D teams that develop the products and the capabilities that enable our customers to have the impact that they're really trying to achieve. I'm Brett Wendler, Vice President of Design and Development at Daktronics. I'm going to talk about innovation, and as we talk about innovation, I'm going to highlight a few things. First, we'll talk about really how we tailor our solution for our customers, the integrated solution that's scalable. I'll get into some of our development priorities as we look across here through the next couple of years. As we think about innovation, it's really what drives the quality of our solutions, but also revenue for Daktronics. Our R&D teams at Daktronics developed large-scale display systems that our customers depend on.
Our sales teams sell, and Matt's manufacturing teams produce. We heard multiple times this morning from our sales leaders. We lead the industry in image quality. We lead the industry in reliability. We also put a real focus on how that product's going to get installed and how it's going to be serviced through its entire life cycle. Now our customers buy so much more than a display. As alluded to earlier, they're really buying the ability to connect and communicate and have an impact on an audience, to bring these large digital canvases to life to really accomplish that impact. For that reason, we developed the software that enable our customers to score that sporting event, to create the content and deliver the content in the right way at the right time, to have the intended impact that they're looking to have on that audience.
Now our R&D teams, our sales teams, software teams, work also closely with our sales teams, but specifically our service teams to really understand how can we help our customers through software maximize that experience throughout its intended life cycle. Our customers, as we heard from Jay, also heard from Judd earlier today and others, have a vision. They have a unique, one of a kind venue or location where they're really looking to connect that audience. You look at Live Events markets that Jay talked about and Jody talked about earlier today. That is typically a one of a kind stadium, one of a kind arena, and they're trying to create that one of a kind experience in that venue.
When they come to Jody and say, "We'd like to have a system like this in our facility," we can say yes, because our solution team that works with Jody can take our products that we have to understand how can we tailor that, because as we saw with the Flame Ball, creating a unique display is rarely a standard rectangle. We do this better than anyone. It's not just the display, it's also the software to match the image across all of those unique displays. That's a key part of what we do. Now we don't tailor only to these unique displays in these unique venues. We also tailor for our customers' specific physical spaces where they're going to connect and communicate with their audience. We have many examples that you saw today where those are standardized solutions.
Ramesh showed a picture earlier of Watertown, South Dakota, where in that basketball arena, they have a large centerhung display and an end wall display. Happens to be the town where I live, about 23,000 people, not that large of a town. If I attend a basketball game on a Saturday afternoon, I would see how that customer in Watertown, they have students operating the system, putting on this amazing show, energizing the crowd, and the away team is going, "Why don't we have a system like this?" They get excited about it, and as a fan, I'm there going, "This was awesome. I need to come back to the next game." That was just really uplifting. It was fun.
Now as I leave the event, I'm driving out of the parking lot to the road and I see a message center. That message center reminds me that, hey, there's an event this Saturday. You might want to consider attending that as well. I'm going to think about that. As I drive down the street, there's a digital billboard that's advertising a new pizza place. Turns out I like pizza.
I haven't tried this place before, but I'll consider it next time. If I'm heading down the freeway, there's a Daktronics system informing me that there's something going on ahead. You might consider that on your route home. I stop for fuel on the way home, and I'm putting gas in the car and I'm looking over. Ice cream. I love ice cream. I'm not going to pay at the pump today. I'm going to go in the store and I'm going to get some of that ice cream.
While I'm there, one of my friends calls and say, "What are you doing tonight? There's a game on tonight. How about we get together and go to that new sports bar? They got this huge screen." People like to come there rather than watching alone at home and have a shared experience. Through all of these examples, really we are tailoring the display system for their physical space and what they're trying to achieve. For the software, we are tailoring the software for their objective. Are they trying to inform or persuade or entertain? Through all of this, we also look at how we can bring the software and the display system together into an integrated solution that's tailored for that application and also scalable.
If you take a look at a scalable type of example, Jay highlighted in the Live Events market, these big systems, and we certainly see them where they're putting them over the ice, over the basketball court in the arenas. There are many displays across there, and not only on the centerhung, but also on the fascia, the end walls, the vomitory displays. They often want to have all of those displays come together to create a unique experience, often to act as a single canvas. Our software solution, Show Control, the Daktronics Show Control solution, we can orchestrate the content across all of those screens simultaneously to really enable them to have that impact. Now as Jeremy mentioned, in the high school market, those customers want to put on as big a show as they possibly can.
As he mentioned, it's pretty powerful in the sales process to go in and really tell them, which is the case. The same technology that we have in that centerhung in the Major League venue is the same technology that we're applying and are going to install in your high school. It's not just the display, it's also the software. As Jeremy talked about, this Crew Connect, students that get the experience using the software in the high school can apply it to their college experience, can apply it to even a professional career. Scaling the solution for both display and software is important. We do this in a way that's integrated. Integration's important because image quality is really important to our customers. We heard that from Jeremy. The Coke red better be the right red.
Green is not just green, it's got to be exactly the right green. It's pretty embarrassing if the home team football jersey color isn't quite the right color orange, and that's really hard to do. We manage image quality across the entire system in the end to help our customer achieve what they're really trying to accomplish. It's not only the first day, month, or year after the system's been installed. That's always exciting. We need to ensure that they achieve that same objective through its entire life cycle, and that's really hard. We focus on the system reliability and serviceability to make that happen. If you ever have a chance to tour Brookings, South Dakota, our headquarters there, we have a reliability lab that no one in our industry has replicated.
We have made a significant investment over the last two decades, really focusing on having the right equipment to enable our engineering teams to test and understand how products will perform before we ever release them to the field. More important than the equipment is the expertise to take those, because those are tools. The tools in the lab, that equipment, those are tools. You have to have people that know how to use those tools to translate that to how our product will perform in the field. As we heard earlier, we've installed product in over 100 countries, and we've installed product in the hottest places and the coldest places, and as Jay Parker mentioned, we've installed them even on cruise ships. One of the things that I have learned is that the seas are not always calm and the sun is not always shining.
When you put a big digital display on the outside of a cruise ship, sometimes the wind is 100 mi an hour and you have 30-foot swells, and it turns out that salt air is really tough on electronics. I have seen putting product on a cruise ship to humble the most confident of engineers, and we do this better than anyone. I'll talk a little bit about industry trends and some of the technology trends that we see today. We've all experienced this trend of resolution and how resolution continues to increase. All the way back to when I really purchased my first video game system back in the 1980s. Any of us watching on a television back then had 300,000 pixels on our television. That was the standard. The characters look like the one on the far left.
Today my kids laugh at that and say, "How could you even play a game that looks like that?" They expect to look like Mario on the right because we have resolution 26x plus on our 4K televisions today and the video game systems and whatnot that take advantage of that. Our customers have had the same experience. Back in 2010, the New England Patriots had 1 million pixels. Now they have over 20 million. At the Intuit Dome, they have over 120 million pixels. That's just the inner ring of the halo. That doesn't even include the 120+ million on the outer ring. Combined, we have just under a 250 million just on the halo, and they have fascia displays, and they have other displays across that entire venue as well.
What's really interesting about that is broadcast TV is only 8.3 million or almost 8.3 million pixels. We have to have the processing to enable our customers to really magnify and amplify the impact across these amazingly large canvases. That's one of the things that we do really well and continue to focus on how we could advance that forward. Adding resolution is not only helpful in the large Live Events or international markets, it's also really important in Jeremy's commercial market. It's not very helpful, or I should say it's kind of helpful, but it's not as impactful to have a display that just has text that says, "Fresh subs made daily." What is impactful is if you're driving along and say, "I'm kind of hungry," and that lettuce and that tomato looks fresh.
That's the impact that our customers want to have, and we need to make it easy for them to have that type of impact. Making it easier to create content and deliver that content in the right way and the right time. With our Venus Control Suite software, that's the key that we use, the key software platform that we use to enable them to do that. As Sarah talked about with Wawa, it's not just the single display that they have out roadside. It's as they expand digital to the other spaces within their venue, we are there to help them tie that all together into a cohesive experience.
One content management system to really enable them to run their entire ad campaign or whatever they have in mind across the whole solution, whether it's across that venue or across multiple venues that they may be operating. We're focused on helping them to do that well at scale. As I move from commercial to more sports, and in this case, Live Events, we have been and we continue to focus on how we can help our customers really amplify the fan experience. In addition to orchestrating all the content on the displays within the arena or the football stadium, for example, we also can orchestrate the light show, the fireworks, whatever they might do to tie it all together so that you have this overall experience going on, like we see here at University of Georgia right before the fourth quarter. It's powerful.
You start jamming the music to it and everything else, and you can't help but get excited. We're a part of helping our customers do that. That's not enough. We need to continue to help our customers engage the audience in that venue to create these one-of-a-kind experiences throughout the event. Increasingly, one of the opportunities to do that is to leverage all of this data that's now available to us in the sports world today. I remember the day where I used to have to get a newspaper on Monday morning to check out all the stats to see how all my favorite players did Sunday during the football game. Those days are long past. Now that data is live, happening during the event, and it creates all these opportunities to improve how we can tell a story during the event in the venue.
That's why we've really invested in continuing to advance the graphics that can be live rendered based on data that's happening and representing what's happening in the field or the court right now. When someone nudges me and says, "Hey, I think the quarterback's having more success throwing to the right as opposed to the left," we can show on the screen visually, instantly, in a way that connects with the audience, what's really, really happening. That's really powerful and engaging for their audience in those venues. Ramesh talked about the L.A. Angels. They are the install. They had their opening day on April 3rd, and they are the first for our latest iteration of our advanced graphics, which we're describing as Camino 8. Jay talked about it earlier today. Sarah did as well.
We're really excited about that, and we're going to continue to focus on advancing this capability and the technology. As we talk about this theme of scaling, we're not going to stop with scaling this within just Live Event venues. We'll look for opportunities to scale it in other parts of our business as well. As we think about trends, another, I would call it a mega trend out there that impacts all of us, is artificial intelligence, AI. Certainly, it's all impacting us in different ways. We need to understand how it's going to impact work as we look forward in the future. At Daktronics, we're really focusing on AI as really a companion to our software development teams. It's a tool, to help us accelerate the value that we're looking to deliver to our customers.
I could see in the future that there'll be opportunities to really simplify how we approach our customers' objectives to create content and deliver content the right way at the right time. As we look at our innovation priorities, we're going to continue to focus on technologies and solutions to increase the resolution and support larger canvases. One of the areas that Spencer talked about with the replacement of LCD for some applications, when you have walk-up pedestrian type traffic, getting enough resolution, LCD was unfortunately the only digital choice for quite some time, and it doesn't last very long, as he alluded to. Three years and it starts to fail. LCD was really designed for the indoor televisions we have in our home.
It can work for a little while, but it's not bright enough and has to be replaced after two to three years and that sort of thing. We see LED is really approaching that tipping point where we're going to start to see some of those opportunities, certainly in Spencer's mass transit applications, but also some areas like street-level advertising, where we could see things start to move towards LED. We're focused on that LCD alternative. From the software perspective, this storytelling at scale, making that easy, and then, where possible, leverage data to help drive and tell the story. As we look at our key development initiatives, on the display side, I alluded to the LCD replacement. We'll continue focusing on that.
We're actually releasing right now this next gen indoor video for Live Events and HSPR, and we'll see that extend to other market verticals here shortly. I alluded to our work on the advanced data graphics. Yes, we installed Camino here, the most recent version at the Los Angeles Angels, where we're going to keep focusing on that. As we think about the opportunities that we have within schools that Jeremy talked about, HSPR, the High School Parks and Rec, as well as moving in the commercial space, we want to help those customers really connect with the community. We know that schools really want community support, and so we're looking for unique ways that we can help them do that by connecting with their audience across physical spaces within the school and how they can extend their message beyond the school.
As we think about tools that enable our customers to configure and build themselves, really, we're looking at indoor systems in particular today where there's lots of spaces a customer want to put a display, and we want to make it easy enough they don't need a technician from Daktronics to install it. For those, they can get a kit and assemble it themselves with some software tools. Not for every application, certainly not the most complex ones. For the ones that are more straightforward, we want to make that very easy for them to do. Those are a couple key initiatives. Overall, I think about technology driving outcomes, really, I'd summarize it like this, amplifying the fan experience. We're going to leverage technology to help do that, and really support the storytelling at scale.
As we do that, we really want to tailor to the customer application, so that it really feels like it was made for them and their situation, what they're trying to accomplish. This integration, really bringing the software all the way through the display system, I think is really important and really differentiates us and helps make Daktronics the clear choice when our customers are really looking to have that impact on their audience, whether they're trying to inform, persuade, or entertain. With that, next is driving EPS growth.
Thank you, Brett. I hope you've all found our presentations today to be meaningful, informative. I hope you picked up on the excitement and the enthusiasm of the team, that is committed to delivering everything that we've been talking about today. I probably should just stop right there and quit while I'm ahead. Being a finance guy, got to get into the numbers. That's my mission this morning with you. I'm going to try to translate what you've heard today about the company's objectives, and the plans that each of our business leaders and functional teams have put together to operate within those objectives, translate that into profit, and EPS specifically. Let's start with going back and explaining how we got to the strategic financial objectives that we've talked about and disclosed publicly for the last three or four quarters.
As Ramesh indicated earlier, about a year ago, the company's Executive team undertook a program to put the company's profit growth trajectory onto a higher, more sustainable path. That's what we've been operating under for the last three or four quarters and continue to operate under. We specifically set, as you've heard today, growth targets, and operating margin targets, the growth 7%-10% compounded growth over the 2025 to 2028 three-year period. Over the same period, getting the company into a 10%-12% operating margin realm. Now, those targets were not set in a vacuum. The way we went about setting those targets at the time we undertook the program was to first look at ROIC.
The research that we did at the time indicated that top-performing publicly traded companies in the United States were typically, not all of them, but typically operating with ROICs in the high teens kind of range. That's where we started our objective setting. As you know, for any given level of ROIC, there are different combinations of growth and operating margin that can get you there. What we tried to do is set realistic targets for both growth and operating margin, that the company felt it could achieve. We looked at things like addressable markets. We looked at a whole variety of initiatives that were agreed to by the company three or four quarters ago on cost savings and so on. We came up with the ranges that I just articulated.
We purposely set our objectives in terms of ranges, in part, yes, they give us a little wiggle room, but more importantly, recognizing that a large percentage of the company's business is project-related, which is typically a little bit harder to predict in terms of size and timing in any given year or any given quarter. We've been operating under these ranges now for three or four quarters. What we haven't disclosed, and what I'm now about to show you, is what these ranges of growth and operating margin mean on the bottom line. We haven't actually given you the dollars associated with these two target objectives that we've set. Here are the dollars.
Basically, as you can see, if you looked at 2028, and if you bracket the operating income that we might achieve in 2028, within the upper and lower limits of the growth target and the operating margin target, our operating income in 2028 would be between $93 million on the bottom and $121 million on the top. Just as an example, if you take 7% revenue growth, the lower end of the revenue growth target and 10% operating margin, we'd be at the $93 million. If we got as high as 10% compound revenue growth during that three-year period to 2028, with a 12% margin, we'd be at the $121 million.
Essentially, what we're saying to you in this chart is by reconfirming as we've done today, Ramesh said earlier, and I'm going to say it again, we're reconfirming the 7%-10% compounded revenue growth targets, and the 10%-12% operating margin targets. We're basically confirming to you that we expect to operate the company between $93 million-$121 million of operating, pre-tax operating income in 2028. Of course, absent any unexpected non-recurring costs that we have in that particular period. Let's take a look now at what this means or potentially may mean in terms of earnings per share. That's what this chart is showing you. Take the same operating income numbers for 2028, bracket it again by our objectives, so this is within the box of the growth and the margin objectives and the operating income numbers that I just showed you.
I added one extra line on the bottom for a 9% margin since we're coming at the 10%-12% from underneath it, whereas we're already in the range on the growth side, which I'll explain in a second. Here you can see what the spread of EPS would look like on the assumption that our share count would remain roughly where it was at the end of the third quarter, roughly $49 million of fully diluted shares, and that our effective tax rate would be 22%. Our effective tax rate does vary from one quarter to the next, and as we go through time, our public disclosure will spend a little more time explaining how our tax rate does change from one quarter to the next.
For purposes of analysis at this point and modeling, we think 22% going forward is probably a good estimate to use for our tax rate along with that share count. You can see the numbers. Again, if we operate at the bottom, the $93 million operating income, our EPS in 2028 would be at a $1.46, so that's the 7% growth, 10% margin. If we operated at the top end of the box, 10% growth rate over the time period with a 12% margin, our EPS could be as high as $1.90. That's the range. In terms of where we have been so far in the last, roughly speaking, the last nine months year-to-date numbers that we just disclosed with our third quarter results roughly corresponds to the period of time that we've been operating under this program.
Our revenue growth year-over-year in that nine-month period was 8%, so we're in the range that you see here. Our operating margin during that same nine-month period was 7.5% up from 6% in the prior period. Our margin has been moving in the right direction, and our growth rate is already within the range. That's the math, and then the question becomes what are the key assumptions that we're planning on in terms of how to get into the range here of EPS numbers that I just showed you, and what are the key things that have to happen that we believe in that you need to believe in terms of being able to operate within that box of EPS numbers? Let me go through some of these things quickly.
On the assumption side, we've talked today in each of our businesses, and Ramesh talked earlier about our growth rate and the market's growth rate. As we think about our modeling, we are planning on growth that is either at or slightly above what each of the TAMs are in each of the markets that we operate in. In terms of pricing, those of you who've tracked us over the last nine months, you know that we adopted value-based selling, value-based pricing as we started this program. That has been very successfully implemented, and we will continue to do so. We are assuming here and there in our modeling some pricing increases apart from value-based, just normal market increases here and there in the program, but nothing substantial. Tariff, of course, comes up.
The assumptions that we would make in our modeling for tariffs are no change in the current percentages, no change in the current rates, simply because we just don't know which way to peg it. We think the best assumption that we would make in our modeling is to just assume constant rates. In terms of refunds, similarly, until things are clarified on the refund side, our approach here would be to protect our rights for a refund. But in our modeling, not to assume any refund. Both of these things are probably more of an opportunity for us as we model going forward, since we've been consistently since the reciprocal tariffs were originally instituted, looking for ways of mitigating and continue to look for ways of mitigating tariffs.
On the refund side, again, that's probably more of an opportunity for us than anything else. But t o be conservative, this is kind of a tariff neutral plan that we would evolve for ourselves here. That brings us to what we've been talking about today, and the team has been talking about, Ramesh outlined at the start. In order for us to continue to operate within this EPS box, two things have to happen. We have to achieve the strategic growth initiatives that we've been talking about. That means, as you have heard, continuing to grow in the core. The program that we outlined nine months ago, we're still on that track, continuing to operate against it, go deeper into it, and get both the growth and the margin expectations that were associated with growing the core.
That will be supplemented with, again, the initiatives you've been hearing all morning from my colleagues, and particularly things like building out the software and service initiatives, which impacts each of our businesses. Sarah is working with the team on the roadmap for that, which we expect to be finished very shortly here, and for the reasons we articulated earlier, will represent a serious opportunity to improve the ROIC of the company, basically. Recurring revenue, better margin, and low capital intensity will by definition improve ROIC for the company as we build out the service and software side of the business. New markets we've talked about. You've heard the market shares that we have already in each of our businesses. We expect to continue to improve market share in each of the businesses.
New markets will bring additional growth in areas where we know we can win, but don't yet have the kind of market shares that we have in our core businesses. That will, by definition, add to the growth rate of the company without compromising our ability to bump up against a market share. On the international side, question was asked before about improving margin on the international growth. On the international side, Ramesh and Judd talked about growth. There are markets where we know we can build at good margins. This is, in part, a capital reallocation or portfolio management issue as we kind of reallocate capital from the lower margin sectors in the international to the markets where we can get higher margin and grow faster.
That's the story on strategic growth that really underpins our confidence in being able to be within that EPS matrix. Importantly, on the operational excellence side, very critical. When I showed you the EPS matrix earlier, you might have noted that operational excellence, getting the cost savings, actually has a bigger impact on incremental EPS growth than getting the growth. Both are important. We have to do both the growth side of it and the operational excellence side. As you know, mathematically, a dollar worth of cost savings just drops right to the bottom line. The things we've mentioned today, automation is critical here. That will both reduce our total costs, our structural costs, as well as improve the relationship between fixed and variable costs in the company. We'll lower our fixed costs. We've talked about lean deployment in our manufacturing sector.
Frankly, that will be adopted throughout the company. The company is very rapidly adopting a more cost-conscious culture, and that will have a big impact on us. We've talked about the footprint. Mexico is now in the mix. We're looking at the entire footprint, which we quite frankly didn't get around to a year ago when we first looked at our structural costs, with a view towards making sure that we have enough capacity to grow the organization, but capacity managed as efficiently as possible and in the right places. Procurement we've touched upon. Those of you who may remember the program that we initiated a year ago, we did take a look at procurement. There have been things done on the procurement side.
What we're talking about now is going deeper into and more aggressively into the direct procurement opportunities that we see, as well as expanding the procurement program into the indirect opportunities. We expect that to be an important aspect of our business. That's the strategy. Here are the key assumptions. Here are the strategies, both on the growth initiatives and the operational excellence that underpin our confidence in being able to operate in that EPS matrix that I showed you on the previous slide. That's the strategy. As you know, strategy is one of two things that are really critical for success.
Along with the strategy comes the ability to execute. There's a lot of things that have to be executed here, and that comes back to the team. I hope you've heard the enthusiasm, the dedication, the confidence that we all have in executing our plans, and that, we think, is really the thing that's going to make a difference going forward for us in terms of getting to those higher EPS numbers that I showed you. With that, I'd like to turn the floor back to Ramesh.
Thank you. I just say thank you for just your support over the last 57 years and 32 years as a public company. Two, thank you for being with us on the journey ahead as we build this. We are committed. Lastly, thank you to my team, to the 2,500+ employees who make this happen every day, that we could come and represent the great work that they do. Thank you. As I get to the closing comments, we are excited and absolutely energized to be here. This is fun. This is a great business. Those who know me, I wake up at 3:44 A.M., and every day when I wake up, the spirit feels good.
You know you can go make a difference with this team out here, with the people we have, with the support we have. We can go make that difference, and I think that starts with that winning mindset that I talk about. As we spoke before, we're committed to the 7%-10% CAGR. As we look at our operating margin, we're looking at the 10%-12% range, and the ROIC in the 17%-20%. I also talk with this about our executives, our teams being aligned. We've been through this journey of an executive-aligned compensation, making sure that we're committed as we look at the different pieces of the equation, as the Lego blocks come together to build these experiences, we can pull it together so we're committed in terms of making sure this happens. We spoke about capital priorities.
Deploying our cash for us is critical. Getting the right return for you is very critical. I want to reiterate our strong cash position, a lack of debt, allows us to be forward-thinking in where we need to get to. Combination of organic, combination of our inorganic areas, which we are, and I want to openly say we're open for deals that we want to go start looking at, start working through. Third, making sure we do the right appropriate stock buybacks in order to ensure the EPS, but also our long-term growth is taken care of, is important to us. I'm going to again state that going back through our high-level views, we look at a high single- digit to low double-digit growth rates in our CAGR. Clearly margin improvement is a combination of our growth as well as operational excellence.
I call them the two sides of the coin. It is important as we look at both of these to ensure we can bring you the right return. Again, we commit back to the numbers that we just stated before, and this is something the management team and I are very, very committed towards to jointly make sure we bring this back as value to you. When I talk about the management team, we had a set of presenters here, but we actually got our entire management team present here, because what we want to represent is that each and every one of us needs to come together to ensure we can bring this out. Working through our amazing employee base that is customer centric, that is focused on delivering what's needed for the customer. This is an important vision where we need to take to.
Strategy, the execution, but the people all need to come together to make this successful for us. That is something we take accountability on. On behalf of the team, I'm here to say that's what we are standing up for, and we want to make sure that at the end of the day, we have this mutual sense of purpose to you as shareholders in making sure we can get to where we need to.
Thank you again for your trust in what you placed in us and for the years ahead. We are energized and excited, and we wouldn't do this without you. Thank you for making this fun. We enjoy doing this every day. With that, give us about a minute. We'll go to the last round of the Q&A, and I know everyone's getting hungry, but we'll make sure we do the question answers fast and give us about a minute or so. We'll get it set up, and we'll pull all the presenters who presented so far, so we have a quorum for you guys. Thank you again.
Good to see you again. Thank you. Yeah, we got to catch up. Talk about how we're thinking about it. That'll be helpful. We could brainstorm with you how I also kind of see this from, A, international, to transportation, and third, clearly from how we see the different logics.
Yeah. I was telling Andrew as well, we're at the wrong microphone, for sure.
Okay. We have 20-25 minutes of questions. We'll have a hard stop around 1:00 P.M. for lunch. Please ask questions. If you don't mind, identify yourself before you ask the question would be helpful.
Thanks, everyone. This is Connor Haley from Alta Fox. I guess, on one of the last slides, showing the EPS matrix, obviously the EPS matrix shown, as you pointed out on the slide, was slightly below consensus, but it assumes a flat share count, so no buybacks, also no M&A activity, presumably. I guess the question is, what is the plan? We've heard about capital allocation for a while. I understand we're building a corporate development group, but the business is generating a lot of cash.
We have close to record backlogs. Why not be more aggressive with the buyback here? We could push that EPS above consensus. We'd still have significant cash for M&A. We used to be a dividend payer. Are we going to ever bring back the dividend? It seems like there's ample opportunity today to return cash to shareholders. We could get a big shareholder authorization. I guess what is holding back being more aggressive on buybacks today, given we presumably could still do M&A, we could still do a dividend. We have a lot of firepower.
There's nothing holding us back, Connor. The question is, where do we get the best returns? What we're saying here is, yes, we have the flexibility to do all of the above. As we evolve our plans in the next few months, it depends on where we think the best opportunities are. Yes, we're generating a lot of cash. That mathematically is the case. You look back at the last year, our pre-tax income in the last nine months is roughly $50 million. The numbers that we're showing you here are obviously above that, so we're going to be generating cash at a higher rate than we have generated cash even to get to this point.
We're also going to be reinvesting some of that cash, at least in more CapEx, for example. There is going to be reinvestment into the company. We are going to be doing acquisitions that make sense for the organization, and we will be doing share repurchase. How much at any moment in time is the relative amount going to depend on where we get the best opportunity for you?
I guess just one follow-up. How do you think about the optimal capital allocation for the business, really the leverage profile, right? As we get through this period, and we have a strategic plan where we have a lot of momentum, we're pushing towards that. But we've got $150 million or so cash on the balance sheet. We're generating a lot of cash. Are we always going to run a net cash balance? What's the level of cash you want to keep on the balance sheet? Could we run it 1x leverage over time to do an acquisition, as you guys think about the pipeline? How do we think about the optimal leverage or cash on the balance sheet as we think about optimizing shareholder returns within the context of the three-year transformation plan?
Okay. A couple of things on that. Number one, we never want to run out of cash. All right? The company, as you know, three years ago, had a going concern problem. We're not ever going to go back to that. Having come from the banking system where banks fail for running out of cash, we ain't going there. Judgmentally, we think that we should keep $40 million-$50 million at a minimum of cash on the balance sheet. In terms of leverage, depending upon M&A again, I wouldn't want to see, and I don't think we can see given we have debt covenants and our backup credit line, for example. On the other side, 3x is probably way too much.
We're talking about at most 2.5x leverage on one side and at least keeping $50 million worth of cash on the balance sheet would be the parameters on both sides. Again, how much and how quickly we spend that is going to depend on where the right returns are going to be. Yes, and you and I have talked about this before, if you believe the range of EPS numbers that we showed you, share buyback makes sense from a financial point of view. The flip side of that is that reinvesting in the business and doing M&A not only can generate the returns, but also build a better and bigger company, which share repurchase doesn't do. Again, it comes down to a combination of where do you get the best returns and how can we build the best company possible?
Thank you for taking my question. Anja Soderstrom with Sidoti. What do you see as the biggest driver for the margin expansion?
Biggest driver for the margin expansion?
Yeah. Is it going to be revenue growth or the efficiency? How do you bucket that?
Well, it depends on which margin you're talking about, operating margin or gross profit margin.
The operating margin that you're guiding to.
Operating margin. Again, both growth and the expense programs we've talked about will improve the operating margin. Growth will improve the operating margin, both because we're putting extra dollars of revenue on the books, but also because we do have fixed costs. As we get growth, our revenue will tend to grow faster than our overall costs, just as a fact. That will help improve margins. The bigger issue is the four vectors that Ramesh outlined, and my colleagues have outlined in terms of procurement, automation, lean, and the network. That will make a big difference in terms of operating margin for the company. We're going to be concentrating on that quickly, as one of our most important priorities, and hope to get that margin expansion as quickly as we can.
Now, margin will also come about because of improvement in gross profit margin, as we build out the businesses, continue with value-based pricing, as the higher margin businesses grow. Again, there is a certain amount of fixed cost in gross profit margin. As we build the revenue side of GP margin, we should get some margin expansion just from that.
Hi, Jenny from Gabelli Funds. I guess, what is the market missing here? I think you guys present a very compelling case, and what's being underappreciated that's going to drive the stock price here? It seems like more of a growth compounding earnings growth compounder story. I know there's the SaaS storyline, is there anything that might drive a multiple re-rating or any catalyst coming up?
What is the market missing? I'm not sure the market is missing anything. I think we can provide better disclosure around the factors that people are asking questions about. The business mix, the growth rate, what specifically we're doing on expenses, how things are evolving from one quarter to the next, will all help, I think, get the market better educated and, as we've tried to do today with you, explain really how the businesses operate and where the businesses are heading, and track that for you as we go from one quarter to the next.
We have a question from the online audience. Do the software and services economics and pricing change depending on the ed market they're being deployed into, for example, HSPR versus pro sports deployments?
You want to do it? Sure. Sarah, since she did one.
Yep, absolutely. I think as we go into our different markets, into our different customers, as I presented earlier today, each one has a unique value proposition. It might be similar when we think across sports. They all want to achieve the same thing. They want to entertain fans. But how a high school might go to do it would look different than a pro level. High schools have different resources, have different levels of equipment. You would see a difference in, one, how we might go to market, and then also on what that software as a service revenue would look like, depending on the size and the scale of the different customers that we would be approaching.
We're on a journey to continue to understand each one of those market segments, really, truly identify what it is that those customers value and what they're willing to pay for, and then aligning the right software and services to match that to really maximize not only use for our customers, but also the value proposition for Daktronics.
Aaron Spychalla, Craig-Hallum. Could you just talk a little bit about some of the factors that get you to the high end of the revenue outlook, certain verticals that might drive that? Just any more granularity on the investments from a capital investment standpoint as we think about just CapEx the next couple of years?
I think the factors would be basically executing the strategic initiatives and the operational excellence initiatives. When we do our planning, we always start with a base and some conservative assumptions around what that might mean. We could be more aggressive in doing that. Again, that involves accelerated and larger reinvestment in the business, so more CapEx along with that. As Connor has mentioned, and others have mentioned, we are planning on generating cash at a fairly substantial rate. It's just on these trajectories, on the strategic initiative trajectories, both growth and margin, pursuing that quickly and getting the most out of that would really be the opportunities on the upside. Then whatever we decide to do on M&A would add to that. Because none of what we showed you before would include any specific M&A programs, but we know there are opportunities.
Just again, any more granularity on some of the capital needs as you think about building out the services platform or capacity on the manufacturing side, just any other thoughts there?
There will be needs. Automation, for example, will need a CapEx. I think you've got it there. You've got the service initiatives. As the company grows, obviously its working capital requirements are going to go up. You've got lots of different places in the organization where more capital is going to be needed to be expended internally.
I think as we outlined it, clearly the capital is going to go towards areas like automation, factory, other areas that we truly believe are important to create a geopolitical balance. This is also being amplified by the geopolitical changes that happen all the time. As we go through our calculations, we want to make sure we are well-balanced to go cater to the customer. That's one. Two is, I think for software and hardware development, that is a critical component of our build. Some will be OpEx and some is going to be CapEx. Just as we try to ensure we're able to, A, globally balance, but two, also build towards what each of these segments needs. We are catering, as Sarah mentioned, to the customer base and being close to what they want.
Any other questions? Carolyn?
Okay. How will increasing software and services share be accomplished? How are you changing your pricing and contracting strategy to increase the amount of software and services included in the initial contract when a system is sold?
Sarah?
Jay.
Jay.
You want to start?
I think I can start. I think we look at Major League Sports. It depends on the capabilities and the functionalities that they're looking for in the software, and that helps us with our pricing model. There will be a software fee. We currently charge a software fee today. Camino 8 will take this next advanced graphic feature, which will be another fee. There will be Software Service Agreements into the future. It gives us a great opportunity to expand what we're currently doing with our customer s.
A lot of our customers value what we're doing, and we want to make sure that we keep giving them updates to the software, new features, new functionalities, because there's competition for entertainment dollars, and they got to put on a great show to try and encourage their customers to come back. Whether the team is winning or losing, they want to make sure they continue to encourage the team, encourage people to come back to their facilities and watch their events. I think we'll do well with that.
I would say broadly across the platforms that we offer, we have offered software as a service for many years. We haven't necessarily always monetized it in the way that we potentially can, and we're recognizing that as we're seeing this shift into monetization of software as a service, there's an opportunity for Daktronics there. That's one of the areas we're continuing to explore and to move into. In fact, over the last year and a half, we've released two different platforms, and we're working on the third one.
One would be what Jeremy talked about, which is the DakClassroom, which is an online subscription for our high schools. In addition to that, we've also released a program called FrameWrx, which is a content creation tool that can be used both for our high schools as well as our On-Premise. There's this appetite for our customers to consume software in a different way than they have in the past through a software as a service model, which is promising for us, not only today, but out into the future.
I think to add to that, our customers have come to us, right? Part of what we are looking at is a customer advisory council that sits across each of these different areas where they're actually sitting with us to develop what's needed. There is an ownership coming from a customer perspective where they want to have the best hardware, the best quality, but also have the reliability of the software that they trust. I think that we see as a very big positive, where it's not just us pushing it to a customer.
This is actually a large sports venue or others who are coming to us to say, "We would love for you to go build this and create this environment that'll take us forward." We see that at the High School level. We see that at the Live Events level when you start looking at the spectrum. That, we believe, is a very big positive. It's not just a push, it's also a pull. That's a great place for us to be.
Okay. Well, thank you. If there are no more questions, I hope that this day has been informative for you. Let's enjoy some lunch together.
Team comes off. Just want to say, as you walk out, we talk about all the experiences where things are. As you walk out, as you just step into Times Square today, most of the displays, the software that runs it is us. All I'm going to say is, as you walk out and you are headed home tonight, and I wouldn't be as good as Brett in explaining the ice cream and the pizza, but I would surely say look up and you'll see Daktronics. We're just grateful for you guys. Thank you for being here with us. As more questions come up, we are available. We're excited about the journey ahead. Thank you once again.