Hello. I'm Brian Lantz, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. It's a real privilege to gather virtually with you today, and on behalf of the entire Ferguson team, welcome to our 2022 Virtual Investor Day. Our real hope is that when it's safe to do so, we're able to meet with investors and analysts later this year in one of our locations, like our state-of-the-art market distribution center in Denver. Before we get started, I do want to remind you that the presentation contains forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. A copy of the slide deck that accompanies this presentation is available on our website and contains the full cautionary note on forward-looking statements, along with additional information that we may discuss.
As usual, Pete Kennedy, Director of IR, and myself can be reached to answer follow-up questions that you may have after today's event. This is an exciting time for Ferguson. We have overcome industry supply chain challenges, met increasing customer demand, and gained significant market share to deliver outstanding performance. Meanwhile, last March, we stood up our additional listing on the New York Stock Exchange and have been hard at work moving to U.S. GAAP reporting and becoming SOX compliant as we move towards making New York our primary listing. All of this is in line with the two-step process that we outlined following our comprehensive consultation with shareholders back in 2020.
Importantly, the next step in moving our primary listing to the U.S. will be a shareholder vote, which as noted in the announcement this morning, we are expecting to hold on or about March tenth of this year. Our succinct presentation today is primarily a kickoff to our anticipated U.S. primary listing this spring, with a focus on creating awareness of our significant value creation opportunity with U.S. investors and analysts. We are eager to share more about our scale, our track record of outperformance, and more importantly, the growth opportunities in front of us. Throughout our conversation today, we will also discuss our approach to ESG, as it is woven into our responsible approach to growth and our opportunity to promote sustainable choices for our customers and our suppliers.
We intend to publish our first standalone ESG report later this spring to provide more holistic perspective on our responsible approach to growth. Today, our Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Murphy, will share his thoughts on what makes Ferguson unique and our important role in the value chain. He'll also walk you through real-life examples of how every day we guide our customers across North America in making their complex projects more simple, successful, and sustainable. He'll bring to life our core strengths and growth opportunities, both in the near and long term. Our Chief Financial Officer, Bill Brundage, will share how Ferguson consistently outperforms and our potential to drive even more shareholder value through organic growth, acquisitions, and returning capital to shareholders. We will close with our growth outlook, and then following a short break, we'll welcome your questions.
With that, it's my pleasure to now introduce Ferguson CEO, Kevin Murphy.
Thank you, Brian. Hello, good morning, good afternoon, and on behalf of the entire Ferguson team, thank you for joining us today. We truly appreciate your time. As Brian said, we very much look forward to meeting with you in person in the near future. Before we get started today, I'd also like to acknowledge and thank our leadership team, our board, and our more than 30,000 associates across North America who wake up every day with a shared mission to make our customers' projects better because they worked with Ferguson. It's truly an exciting time for our company. We've recently reported exceptional results for fiscal year 2021 and have an incredible team in place to continue to deliver.
For those just getting to know us, today's presentation will give you a better idea of who is Ferguson, and for those of you who have known us through the years, we'll help you understand our path forward and our significant value creation opportunity as a North American company. Who is Ferguson? Our associates wake up every day working to make our customers' complex projects simple, successful, and sustainable. We are a relationship business. We're an integral part of the new construction and RMI, large and small. From underground water and sewer infrastructure to rough and finish plumbing to HVAC, lighting, appliances, and more, we work hard to make our customers more productive and their projects more successful. Ferguson is the leading North American value-added distributor, with operations across Canada and the United States. At our core, we are a value-added distributor.
We do so much more than just move boxes. Whether we're working on a walk-in bathtub renovation, a new residential subdivision, an NFL stadium, or the largest wastewater treatment plant in the United States, we offer a unique set of value-added solutions. Today, we'll talk more about how we're involved in design, staging, project management, and much more. In everything we do and across all our customer groups, we take a consultative process, serving as a trusted partner to guide projects to a successful conclusion. We're proud of our historical financial performance. Last year, we generated roughly $23 billion in revenue and $2.1 billion in adjusted operating profit, with over a 34% return on capital employed. Our organization has consistently driven above-market revenue growth, coupled with gross margin expansion, which we view as the best reflection of the value-added solutions we provide to the marketplace.
We've taken a balanced approach to our end markets. This balanced business mix, with 56% residential, 44% non-residential, 60% RMI, 40% new construction, has and will continue to serve us well. This very intentional balance not only allows us to participate in attractive markets, but also drives a more resilient business mix. Our business is well-positioned in the value chain, bridging the gap between 34,000 suppliers and over 1 million customers. We connect this large and fragmented supplier base with an even larger and more fragmented customer base, and we do that by delivering global scale locally. We deliver products and projects on time and in full for more than 1,600 final mile locations that are located within 60 miles of 95% of the U.S. population.
We offer the best local breadth and depth of product availability backed by the industry's strongest supply chain. This is built on a foundation of the industry's most knowledgeable associates and a palpable sales and service culture with an unrelenting passion to serve our customers. We augment our associates' knowledge and deep, long-standing relationships with the best digital tools in the industry. We talked earlier about value-added distribution. We work to ensure every day that as a baseline, we deliver a seamless, single SKU, unaided electronic transaction delivered same day or next day, but that's not what makes us who we are. That's not our core. We make sure that complex projects move smoothly and productively, and that these projects are better because Ferguson was involved.
It doesn't matter if it's a pure play e-commerce customer, where over half our revenue still has a consultative experience through a phone call, chat, or email, or whether it's a commercial contractor that has an outside sales team working on the construction of a university building. This need to add value, this consultative culture, is really who Ferguson is. This is built on a solid foundation of leading a responsible business. We are committed to making a difference through our work. Our ESG framework illustrates this approach and guides our actions. We are proud to have solid ratings from organizations like MSCI, Sustainalytics, and CDP. These illustrate the progress that we've made over the last decade, but we have more to do. Recognizing the need for more ambitious actions to limit the amount of global warming, we have set more challenging goals for carbon reduction.
These include a target to reduce our Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions by 35% per $1 million of revenue by 2026. To achieve this, we will increase the use of renewable energy across our business. We will complete significant conversions in LED lighting and efficient HVAC equipment. Our fleet remains a significant portion of our Scope 1 emissions, and ultimately, reductions in these emissions will require an accelerated conversion of our medium-duty and our heavy-duty fleet to electric vehicles. That said, electrification technology in these classes continues to face challenges, including range and payload capacity. We will pilot electric vehicle projects, and we remain committed to improve the efficiency of our fleet and reduce our overall fuel consumption. We also recognize that Scope 3 emissions represent a significant proportion of our total carbon emissions.
While these aren't directly within our control, we remain committed to working proactively with our customers and our suppliers to reduce their emissions. We will collaborate to make an impact in categories like water heaters, HVAC, and appliances. Our long-term goal remains to align with the Science Based Targets initiative. We are committed to transparency in our ESG disclosures, and we report in line with TCFD and SASB. We are successful because we have the best associates who deliver for our customers even in the most challenging of times. That is why we are so focused on health and safety, and we remain committed to being first in safety. We promote a culture of inclusion and diversity. We invest our time and our talents in the communities we live and work through our Ferguson Cares program with a strong focus on housing, the skilled trades, and clean water and sanitation.
We're proud of the governance in place to ensure we remain focused on driving long-term shareholder value and maintain ethical and compliant business practices at all times. We approach our ESG opportunity in terms of our footprint, our internal responsibility to lessen our impact, and our handprint, our external opportunity to influence a greener, healthier, safer, and more sustainable future. As Brian said in our opening, we look forward to sharing more about our ESG journey, and we intend to publish our first standalone ESG report this spring. During our time today, we'll talk more about what makes our company unique. Let's start with why Ferguson? First, we hold leading positions in large, growing, and fragmented markets. Roughly 75% of U.S.
Revenue is generated from number one or number two positions in the market. Not only is our supplier base fragmented, not only is our customer base quite fragmented, but our competitor base is highly fragmented, with more than 10,000 small and medium-sized, mostly privately held competitors. The flexibility of our business model and the very intentional balance of our growth creates resiliency. The markets we compete in have historically grown 2%-3% above GDP. We believe there are structural characteristics that give us confidence that these markets will continue to be supportive. Secondly, our scale allows us to deliver sustainable market outperformance. On average, we delivered 350 basis points of U.S. organic market outperformance over the last five years. We are confident in our ability to continue to outperform by leveraging a base of core strengths. Value-added solutions.
Value-added solutions that make our customers' complex projects simple, successful, and sustainable. Again, not just moving boxes, but enabling greater construction productivity. Supply chain that delivers the best breadth and depth for our customers, where and when they need it. A suite of digital tools that offer our customers both productivity and an omni-channel experience that drives sustainable advantage. Our associates, our people, a true sales culture leveraging long-standing relationships with our supplier base, our customers, and the communities that we serve. We complement our organic growth model by consolidating our fragmented markets with consistent bolt-on acquisitions. We employ a two-pronged acquisition strategy focused on geographic expansion and acquisitions that give us new capabilities, such as valve automation, fabrication, or Ferguson-owned brands. We combine these acquisitions with our scale and our capabilities to further drive over-market organic growth.
In the past five years, we've completed 44 acquisitions, delivering 240 basis points of incremental annual revenue growth. All this has produced a long-term track record of outperformance and cash generation by a dedicated team with extremely deep experience in our business. Over the past 10 years, our revenue and underlying trading profit compounded annual growth rates were 8.3% and 13.9%, respectively. The cash generative nature of our business model funds organic investment in our business and produces a sustainable and growing dividend. Over the past 10 years, we've returned $8.5 billion to shareholders. Through the rest of our time today, we'll talk through how we intend to continue with this value creation. With that as an outline, let's go a bit deeper into each of these areas.
Beginning with our leading positions in large and attractive markets. We stay very focused on the unique needs of the customer in each of our nine customer groups. That said, these customer groups work together to make the whole of the new construction or RMI project simple, successful, and sustainable, not only for the trade professional, but also for the GC, the developer, or the homeowner. Each of these nine customer groups compete in large, growing, and fragmented markets with ample runway to go after, both organically and through roll-up M&A. We have leading and scaled positions in each of these groups, with over 75% of our U.S. revenue coming from number one or number two market positions. Together, our platform serves these customer groups with the advantage of scale that yields strong sales and profit growth.
We leverage not only supply chain and technology, but also associate recruitment, training and development, global product sourcing, acquisition infrastructure, and much, much more. Most importantly, we work together for the trades, for the general contractor, and for the owner, with Ferguson being the first on the job site and the last off. Our customers and our customer's customer benefit from Ferguson being on the project. The overlap and interaction of our supplier base, product needs, project management, and value-added solutions make new construction and RMI more seamless. This comes together as a $23 billion leading position in a $300 billion North American market opportunity. Our balanced approach to our end markets allows us to leverage scale in attractive markets with a less cyclical and a more resilient business model.
Sure, market growth rates will differ over time, but we will consistently work to maintain balance while we take advantage of growth opportunities. This approach has served us well. As we look to the future, we believe we will continue to operate in strong and supportive markets. Our residential markets were attractive and growing pre-COVID, and have accelerated in the past year in both new construction and in RMI. On the residential new construction side, which is roughly 20% of our overall business, U.S. housing stock is underbuilt by roughly 3.8 million units. As we exited the 2008, 2009 downturn, we as a nation have not kept pace with household formation, immigration, second homes, and housing demands from natural disaster. We've only recently been at or above the 1.5 million unit pace to achieve our historical equilibrium.
Historically low mortgage rates, they continue to be supportive, but with a new generation of homeowners that are driving strong demand. As we look to a post-COVID environment, the future of remote work and further expansion from urban areas supports single-family new construction. On the RMI side, post-COVID, the home is the office, the gym, the school, the sanctuary, et cetera. Together with the aging housing stock and strong home price appreciation, residential RMI is expected to remain strong. Again, we will intentionally maintain the balance of new construction and RMI as it supports a more resilient and a healthy business model. On the non-residential side, our diverse end markets, coupled with macro trends, are expected to drive continued growth.
As we've discussed in recent earnings calls, there are bright spots in the commercial market in areas like data centers and distribution facilities needed to support supply chains and growing e-commerce fulfillment. We're seeing similar increased activity in areas like healthcare and education, as well as the natural commercial growth that follows residential build-out. Industrial activity is improving, and our contractor customers have benefited from improved access for repair and maintenance shutdown work. Additionally, we see growth over the medium term with reshoring of manufacturing capacity and the knock-on build-out of distribution network capacity. In civil infrastructure, we continue to see strong public works demand with a reasonable anticipation for future work, given the historical under-investment in water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure.
This will no doubt accelerate with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but we don't see a marked near-term impact given the current labor and the current demand picture. If we take a step back, large, growing, fragmented markets, but one of the key things that we come back to is our intentional and balanced business mix. We are a very different company than we were going into the Great Recession, when we were focused more heavily on new construction. We have intentionally shifted our focus to move to more resilient repair, maintenance, and improvement markets, and we are well positioned with a 60-40 RMI new construction mix. Our scale, coupled with our balanced business, provides a more attractive margin profile and greater resilience through the cycle. As we look to our end markets, they have consistently grown faster than GDP. Over the past five years, our U.S.
Markets have outpaced GDP by 220 basis points, and we have a proven track record of growth over that market. Ferguson has an organic growth culture with an experienced team, a deep understanding of customer needs, and longstanding customer relationships that have generated over-market growth roughly 350 basis points over the last five years. We have an acquisition model that consolidates these fragmented markets and has delivered an additional 240 basis points of annual growth. All in, that's delivered average annual growth just shy of 10% in the U.S. over the last five years. Our ability to deliver global scale locally is a core strength and a core competitive advantage. We will leverage the strengths of this unique platform that we've built from the ground up over the last seven decades.
We constantly challenge ourselves to create value-added solutions that make our customers' projects simple, successful, and sustainable, solutions that increase productivity for our customers and for the industry in a trade labor world that is incredibly challenged. Our global supply chain truly enhances our local relationships with unparalleled product availability, both breadth and depth, branded and own brand. Our omnichannel, our digital investments that have helped us make our customers' jobs easier. We are agnostic as to how our customers wish to order, interact, and receive product. We continue to look to digital investments to make our deep personal relationships with customers just as strong digitally. Our associates, they are and always have been the foundation of Ferguson. We attract, develop, engage, and retain the best talent to our company and to our industry. We are a relationship business.
That relationship starts with a unique ability to solve a customer's problem, and it blossoms into a true partnership. As I said before, our real value is helping to make our customers' projects simple, successful, and sustainable. We bring order to chaos, and we solve for complexity. This isn't represented by one silver bullet, not one individual service or piece of functionality, but more so by a suite of services that really depend on the project and that particular customer. These range from having the best product breadth and depth with access to over 3.5 million SKUs in our active product file, own brand products giving us exclusive solutions in the marketplace, exclusive branded relationships, global sourcing capabilities, project takeoff services, value engineering, a consultative approach to help our customers meet their sustainability goals, reducing carbon emissions and conserving water.
Virtual design services providing a constructible model for our customer. Off-site fabrication services. Valve automation and actuation. Project staging, section by section, floor by floor, street by street, delivered just in time. When our customers need it, we offer complete project management, oftentimes over months and even years, with thousands of line items and hundreds of deliveries and pickups. We'll take a bit of time to talk about a few of these solutions, starting with sourcing and the execution of our product strategy. Our associates, our customers, and our supplier partners all are critical to our business. We strive to be our suppliers' best path to market. We work to remove costs from their supply chain, provide them speed to market, be a source of data and information, and most importantly, we drive demand for their products. We do that by being our customer's trusted advisor.
Our associates take a consultative approach that guides customers to the right product for the particular application. In today's supply chain challenged environment, that often means the product that can be delivered on time. To our customers, we offer the best breadth and depth of product solutions from leading brands to branded exclusives to our own brands. Our associates pride themselves on first and foremost partnering to construct the best project, and then we'll pivot towards those products that provide us the best opportunity to secure the whole of the job. Our most proprietary solution is a Ferguson own brand, which is a component of our overall product strategy, albeit a very important one. We take a methodical, thoughtful, and balanced approach to own brand, and that's because of the value we place on our long-standing branded vendor relationships.
Over the years, we've developed a strong product reputation, and we've developed brands both organically and through acquisition. Today, we market 22 brands that represent about 9% of our total revenue, and they're sold across all of our customer groups. Our goal is to grow our own brand at roughly 2x core Ferguson growth rate. Our own brand drives approximately 2x the gross margin profile of our overall non-own brand product offering. We drive this component of our product strategy, again, to give us exclusivity and a better chance to secure the project. We use the margin profile to invest in our specifying capabilities, bringing us closer to stakeholders like engineers, architects, designers, and owners. We also use it to invest in new product development, in global sourcing, and overall supply chain capabilities.
Again, own brand is a component of our product strategy, driven by our consultative approach to the market. Our ability to influence through this consultative process uniquely positions us to positively impact the environment, promoting products that protect and conserve water, reduce emissions, and create a safer, healthier environment at home and at work. We will work closely with our suppliers to enhance innovation, design, and the manufacturing of sustainable products and solutions. This extends from sustainable products to sustainable packaging. On the demand side, we'll work to influence the product choices of thousands of municipalities, engineers, skilled trade professionals, architects, designers, and homeowners across North America. Today, we sell over $2.5 billion in products with a sustainable certification, including ENERGY STAR and WaterSense.
This impact is what we refer to as our handprint, our ability to influence product selection having a positive impact on our environment. Water, in particular, is a constant across our customer groups, from our waterworks business through rough and finished plumbing, fire protection, and more. Everything from storm water management and erosion control to water infrastructure, metering, low flow toilets, shower heads, touchless faucets, and leak detection. We have a unique opportunity to further address water access, quality, and efficiency, as water is one of the world's most precious resources. As mentioned, we intend to publish our ESG report this spring and look forward to sharing more with you. Along with a consultative approach, these value-added services come to light every day across our business through large and small projects, residential and non-residential.
Recently, our team managed a complex project at a major university in the southwestern U.S. with a large commercial mechanical contractor. This project was a complete renovation of a mechanical room inside of an academic building, and during the reconstruction process, all they had to go by was a 40-year-old set of plans. This project had a very tight timeline for both demo and new construction, and some fairly complex requirements like needing to keep the building operational for ongoing lab work, and that required maintaining temperatures. Using our reality capture capability, our group scanned the entire building to capture the existing pipe routing. Then our virtual design team created a phase system from that scan, allowing the customer to optimally demo and route new piping into place. The contractor used our off-site fabrication services to fuse polypropylene pipe and fittings.
That allowed them to assemble and install on-site, saving the contractor time and money in the field. From the use of technology to increase productivity, to the creation of an error-free material takeoff, to fabrication services, to an exclusive Ferguson piping system and material, and overall project management that allowed on-time delivery. This is a great example of how our associates deliver value to make a project simpler and more successful. Like our reality capture capabilities and our virtual design services, digital investments enhance productivity for both our associates and for our customers. We use technology every day to deliver value-added services for customers. These replace manual processes that historically have been used. 2D estimation and takeoffs add speed and accuracy to a complete material takeoff and a product list for the customer. We had a large national customer relationship that needed to build a similar project all across the country.
They were building roughly the same footprint, but in different areas of the country that had different circumstances and unique local specifications. This required a supplier that not only had a national presence, but also had the ability to know and have access to the products that meet those local specifications. Our teams were able to do both, and they did so while using an integrated toolset that linked master product data, pricing, and the proper local specification. They did a digital overlay for an easy comparison and a complete material takeoff, ensuring order accuracy and efficiency. In the end, the group cemented a national customer relationship, leveraging a consultative approach with local knowledge and technology, all supported by a global supply chain that was able to deliver on time and in full. That global supply chain empowers our associates with broad access to products.
We source products from 30 countries, utilizing 53 global ports, shipping over 22,000 containers each year. We have over 250 sourcing professionals across those 30 countries ensuring product development and that our quality assurance and quality control process is sound. We work closely with U.S. Customs and the Department of Homeland Security, and the Ferguson supply chain has been designated with a C-TPAT Tier 3, which is the highest level of security certification in our country. Our team makes sure we have full global tracking capabilities down to the SKU level from our vendors all the way to the container's destination. These capabilities have served us incredibly well during the past year. Combined with a strong balance sheet and our inventory investment, it has allowed us to maintain market-leading fill rates for our customers in the local market.
Our network is designed for speed and efficient access to product. Our import centers are strategically located at East and West Coast ports. We utilize 11 regional DCs to ensure both branch replenishment and direct-to-customer shipments are industry-leading fill rates for A and B items as well as for the long tail. These DCs ship 99.8% of orders placed within the same business day, either to our branch or via parcel and LTL to the end customer. That said, the true strength of the network is our more than 1,600 final mile locations that place us within 60 miles of 95% of the U.S. population. This, combined with the Ferguson private fleet, allows us to make same-day and next-day customer deliveries in a highly efficient and a customer-centric manner. Our driver associates are a foundational piece of our customer relationship.
They often interact with our customers even more than our sales professionals. This is a powerful footprint, and these are powerful relationships for our customers. They have a confidence in our ability to engineer a solution to make sure that we source the proper product and deliver their projects. The next step in the evolution of our network and our overall supply chain is perhaps the most exciting yet. When we originally introduced our DC network, we offered best-in-class fill rate, working capital efficiency, and margin enhancement built on cost savings for our supplier and through our implementation of the product strategy. Today, our size and scale gives us the opportunity to take these attributes directly into major markets.
Our market distribution strategy will eliminate double and triple touches and cut the transportation expense associated with a regional DC while giving the customer access to the same breadth and depth that they're used to from a regional DC, but in their local market. Two to three day becomes same day for local pickup and for on-site delivery. In a past earnings call, I talked about the development of our newest Denver MDC, a 450,000 sq ft facility with today almost 75% of the lines being picked utilizing robotics. This allowed us to save 100,000 sq ft with 50% less rolling equipment, creating a safer and a more efficient environment.
Branch sales have accelerated more rapidly than we even anticipated, built on the breadth and depth of our product availability and the speed with which we can get it to the job in the local market. The build-out of our MDC network is our future. Our MDCs further bring our scale to the local market. We will continue to invest in building this out at roughly two to three per year across the U.S. and Canada. As we said earlier, we look very forward to hosting you in one of our MDCs, but until then, we'll use a quick video to share some of the highlights.
How does Ferguson remain an industry leader year after year? It starts with the scale of our global supply chain network. We create unparalleled customer experience built for scale, speed, and efficiency.
We bridge the gap between 34,000 suppliers and over 1 million customers who expect access to a wide array of products with exceptional fulfillment and delivery times. Our people and distribution centers are at the heart of our success, and our customer experience has remained best in class. Our customers can order online or on the phone, and our distribution center network, strategically placed around the country, can deliver to 74% of the North American population the same day or next, and 99.8% within two business days. We continue to reimagine our newest distribution centers for even greater efficiency and sustainability. In 2021, we opened our newest state-of-the-art distribution center in Denver, Colorado.
We combine national capabilities with local supply house relationships and expertise, and we use cutting-edge technology and automation to cut order fulfillment times from 35 minutes to as little as five minutes.
This technology optimizes space, time, energy, and productivity. In addition, our custom boxing and packaging systems reduce costs and materials waste. Because of our automation efforts, this facility is 100,000 sq ft smaller than a traditional layout. It has been ergonomically designed for safety and greater efficiency. We also continue to excel in moving big, hard to handle materials. Our Pro Pick-Up service allows for multiple delivery and pickup options, including locker services for easy, convenient 24-hour pickup. Always looking to the future, we remain committed to running the most efficient operations possible and are taking steps to bring more renewable energy into our portfolio. At our 1 million sq ft distribution facility in Southern California, our solar array can offset up to 1,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. We continue to lead with innovative thinking and continuous improvement.
As always, Ferguson will continue to lead our industry with an eye on scale, speed, and efficiency, while also focusing on sustainability and using our global supply chain prowess to deliver compelling customer experiences well into the future.
I hope you enjoyed that preview. Again, we look forward to hosting you at one of our MDCs to see the supply chain evolution come to life and to interact with our associates who make that customer relationship durable. As we've discussed, that personal relationship is foundational for Ferguson, and we're committed to expanding those personal relationships with a digitally enabled experience. Now, we've already discussed utilizing technology to drive productivity through value-added services like virtual design, 2D takeoff capabilities, and overall product data. In the supply chain video, you saw some of our omni-channel capabilities highlighted. We will continue to invest in a best-in-class marriage of digital and bricks and mortar to deliver a connected customer experience. We truly are agnostic as to how a customer wants to interact with us. Today, overall, electronic commerce represents 21% of our total revenue.
Customers actively engage with Ferguson through our app or ferguson.com. They communicate with our branches. They search and order product. They schedule Ferguson Pro Pick-Up. They receive real-time notification of order status and product availability. Our 1,600 branch locations make it easy and convenient for delivery using our fleet of over 5,000 vehicles, for local pickup at the counter, local pickup curbside, or even through lockers. If product is delivered, our customers can track in real time through geopositioning the entirety of our fleet. We also extend that marriage of digital and bricks and mortar into our showroom channel. We have always prided ourselves on having a best-in-class consultative showroom experience, one that's driven by the industry's most knowledgeable associates. Through Build with Ferguson, we've combined that showroom consultation with an industry-leading e-commerce experience for decorative home improvement.
In 2007, we acquired Build.com, which at the time was a standalone $30 million decorative plumbing e-commerce business. By combining Build with the capabilities of Ferguson, we've grown this business to a nearly $2 billion solution for the light decorative pro and the project-minded consumer. We've now combined the consultation, selection, project management, and fulfillment capabilities of the showroom with Build.com's leading e-commerce experience. We've implemented a proprietary digital projects tool that supports the pro, the homeowner, and our associate with features like organization and inspiration, where products can be organized by room and added to a project or a room anywhere on the site. Pro specific features like portfolios and pricing tools. With these portfolios, our pro can do business with their customer. This has truly come to life with over 1 million projects created last fiscal year alone.
This is a great example of bringing together best-in-class digital commerce with extensive capabilities and our knowledgeable Ferguson associates. Now let's focus on those associates who have always been the foundation of our success. The driver of our growth has been the personal relationships our associates have with our customers. We are a relationship business. This trust cements customer loyalty. Decades ago, we developed a college recruiting program to attract talented people to an industry that they otherwise wouldn't have thought about joining. We built our company on a career orientation that has allowed us to build an associate base with decades of expertise that is virtually impossible to duplicate. This is a career, not a job, built with people that have an appetite for growth and service.
We have a palpable sales culture with growth-oriented people who, through our training program, have learned the business truly from the ground up. You start your training program in the warehouse, learning what it takes to pick an order and the importance of a complete project. You take steps through counter inside sales, ultimately choosing your medium-term path, whether that be finance, sales, operations, or logistics, all the while receiving training and development from product training to sales training to systems and general leadership. Our associates take this common understanding with them throughout their career, and it forms a shared bond across our organization. A great example of this career orientation is our Vice President of Human Resources Business Partners, Allison Stirrup.
Allison joined Ferguson as a trainee out of Virginia Tech, and she started her career in Fort Myers, Florida. She started in the warehouse, moved to the counter, and then on to inside sales. She moved into the showroom as a consultant. She made our President's Gallery her first year as a showroom consultant, which I can promise you is no easy task. Choosing to develop professionally, she moved into a showroom management position. She then took an opportunity in college recruiting to bring in future generations of Ferguson leadership while also developing her career in human resources. Now, Allison is a Ferguson Vice President, helping to drive our HR organization. Although Allison's story is fantastic, this type of career orientation is a big part of what makes Ferguson culture extremely special. Another great example of how talented associates join Ferguson is through acquisition.
When we acquire geographic bolt-ons, what we're investing in is people, local talent, local relationships. We can put up buildings, and we can buy trucks anywhere, but we can't duplicate the local talent and the local relationships with customers. When Ferguson acquires an organization, we retain and engage associates into our culture, which further develops a foundation for growth. Not only does this build credibility for our acquisition strategy, it creates diversity of thought and experience inside of our organization. Associates who join through acquisition make us better each and every day by challenging our thinking. After discharging from the Marine Corps, James Golini worked as a truck driver while going to school for a company that was later acquired by Ferguson.
Once inside Ferguson, his career journey took him through operations, sales, and into leadership, rising to lead Ferguson's Northeast District, which includes New York, New Jersey, and eastern PA. Jim now drives strategy and execution for our largest customer group as the Vice President of residential trade plumbing, and his leadership and commitment goes beyond developing long-term relationships with customers. He also leads the Veterans Business Resource Group for all of our associates. When we bring together the expertise of our associates across customer groups with world-class supply chain, investment in technology, and a suite of value-added services, it creates a very compelling value proposition. This all played out recently in the construction of a very large manufacturing facility in Texas. This project brought together several of our customer groups to service the project owner, the general contractor, and 10 different trade contractors.
Suffice it to say, this was a large, complicated project with an unusually fast-paced construction timeline. We provided fire protection design services, value engineering of the underground water and wastewater piping systems. We leveraged the capacity of 13 of our pipe fabrication shops all across the country for off-site pipe fabrication. We used two-person trucking teams to ensure on-time and in-full delivery of product. We worked through local specifications to provide alternative products that kept the job moving in a supply-constrained environment. Our project management teams worked across multiple trades for product staging and to address storage capacity challenges while meeting tight deadlines. To date, this has been $24 million in sales with over 5,000 line items of material across our waterworks, fire and fabrication, and commercial plumbing and mechanical customer groups.
This is just one example, albeit a pretty large example, of the value that our teams provide each and every day across North America. Value-added solutions delivered by the best associates, digitally enabled, and backed by a world-class supply chain. Now, let me hand you over to Bill Brundage, our CFO, who can walk you through how we look to continue to consolidate our fragmented markets while bringing in those local relationships and those unique capabilities into our business. Bill, over to you.
Thank you, Kevin, and thank you all for sharing your time with us today. Our ability to grow organically and outperform our markets is our priority focus, and it's at the core of what we do and what our business model delivers. Leveraging our scale and market-leading positions to consolidate our fragmented markets through acquisition adds another dimension to our growth, and we have a proven track record of successful acquisitions. Over just the past five years, we've completed 44 acquisitions in the U.S., bringing in $2.1 billion of revenue and accounting for approximately 2.4% of our annual U.S. growth over that period. We acquire these companies at attractive multiples and then leverage our scale to drive revenue, gross profit, and operating cost synergies to generate strong returns. Our strategy targets two types of bolt-on acquisitions.
First, geographic, which allow us to expand and fill in our existing footprint, consolidate our markets, and bring in associate expertise and customer relationships. We have a repeatable process that allows us to quickly integrate these acquisitions, leverage our scale, and generate synergies. In addition to geographic opportunities, we look for capability acquisitions in which we bring in new products or services, associate expertise, and customer relationships that we can then leverage across our platform, opening up these products and services to our more than 1,600 locations and 1 million customers to rapidly expand that offering. In both cases, while we're acquiring physical assets such as locations and trucks and inventory, the real value we gain is from the people, their expertise, the customer relationships they bring to our business.
As Kevin previously shared, we spend a lot of time ensuring we have a good cultural fit and aligned values with the target to make sure we'll have a successful acquisition. As we present Ferguson to potential targets. We believe we are the acquirer of choice in our industry because we provide these acquisitions and their associates access to the best platform and capabilities in the industry and a proven ability to grow their careers far beyond their existing opportunities. Now, let me illustrate our acquisition strategy through a couple examples. First, a great example of how we take a strong organic business and enhance it through a geographic bolt-on acquisition in a top market. In July last year, we acquired Canyon Pipe & Supply in Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is one of the largest markets in the U.S.
It's the 5th largest city with a market opportunity of over $3 billion. Canyon was a $100 million revenue business with a strong market reputation, 160 talented associates and 7 locations, with the majority of sales coming in the Phoenix market. As a core bolt-on, we quickly converted the IT platform, supply chain and operations, enabling us to drive synergies. We've been able to bring in an expanded product offering to Canyon customers, opening up a broader product portfolio, both branded and own brand, to drive revenue and gross profit synergies. We're driving efficiency savings through supply chain and the back office. We now have a combined business of approximately $450 million in revenue with 25 locations and 550 talented associates. We're not stopping there.
We're leveraging our scale with a new 350,000 sq ft state-of-the-art market distribution center set to open in the summer of 2022, providing the best breadth and depth of inventory and service capabilities to further enhance our market-leading position in Phoenix. Next, an example of how we leverage an acquired capability through our platform. In 2016, we acquired Signature Hardware, which at the time was a luxury brand of kitchen and bath products, principally tubs and vanities. Signature was sold exclusively online and had revenues of approximately $115 million. Upon acquisition, we expanded the Signature brand in products to not only sell through signaturehardware.com, but across our platform through our multiple channels, including our more than 250 brick-and-mortar showrooms, ferguson.com and build.com.
We then built the Signature Hardware brand into Ferguson's premier residential luxury own brand, converting several existing own brands and adding additional products and product categories to the Signature lineup. Today, Signature Hardware is a recognized luxury brand in the market, and it generates more than $340 million in revenue for us. When we look to our future acquisition opportunities, we have a large pipeline that allows us to continue to consolidate our fragmented markets. Our industry is comprised of thousands of mostly small to medium-size, independent, family-owned businesses rather than large-scale competition. While we already have market-leading positions, the industry makeup provides us ample runway for the future.
We approach acquisitions through a proven repeatable process, starting with the deal funnel, where we maintain a database of our competitors, and we use our strategic planning process to evaluate and refine that potential pipeline into a target list. We then source deals using our in-house acquisitions team, our business leaders, and local management relationships that in some cases go back decades with these targets. Those local relationships are incredibly important as you consider that for most of these companies, the decision to sell their business is a once-in-a-lifetime decision. Selling to a company they know and one they trust will take care of their people is critical. Finally, from a deal execution standpoint, we have in-house deal, diligence, and integration teams that allow us to execute quickly and do this over and over again.
We believe we have the opportunity to continue to generate approximately 1%-3% incremental annual revenue for the foreseeable future. Now, we've discussed today how we leverage our leading positions in attractive markets, our scale and capabilities, and our ability to consolidate our industry. These attributes come together in a sustainable business model that has delivered a long-term track record of outperformance and cash generation. This business model culminates in consistent above-market organic growth, consolidation of our fragmented markets through acquisition, and an ability to improve our operating margins. We improve operating margins through gross margin expansion driven by expanding the value-added services we provide to our customers, our purchasing scale, and executing our product strategy, including own brand. In addition to gross margin expansion, we produce operating leverage driven by scale, efficiencies, and productivity investments in areas such as supply chain and technology.
Over the past decade, we've grown revenue at an annual rate of over 8%, improving our gross margins by more than 300 basis points and growing our underlying trading profit at a rate of just under 14%, improving operating margins by 330 basis points to 9.2%. We've done this while generating strong cash flow and cash conversion. We take a disciplined approach to working capital investment. In a normal operating and growth environment, we expect to, and have consistently demonstrated an ability to incrementally improve our working capital efficiency over time.
Now, in times of unique opportunity, such as the past 18 months during periods of product shortages and supply chain disruption, we utilize the strength of our balance sheet and our supply chain to intentionally invest more into working capital. While this resulted in short-term pressure on operating cash flow in fiscal 2021, it ensured our ability to maintain customer service levels, improved our market share position, and generated strong overall returns on capital. We'll continue to make appropriate working capital investments, but as our supply chain conditions normalize, our working capital position will normalize, and our business model will continue to generate strong cash conversion. If you look over the past five years, we've generated just over $6 billion in operating cash flow, with an operating cash flow to net income conversion of over 100% with reliable free cash flow.
We allocate that cash generated in the business across four clear capital priorities. First and foremost, we'll make the investments necessary to drive above-market organic growth, principally working capital and CapEx investments. Next, we'll continue to sustainably grow the ordinary dividend. We'll then invest in bolt-on geographic and capability acquisitions. Finally, if we're below our target leverage range of one to two times net debt to adjusted EBITDA, we'll return capital to shareholders, principally through share buybacks. That consistency of capital allocation has accelerated our growth and shareholder value. Over the past 10 years, we've invested $2.9 billion in CapEx. CapEx investment was principally focused on the build-out of our branch network and our supply chain capabilities. In more recent years, we have shifted our investments to the next steps in our supply chain evolution and to our technology journey.
Our technology investments are focused on both front-end customer-facing capabilities, which enable us to deliver customer service and a continued above-market growth, as well as investments in back-office capabilities and tools to drive associate productivity and efficiencies in our business. In addition to investments in organic growth, over the past 10 years, we have invested $3 billion in acquisitions, and we've returned $8.5 billion to shareholders in the form of ordinary and special dividends and share buybacks. We've done this all while generating strong returns on capital. As we focused our group on our North American markets, our ability to drive top-line growth and improve operating margins while appropriately deploying capital has resulted in a return on capital of over 30% in our business.
As we look towards the future, we continue to operate from a position of strength underpinned by a strong balance sheet and leverage position. We view our target leverage range of one to two times as both a through economic cycle range and also a through season range, where our leverage typically increases in the first half of our fiscal year and falls to a lower point at the end of the fiscal year. While we've been within our leverage range in three of the last five years at the half year, we've been below our range at year-end, and we've purposely operated below our intended range over the past two years during a time of unique uncertainty. As conditions have become more clear, and as we look towards the future, we intend to operate towards the low end of our range.
As such, we announced a $1 billion share buyback program in the fall, which is well underway. Our strong balance sheet provides us great resilience should we encounter a negative economic cycle, but also optionality to invest further as opportunities arise. With our strong historical financial performance as a backdrop, let's turn to the future and discuss what our business can produce. We are and will continue to be a growth company. As we've discussed, our markets have historically outgrown GDP by 2%-3% a year, and we expect the fundamental demographic trends and drivers of growth in both residential and non-residential end markets will continue. We therefore believe a reasonable expectation of market growth over the medium term is 3%-5% a year. We will continue to take share and outpace these markets.
We've demonstrated a history of above-market organic growth, producing 350 basis points of market outperformance in the U.S. business over the last five years. We believe our market-leading capabilities of value-added services, global supply chain, omni-channel, and our associates will continue to drive above-market organic growth in the range of 300-400 basis points a year. We'll continue to consolidate our fragmented markets through bolt-on acquisitions, driving 1%-3% incremental annual growth. Our markets, our overmarket growth, and our acquisition strategy collectively result in a total annual revenue growth expectation over the medium term in the range of 7%-12%. Against that growth backdrop, we will continue to execute our strategy, which produces incremental operating margin improvement driven from gross margin expansion as well as operating leverage driven by scale, efficiencies, and productivity investments.
Over the medium term, with growth rates of 7%-12% per year, we would expect to deliver flow-through in the range of 11%-13%, resulting in operating margin improvement of roughly 10-35 basis points per year. We'll do this while continuing to produce strong cash flow and cash conversion underpinned by a strong balance sheet, providing us additional optionality for further capital deployment. Collectively, this will drive continued strong earnings per share growth, which we estimate would be in the range of low to mid-teens over the medium term, inclusive of some level of share buybacks. Now, to give a sense of the potential incremental investment capacity of the organization, I'd like to end with an example of that potential over the next three years.
We've set this example out at roughly the midpoint of our medium-term growth and flow-through ranges. For the revenue assumption, we've assumed a 10% growth rate comprised of roughly 8% organic and 2% from acquisitions, and we've assumed 12% flow-through on revenue growth over that three-year period. We've included estimates for CapEx required to deliver that growth, sustainable growth of the ordinary dividend, and the rough cost of acquisitions to deliver that 2% incremental annual revenue growth. With these assumptions, and taking into account a move from our current leverage level up to approximately 1.25x, this business could produce over $3.5 billion of additional capacity for further deployment over a three-year period. We're currently executing our $1 billion share buyback program.
As we look forward, deployment of additional capital over time will be a mix of further organic growth investments, acquisitions, and shareholder returns. Our business is in a strong position to generate additional shareholder value. Thank you again for your time. Now let me hand it back over to Kevin to wrap up.
Thank you, Bill. We've shared a great deal of information which we hope has helped you better understand Ferguson and allows you to share our confidence in our path forward as a North American company. We lead a responsible business and are committed to making a difference through our work. You've seen several examples of how we serve our customers and the value-added solutions that differentiate that service. Simply put, at our core, we exist to make our customers' projects simple, successful, and sustainable. As Bill just laid out, we believe Ferguson offers a significant value creation opportunity. We start with a foundation of balanced yet highly fragmented end markets that have consistently outgrown GDP. Our scale and core strengths support a unique platform that is difficult to replicate.
With this platform, we have the ability to consistently drive growth above those attractive end markets organically as we gain share. We also have ample runway for further growth through bolt-on acquisitions across those fragmented markets. Lastly, we have a cash generative business model that gives us the ability to further deploy capital as we continue to create value over the next several years. We are proud of our long-term track record of outperformance, and we're excited about the opportunities that lie ahead of us. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. We look forward to a robust Q&A session after a short 15-minute break.
At Ferguson, our people are our business. We recruit the best and the brightest, employing more than 30,000 diverse, dynamic associates. Our people are at the heart of our success, and they treat every customer's project as their own. With more than 70% of our associates in customer-facing roles, our teams are motivated to go above and beyond to deliver on our customers' expectations. We are also delivering on safety. Being accountable for our own safety, as well as the safety of others. Our service commitment doesn't stop there. We are passionate about giving back to the communities in which we live and do business. We strive to be our best selves and the best company for our associates, customers, and all our partners.
As we build and strengthen our organization for the future, we will continue to foster an inclusive culture that will grow and evolve to meet our customers' needs for years to come. Because at Ferguson, we know that our people are everything.
We will now begin the Q&A portion. I'll now hand over to Brian Lantz, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. Brian, please go ahead.
Hello, and welcome back to our Q&A session. We are eager to address any questions that you may have. From this point forward, we will take live questions via the operator via the dial-in number. Before we take live questions, let's cover a few questions that came in during the session. The first question comes from James Rose at Barclays. Why do you think the markets are continuing to be supportive with rising interest rate environment?
Yeah. Thanks, Brian, and thanks, James. When we look at our overall markets and the supportiveness of those markets, you know, I go back to some of the things that we talked about during the session today, and that really is around the balance of those end markets that we are competing in, that RMI and new construction, residential and non-residential. If we look at, say, for example, the new residential construction market, yeah, we do expect interest rates rise clearly. As you look at historical standards, those interest rates are still relatively low. As we look at the Millennial generation starting to come into the home buying market, that clearly is supportive for new residential construction.
As we discussed, when you think about the extension of commutable distance because of remote and hybrid work into more suburban areas, also supportive of new single-family construction. We still see good momentum inside those new construction markets. Then that balance with RMI, the limited amount of housing stock that's on the market right now, the aging of that housing stock, the robust nature of both presale and post-sale RMI in the categories that we compete in, provide some pretty good support. Then clearly that knock-on or that follow-on, commercial build-out that happens after residential new construction, happens in a more suburban marketplace. We still feel very good about that balanced end market profile that we have being supportive as we go forward.
Yeah, Kevin, maybe just to add a little bit to that. As we look at some of our indicators out there, first off, on the new residential side of the equation, permit activity is still strong, with permits up over 1.7 million, as of the most recent reading. As you shift towards the RMI side, the LIRA, the leading indicator of remodeling activity, still calls for probably high single-digit growth in calendar 2022. That gives us some a more balanced and more understanding of a strong market in the near term. Then on the non-residential side, the ABI from a commercial perspective is still over 50, indicating growth.
The Dodge Momentum Index and Dodge put in place forecasts all calling for growth over the next two to three years, which gives us some more confidence in that market outlook.
The next question comes from Cedar Ekblom of Morgan Stanley. She asks if we can discuss the landscape for M&A, multiples, the ability to source and integrate targets and areas for future growth focus.
Yeah, certainly. Hopefully, we gave some color of that in the presentation this morning. As we talked about, we have a really healthy pipeline, and it starts with the foundational makeup of what our industry is. Thousands of competitors, mostly small to medium-sized, and we have a proven track record of continuing to consolidate that industry. If you look over more recent history, we did seven deals last year. When we came out with our Q1 earnings in December, we had closed four deals to date. We've continued that momentum. We closed another bolt-on acquisition, a smaller one in December, and there are several more in the pipeline. We feel pretty good about and pretty confident with our ability to continue to consolidate the industry.
From a multiples perspective, we talked about in the range of 7-10, generally. Certainly, that'll vary deal to deal, and it will vary over time. There's been more activity and certainly more competition in the marketplace lately that have driven those multiples up towards the higher end of that range. We still see really good value out there for our company and for our shareholders to go after and to continue to consolidate our markets.
Yeah, Cedar, thank you for the question. Maybe a little build on that. As Bill indicated, the pipeline is good right now, and we see a fair amount of activity. What we're extremely bullish about is that balance of that activity level, both in geographic bolt-ons, that can help us bring local relationships and local capabilities and bolt them onto the core strengths of Ferguson, and then also those new capability acquisitions that Bill spoke about, during the morning session, where we bring in a capability like valve and automation or fabrication or new Ferguson-owned brands and can leverage that across the 1,600+ locations, leverage it across our digital properties to further accelerate that organic growth. Those pipelines are good.
It's a matter of making sure that, again, as Bill indicated earlier, that those value sets of those acquisitions marry up. Because although we can put up buildings and trucks in every market across the U.S., what we really are putting value on are those local associates, those local relationships, and making sure that we have a good cultural fit for those organizations is paramount.
As we start to look at what areas of our business are really attractive from an M&A perspective, clearly all of our customer groups are organic growth engines. We have the financial capabilities to continue to invest to allow them to grow organically faster than market. But from an M&A perspective, we're particularly excited in areas like HVAC, in areas like our waterworks business, and specifically in new areas of our waterworks business that make us more valuable on the project. Like things in erosion control, stormwater management, geosynthetics, that make us more valuable for that waterworks trade professional and more valuable on the project as a whole. The pipeline is good balance in that pipeline, and it should continue to complement that organic growth model.
Good. Now let's turn the call over to live questions. Chiquita, I'll turn the call over to you to take calls from the group. We may need to go back to.
Absolutely. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. Please be mindful to use a landline and not a speakerphone. Also pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question is from David Manthey with Baird. You may proceed.
All right. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks very much, guys, for doing this. Very informative, a lot of good information here. Thank you. So the first question is related to your outlook for 11%-13% flow through. Could you discuss what factors might drive the high end versus the low end of those targets?
Yeah, sure, Dave. I'll start with that. Thanks for the question. If we start with the top line, it's absolutely easier for us to drive more operating leverage at higher growth rates. If we're towards the high end of our growth range, that becomes a bit easier for us to leverage our fixed cost base, and drive a bit more productivity. That would drive that towards the higher end of that flow through range. In addition, we talked about in the presentation our product strategy and own brand being a component of that. As we think about that, driving the products that are more valuable to Ferguson, that drive a higher gross margin profile for us, inclusive of own brand, is a big piece of how we intend to grow that operating leverage over time.
Our ability to accelerate that and really execute that product strategy will give us a bit more tailwind to push up that flow through. From a productivity standpoint, from an operating cost perspective, as we continue to make investments in the areas of technology and supply chain, we're really focused on making our business model more efficient. That will be incremental over time. That won't be a big singular year step up. We do think that we can continue to push up that operating leverage and that operating cost efficiency over time.
Yeah, maybe to build on that, Dave, thank you for the question. Clearly, we wanna have balance as it relates to gross margin expansion and productivity savings. If you look in the more recent past, that gross margin expansion has been what is the driver of of that operating leverage. When you think about gross margin for us, Bill indicated product strategy. That is core, that's the foundation. How do you make from a consultative perspective, guide that project to those products that can expand our gross margin while at the same time making the project better and allowing us to secure the whole of the job. Then it really is that value-added portion of our business, those value-added services and solutions that we talked about, which is really a suite of overall services.
Because as we look at gross margin, it's the best reflection of that value we're providing to the contractor base, and it's the best reflection of the productivity that we're adding to the construction industry. We're gonna continue to focus on that to be a principal driver of what we look like from an operating leverage perspective.
Okay, thank you. Second question and related to that would be just so we know how to frame these medium-term targets, we shouldn't probably consider these moving from the base of, say, fiscal 2021 or fiscal 2022. These are more secular sort of long-term targets. Am I reading that right? I just wanna make sure we're not misgauging this in the very near term.
Yeah, yeah, that's right, Dave. I mean, we view medium-term, call it three to five years. These are a bit of a broad estimate of what we expect, and that's built on that foundation of an expectation of market growth in that 3%-5% range. What we have said is if you go back to the performance that we delivered in fiscal 2021, we're quite pleased with that performance and our ability to both grow gross margins in addition to generating operating leverage. We stepped up our operating margins from about 8% to 9.2%. We very much view that as a base from which we can build on over time. That is absolutely our goal as we move into the future.
You're thinking about it correctly in terms of medium-term, a medium-term view in that kinda three to five-year range.
Thanks very much, guys. Best of luck.
Thank you, Dave.
Thanks, Dave.
Thank you. The next question is from Sam Darkatsh with Raymond James. You may proceed.
Good morning, Kevin and Bill. Happy New Year, and again, thank you for all the work that went into this presentation. It's very helpful. I've got a couple questions. First, in answering Dave's prior question, you mentioned that gross margin is a good objective measure of value add. I wanted to dive into that a little bit deeper and talk about price cost specifically. Can you describe price cost as 2021 progressed, where it sits now, and then what your expectations for price cost might look like for 2022 and beyond?
Yeah, Sam, thanks for the question. As we went through fiscal 2021, and we saw that real step-up in inflation, particularly in the second half, that really enabled our ability to pass that price on in the marketplace from a goods cost to a goods sold position, and expand our gross margins. If you think about where we finished fiscal 2020 at about 30% gross margins, we grew that to 30.6% in fiscal 2021, but in the back half it was more like 31.4%. Our ability as prices are increasing, our ability to get that wedge and to pass that along in the marketplace absolutely increased those gross margins.
We've talked about the fact that as price inflation at least flattens at some point in the future, and it's really difficult to predict when that's going to be, but when that happens, some of that price cost advantage will come back, and we would expect those gross margins to moderate a little bit. But I would anticipate, again, where we finished last year from a full year perspective in that 30.6% range, we would anticipate that being a good solid foundation from a margin standpoint that we could build on into the future.
Yeah. Sam, thank you for the first question, and happy New Year to you as well. When we think about the mechanics involved with what Bill described, as we saw that inflationary condition start to play through the system, we first saw it in the commodity side of the business, then it flowed through into the finished goods side. As we've discussed in some past earnings calls, it's hard work, but we work diligently to make sure that as soon as price increases are announced, that we flow that through into our POS, into what happens from a counter and inside sales perspective, into our bidding activity, so that from a good market stewardship perspective, we're starting to protect our customers and move that forward into the marketplace.
We've got those projects that are in flight, which is again, a much more difficult situation, but going back and working through that price increase, with our contractors, with the owners, to make sure that that flows through methodically, through the construction marketplace. Difficult work, but something we're pretty proud of in terms of the way we were able to execute this past year.
Thank you for that. The second question. If you voiced a market outgrowth goal of 3%-4% annually. If my memory serves, I think it used to be 2%-3%. Assuming that's right, what gives you confidence to raise the outgrowth expectations now, and if you could rank order the drivers in terms of what will contribute to that outgrowth? Thanks.
Yeah. Sam, you have a good memory. We have historically said 200-300 basis points of market outperformance. That was principally driven by, and we keep coming back to this over and over again, this balance, wanting to make sure that that organic outperformance is balanced with what we do from a value add perspective and how we're able to generate gross margin improvement. What that improvement looks like in terms of sales against working capital absorption to make sure that we maintain a good, solid cash generative business. That balance made 200-300 basis points the right place to be. Over the recent history, and we talked about this during the presentation, about 350 basis points worth of overmarket growth over the past five years.
What we've seen is an acceleration of what those core strengths can do to drive market outperformance. Those things built on our associates and the best associates in the marketplace, a world-class supply chain, global sourcing, digital tools, no silver bullet as it relates to the value-added services, all coming together to drive overmarket growth. Now, there are gonna be times when that overmarket performance ebbs and flows. In the recent past, we've had more outperformance than even that 350 basis points as you looked at supply chain chaos and product availability being an extremely important aspect of today's environment. That supply chain, as well as the investment in inventory, utilizing the strength of the balance sheet, has become incredibly important to the local marketplace.
What we've seen are those core strengths improving and our ability to grow faster than market improving. Yeah, we've moved up what that expectation is from call it 200-300 basis points to 300-400 basis points.
Thanks much. Terrific stuff. Thank you again.
Thanks, Sam.
Thanks, Sam.
Thank you. The next question is from Elodie Rall with JP Morgan. You may proceed.
Hi, good morning, and thank you very much for this very interesting presentation. I have a couple of questions. First of all, a follow-up on your bolt-on acquisitions. If you could give us a little bit more color about what you think are the real attractive segments at the moment, if Waterworks is more attractive now given the infra bill? And what kind of margin profile do you see from the businesses that you acquire, and how long does it take you to get these businesses up to Ferguson margin? That would be my first question. My second question is on your goal to build 2-3 market distribution centers per annum. How much incremental growth or revenue could this provide, given the services that will be offered then?
Lastly, a question on own brand. You did confirm that this is about 9% of sales, that margin are double the normal business margin again, and that the objective is to grow this twice as fast as the organic growth of the group. Is there a cap on how much penetration potential you see from the own brand business? If you could give us a rough idea of where you'd like to take the level to and how that compares to peers. Thank you.
Maybe I'll start, Bill.
Yep.
From a bolt-on acquisition. First of all, thank you, Elodie. From a bolt-on acquisition perspective, what are those real attractive areas? Again, I go back to, again, that word balance that we like to use a great deal. We want to make sure that we're doing not only geographic bolt-ons that give us local expertise, but also those capability acquisitions. We've had some very successful capability acquisitions. Bill highlighted one with Signature Hardware. That build-out for own brands and recognized own brands in the marketplace that don't have manufacturing assets but do produce high-quality own brands that we can take across our bricks and mortar and digital channels. That'll continue to be an area that we look at, as well as other capabilities like fabrication.
If you look at the geographic bolt-ons, talked a bit about HVAC and Waterworks, and I'll come back to that in a second, but we also look at some of our oldest, customer groups that are historic inside of Ferguson, like residential trade plumbing, commercial mechanical plumbing, and the like. Those are great areas for us to, again, expand what that local footprint looks like, bolt it on to our core infrastructure, bolt it on to world-class supply chain and sourcing, digital tools, and associated traction and retention, and make that one plus one equal far more than two or three. We're gonna continue to look at those, as well. On the HVAC side, we do believe that there are some great structural characteristics with both new construction and repair/replace inside of that HVAC market.
We've still got a long runway to go after in that $50 billion market. We've got geography that we can really grow in across the United States and Canada. That's an attractive place for us to be. That Waterworks business, bolting on additional diversification efforts to make us more valuable for that contractor and the overall project. Those are some real key areas for us to grow through M&A.
In terms of some of the margin profiles that we see, Elodie, and again, thank you for the question, generally, if you think about geographic bolt-ons, kind of in our core competitive space, the margin profile is not as strong as our margin profile. Generally, if I had to put a number on it, half to two-thirds of our margin profile. As we talked about, we have a good opportunity to generate synergies. We can normally get that up to our margin profile over the first two to three years, generating really solid and strong returns for us. On the capability side, though, if you look at some of the deals we've done, sometimes that's margin accretive from day one, particularly when we're acquiring a new brand company.
We look at that a little bit differently, but that can be right out of the gate, accretive to our operating margins.
On the MDC side, we talked about building out two to three per year. Really that is about taking what are the advantages that are created by our regional distribution centers that we've had historically over time, best in class fill rates, working capital efficiencies, and then taking cost out of the supply chain for ourselves and for our supplier partners so that we can improve our overall margin profile. That has actually driven, when we look at our Denver MDC, for example, accelerated growth in both local deliveries as well as our counter profile. Generally speaking, from a strategic perspective, it is about continuing with that over-market performance organically across the major MSAs by making sure that we have best breadth and depth same day for the marketplace.
That's really our focus area and how we're going to continue with that 300-400 basis points worth of market outperformance. I think the last question was around own brand and 9% of what we do and two x the margin profile. Where do we see that from a growth perspective? Do we cap that? What I referenced during the presentation this morning is we take a very methodical and thoughtful approach to how we grow own brand because of the branded relationships with our vendor partners that we hold so very dear. We wanna make sure that it's well thought out and that expansion happens in a methodical way in the local marketplace. We don't put a cap on that.
We do believe that we can grow that business at about twice the growth rate of our non-own brand growth inside of Ferguson, while at the same time, again, because of our market outperformance and the layered on acquisitions that we're doing, that we can continue to be a best in class supplier or partner for our suppliers as we look to the market. That balance is extremely important to us. We wouldn't put a cap on it, but we do wanna do it in a thoughtful way.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Elodie.
Thank you. The next question is from James Rose with Barclays. You may proceed.
Hi there. Good morning. I've got two, please. I think the first one is, Ferguson has always invested in its own capabilities, customer solutions, and its value add over the years. Could you summarize in a bit more detail what the next five year of investments you're going to prioritize are? And then the second one, on the showroom business, specifically, could you talk us through the plan you have in place to grow this business? Thank you.
You want me to kick off?
Sure.
All right. From an investment perspective, and thank you, James, and thank you for the comment about investing in capabilities throughout the years. That's what we're trying to get across this morning, is that it is a true suite of value-added services that we invest in to add construction productivity over time. If we look at those next five years, we've hit on, obviously, own brand as being a component. Proprietary products that offer a best solution for that trade professional, for that owner to complete their project. That's gonna be clearly an area for investment as we go forward. Supply chain. Building out our market distribution centers and making sure that we have best-in-class breadth and depth for all of our customer groups in the local marketplace for same-day product availability, pickup, and deliver to site.
We'll continue to invest in our digital relationships. Taking that best-in-class personal relationship and making it digitally enabled. Omni-channel is absolutely a baseline. We need to meet our customer where they want to order, how they want to order, how they want to receive fulfillment of that, and to make their time much more efficient, especially in a trade labor-constrained world. That said, that is only a component of that digital investment that we're going to make. As we look at things like off-site construction, fabrication, how you create a digital model that helps to accelerate time horizon and productivity in the construction project, that's where we'll invest.
You'll see us do that in our core technology investments, but also in areas where we invest from a Ferguson Ventures perspective, which is our corporate venture capital group, where we're going out and investing in companies like GTP that have a product called STRATUS that take building information modeling and connect it to a bill of materials to, again, take time out of the construction process. It's proving value today with our commercial mechanical contractors, and it's only the beginning. Making sure that we are adding to construction productivity through technology is the way in which you'll see us invest over time.
If you think about that, James, from an investment standpoint and perspective, it's those investments are both from an operating cost perspective or OPEX perspective as well as CapEx. Our CapEx, which we've said is $300 million-$350 million likely this year, as you saw in that medium-term example, we said about 1.5%. The majority of that is going to those areas of technology as well as the supply chain build-out. That's embedded in our guidance and our expectations of both CapEx as well as our operating cost and operating margin expectations over that medium-term time period.
You broke up a bit on the question, James, but I think your next question was the runway for our showroom business. If you think about our showroom business, we've had a best-in-class consultative experience by incredibly knowledgeable and passionate associates, not just on product design, but also on the design of the home and bathroom renovations and kitchen design and what have you. Bringing together that best-in-class showroom consultation with best-in-class e-commerce experience through Build with Ferguson really gives us an extended runway, and we start to engage with what historically has been a connected consumer, because our customer is the trade professional, the plumber, the builder, the remodeler, the designer, the architect, and really start to engage even more closely with that consumer who's driving choice in the market today. We see a long runway.
In fact, we'll continue to build out beyond that 250 destination showrooms that we have across the U.S. today.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, James.
Thank you. The next question is from Ryan Merkel with William Blair. You may proceed.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the great presentation.
Thank you, Ryan.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ryan.
I had two longer-term questions, if I can. First off, labor shortages in the trades is gonna be a secular problem. Does this allow Ferguson to become more valuable in the value chain? And if so, how? Secondly, Kevin, you mentioned the shortage of homes. Over the next 10 years, what are some of the technologies you expect that will change how homes are built, and how can Ferguson participate?
Thank you, Ryan. Yeah, they're great questions. The labor shortage, yeah, that's part and parcel to how we think about growing inside of our business, but it's also part of our Ferguson Cares efforts from an ESG perspective as we look to, from a grassroots perspective, really start to entice young people that a career in the trades is an incredible way to grow yourself and your family over time. We take that extremely seriously. That labor shortage piece.
Plays into how we think about our supply chain investments, value-added services, how we think about technology investments. Going back again, that is really everything as it relates to construction productivity. When you think about labor shortage, our customers don't have the time to wait and to not have availability for product same day. That's the advent of our market distribution centers. Best breadth and depth of product same day so that they have product when they need it.
Things from a technology perspective, like geo-positioning of the over 5,000 trucks in our fleet to make sure that a customer knows exactly where that truck is, exactly what's on that order, are there any back orders, and so they can track it in real-time coming down that street to be able to send that trade labor to meet that truck to make sure that they can offload and get product into the installation process. Those types of things, anything that we can do to make it so that that very valuable trade labor person can do jobs installing as opposed to procuring material. That's gonna be a focus area for us. As we think about the way that homes are built, now, clearly, we're looking at how does productivity inside of both residential and non-residential new construction take place.
We keep our eyes on what's happening from an offsite construction, a modular construction perspective. I referenced in the previous question our Ferguson Ventures corporate venture capital arm. We're invested in a couple of different firms that are engaged in new construction, single-family, residential, as well as in multifamily and commercial offsite construction, just to make sure that we understand how can we be valuable as certain amounts of the construction process move into a more modular environment and a more controlled environment. We haven't seen tremendous growth inside that yet, but we keep our focus on what that value add can be as we grow and progress.
Super helpful. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Ryan.
Thank you. The next question is from Keith Hughes with Truist. You may proceed.
Thank you. Two questions. First on cash flow. You've laid out, you know, very aggressive cash flow numbers both operationally and specifically from raising the debt profile. How long, particularly on the debt profile, will it take to get to this 1.25 you discussed, and are special dividends gonna play any role in that?
Yeah, I'll start with that. Thanks for the question, Keith. If you think about where we finished at the end of Q1, very similar to where we finished at the end of last fiscal year at about 0.6x. As you know, we've stepped into our share buyback program with $1 billion that we're over $300 million into at this point. We're being fairly aggressive on the M&A front. With that said, it'll likely still take us a bit of time to get over 1x, just given the growth of EBITDA over the last three quarters. We are deploying capital. We are on a path and an intended range to get back into the low level of that range, but it will likely still take us a bit of time to get there.
Okay. Second question, around the upcoming primary listing in New York. Assuming the vote is successful in March, how will that change how the stock trades? Do you have a perspective on what that'll do to liquidity? Just what will it look like different, assuming the vote is successful?
Yeah, I'll start with that one. Just, maybe a couple of thoughts. Assuming a successful vote, in March, it'll likely take us a couple of months to then demote the premium listing in London to a standard listing. At that time, we would come out of the FTSE 100 Index. We would think that at that point, we would start to see more volume shift from London to New York. Over time, our goal is to get U.S. indexation.
If you look at just the value that could create for our shareholders, and you just look at what portion of our shares are owned from an indexation perspective today, which is roughly our advisors are telling us 8%-12% versus what our U.S. peers have in indexation, which could be double that. Over time, this should be a positive catalyst for us. As we've talked about in the past, it'll take us some time to get into certain of those U.S. indices, namely the S&P 500. A couple criteria there. One, we have to file domestic forms, so we have to file a 10-K, which we will plan to do, assuming a successful vote in the spring. We would file our first 10-K here in the fall at the end of this fiscal year.
Then secondly, an annual liquidity test, which requires liquidity to move to the U.S., and is measured on an annual basis. It'll take us a bit of time, and likely a year plus to be eligible for the S&P 500. With that said, as you know, ultimately, it's still an S&P 500 committee decision. If you look through that, over that period of time, again, the ability to move from London to New York as a primary, and move our indexation from London to New York, should be a very positive thing, from a share perspective.
Yeah, Keith, the way that we have, if we take a step back, the way we've thought about this the whole way through is it's a very methodical process that we'll do with great interaction with our share register over time. That's why the two-step process from a vote perspective. As we start to go through that, again, assuming a successful vote number two, we will work very hard to maintain our non-U.S. share register and make sure that we're an attractive investment choice for their portfolio. We will look to educate and engage with U.S. domestic capital to introduce them to Ferguson and what we mean inside the North American construction market.
We'll look to engage with U.S. sell side, clearly, to better understand our business and with sell side analyst coverage that really understands the markets where we compete and the peer group that we operate within. Lastly, as Bill indicated, that indexation and making sure that we move that indexation from the United Kingdom over to the United States. That methodical process we'll continue to engage in, but we think it will be very successful in the end.
I don't think you said this before, special dividends you've done in the past. Is that gonna be potential in the future?
Yeah, Keith, apologies, I missed that part of the question. If you look at when we've typically done a special dividend, it's been generally when we've sold businesses or had a large inflow, a non-operating cash inflow. When we sold the Nordics or when we sold the U.K, we did a special dividend. We really think more consistently we'll utilize share buybacks. We'll consider that as we move forward.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Keith.
Thank you. The next question is from Will Jones with Redburn. You may proceed.
Thank you. A couple from me please, if I could. First one is around Canada actually. I think most of the commentary today have been really North America related rather than splitting the two countries. You know, can we take from that that you're looking at a more integrated approach for the two businesses? Or just, I guess, specifically on Canada, whether there's anything you'd draw out for us strategically? Then the second was actually on Facilities Supply. I think I'm right in saying that's been somewhat of a test bed for the group over the last number of years, and it's, I guess, a business that has quite different attributes in many respects to the legacy business of Ferguson. I guess, where do you sit with strategy on Facilities Supply over that medium term?
Thank you.
Thank you, Will. Maybe I'll start and Bill, if you wanna layer in. From a Canadian perspective, the way we think about Canada is it is absolutely together with the United States in a North American profile that we are going to market with. From a customer group perspective, Canada competes just like the U.S. in the same customer groups. We have very similar vendor profiles between the two countries. In fact, some of the same vendors are our principal vendors, both north and south of the border. We will deploy one strategy in terms of how we go to market and how we overperform organically in that market. We will make sure that there is connection. In fact, we're seeing great connection between the functional groups in Canada and the U.S.
The business and customer groups that are acting together in terms of how we go to market. Yes, Canada is at a bit of a different point in the evolution of that business and the evolution of things like product strategy, category management, and supply chain. We will continue to ramp that up so that you can expect growth rates and market performance similar to the United States over time with that Canadian group, because we really are operating with one strategic playbook in terms of how we go to market in two countries with two cultures. In terms of our Ferguson Facilities Supply group, we really started that.
The genesis of Ferguson Facilities Supply was not only is it an attractive market that is incredibly large, that is also incredibly fragmented, that recognizes and rewards value-added services with gross margin, but also we had a leading market position, have a leading market position in that commercial construction and non-residential sector. We were doing the new construction. We had relationships with the ownership groups that were doing that new construction, and so it parlays quite well into that repair, maintenance, and improvement environment as we go forward. It is today and will remain a growth engine business for Ferguson. It's a billion-dollar-plus business inside of a very large market, and so we'll continue to focus on making sure we have the capabilities to grow organically.
We'll be focused in the types of customers we're going after in that Ferguson Facilities Supply business because that market is so large, but we'll continue to focus in that area.
Great. Thank you. Sorry, just coming back to Canada and the U.S. Can we infer from that that there's not a lot of structural reason why Canada should make a lower margin than the U.S? Or perhaps the customer mix is different, so at least partly explain that.
We do not believe there are structural differences between the United States and Canada that would necessitate a lower gross margin or operating margin profile over the long haul. We need to make sure that we have the right level of investment so that we're adding value that drives that performance from a financial perspective. We're doing that today. We're gonna continue to work on that over the medium term to make sure that over market growth and margin profile start to look more like Ferguson from a strategic playbook perspective.
Yeah, there's good runway there from a Canadian perspective with operating margins just under 6% last year. To Kevin's point, this is a journey from a Canadian perspective, but plenty of runway to go to improve performance of that business over time.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Will.
Thank you. The next question is from Harry Goad with Berenberg. You may proceed.
afternoon. It's Harry Goad with Berenberg. Thank you for taking my questions. Just a couple on the margin from me as well, please. Firstly, just so I'm clear in terms of what your communication is on near-term margin movements, can I just be clear that what you're saying is you see the FY 2021 gross margin of 30.6% and the operating margin of 9.2% as the sort of base level, and you wouldn't expect to go below that? I take your point that in the future, you're talking 10-35 basis points of potential operating margin expansion. You know, who knows where this year goes because of the potential pricing unwind, but that's the future. Effectively what you're saying is those are the base levels of FY 2021. You don't expect to go under those.
That's the first part of the question. The sort of second slightly longer term part of the question is taking that comment you made on 10-35 basis points over the medium term, and if we roll that out and we play it out over five years, I mean, you know, do you think when you look at your competitors, there's any reason why Ferguson can't be a sort of 10%-11% operating margin business, or is that ultimately the point you're targeting? Thank you very much.
Yeah, Harry, thanks for the question. You're interpreting that the right way. I would focus more so on that operating margin of 9.2%, being that base from which we think we can grow. To your point, currently, and for the last few quarters, we've been operating in truly exceptional times, and we've had growth rates over 20% in Q1, growing at over 25%. As we've talked about in the very near term, as we come up against tougher comparables, and as we expect price inflation to normalize at some point, we do expect a tapering of that growth.
Now, that growth and our ability to pass price on the back of inflation, in addition to driving operating leverage, has really resulted in super strong operating margins in the fourth quarter and in Q1. With operating margins of 11.3% in Q1, we don't expect that to be our go-forward margin. We do expect a tapering of that in the short term. You're interpreting that the right way. As you look through that and some of the near term, you know, the near term environment that we're operating in, we do believe we can grow the operating margin steadily over time in that 10-35 basis points range. We feel comfortable with that.
That's great. Thank you. Just that thought about if we roll it out over, say, the next five years, do you think, you know, Ferguson is a, in the future, a 10%-11% type margin business when you look at what your competitors are achieving?
Yeah, we don't put a ceiling on what those operating margins can be. To Kevin's point earlier, we've hit on it a number of times today. We do want to do that in a very balanced approach. If you look back over our history, not just the last five years, but the last 10 years and beyond that, particularly from a U.S. perspective, we've got a history of incremental improvement in both gross and operating margins over time. That's served us well, and we believe that we will continue to do that over the medium to long term.
Yeah, if you were an associate inside of Ferguson, you'd hear that word balance.
Yeah.
A great deal. Balance in terms of residential, non-residential, repair, and new construction. You'd hear balance in terms of over market growth and charging for the value that we provide in the marketplace as reflected by growth margin, gross margin. You'd see balance, hear balance in short term and long term, never sacrificing the short for the long or the long for the short. That's the way we approach this business, that reinvestment in associates, that reinvestment in making sure that that college recruiting program that we talked about today, we're bringing in, on average, about 400 college graduates into our program to make sure that we're keeping a funnel that we can drive to great succession plans for those personal relationships and that leadership for the company for the long haul.
Those digital investments, that supply chain, and having that right balance is hugely important to us as we go forward.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question is from Kathryn Thompson with Thompson Research Group. You may proceed.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions today. You've given a lot of great detail on your outlook, and some elements of change and some patterns. One of the factors I wanted to see if you could pull the string on more is given not just an inflationary environment for last year, but what looks to be an inflation that could be over the next couple of years. What factors did you play into for your medium-term outlook to take into account this change from an inflation standpoint?
Yeah, Kathryn, if you think about that 3%-5% expected market growth, that does anticipate still some level of inflation, but clearly not the levels of inflation that we're experiencing today. I would go back to that over that three to five-year period assumes that inflation comes back more towards historical levels, at least in our industry. Certainly, if inflation is stronger than that would tip us up towards the higher end of that three to five or potentially even over that. But at three to five, that's a balance of both underlying fundamental volume growth with probably 1%-2% normalized inflation.
Okay. On your private label initiatives, can you just give a clarification of where you want that build to be as a percentage of your total sales and, just a reconfirmation on the margin? Because as you think about building out that private label mix, things are getting more expensive to make, even if it is private label. Just a more clarification on private label as part of your overall mid- to long-term growth initiatives.
Yeah. Kathryn, thank you for the question. Much like how we think about operating margin, we don't put a ceiling on what that own label percentage of our overall revenue can be. I go back to, because of those very important branded relationships that we have, we act in a very methodical way in terms of what that next and that growth area is for own label. We've got a good product pipeline to organically grow what that own label category looks like. As we discussed, we also have a good acquisition pipeline to grow our own label brands. When we think about the gross margin profile, again, yes, it has about two times the gross margin profile of our non-own brand.
We take that gross margin profile, and we also reinvest in our specifying capabilities that allow us to drive demand with both architects, engineers, municipalities and the like, and then also what those supply chain capabilities can look like. We wanna make sure that we have a balanced approach to what that growth looks like, and then a reinvestment to make that a sustainable growth engine for us as a part of our overall product strategy.
Okay. Then final question from me for today. You know, we picked up coverage of you guys in the summer of 2019. A lot has happened since then. From your perspective, what are the biggest changes from Ferguson as an organization today versus three years ago, really outlining just some of the, not just company specific, but also macro and how that changes your future outlook? Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you for the question. Thank you for your view on our company. You look back at 2019, clearly COVID wasn't an issue as we were approaching 2020. From the biggest change perspective, if you look at that COVID environment and then the knock-on supply chain challenges that the economy has had, and certainly our industry has had, that probably has been the biggest change. Take aside the workforce dynamics for just a moment.
If you look at the supply chain changes and chaos that has happened, our ability to utilize our supply chain, our ability to utilize our balance sheet for increased inventory investment, and our ability to have our associates guide a customer to the right solution that they can have on time and in full to complete a project has been hugely important. The reason that I call that out is not just to finish a project and to have a customer relationship that is more solid tomorrow than it was today. It really is how we can not only show that value to the trade professional customer who's so dear to us, but also show that value to the general contractor and the owner, to the homeowner, so that they understand that it's better to have Ferguson as part of the solution for the project.
that comes in not only the implementation of our product strategy and what products to use, whether that's own brand exclusives or branded, but also in terms of just the general nature of the company in dealing with a trade professional on a bid of a project. that probably has been the biggest change that we've experienced over the course of the last couple years.
Okay, great. Thanks very much and good luck.
Thank you, Kathryn.
Thank you. The next question is from Gregor Kuglitsch with UBS. You may proceed.
Hi.
Gregor.
Good morning. Thanks for your time and the presentation. A few questions. Can you hear me?
We can, yes.
Hello?
We can, Gregor.
I think we may have a slight lag, so I'm just gonna ask my question. The first one is on the vote that you have scheduled for March. Can you give us any kind of sense of whether you've had conversations with shareholders and the potential support? I mean, I guess to put the question perhaps differently, what do you think is your probability of success? The second question is maybe a clarification question on the $3.5 billion of excess capital. Just to be clear whether that already includes the $1 billion share buyback. Is that already netted off or is that, I suppose, part of that $3.5 billion?
If you also could come back to the M&A slide I think 33, I believe. Are you suggesting that post synergies and post integration, you're able to acquire businesses at two to three times? I don't know if that's the right way to look at that. Sort of the bottom right hand of that chart. I wasn't exactly clear on that. Maybe a final question on the distribution center rollout. Can you give us a sense how many of these you'll eventually do? How many markets are there and what's it contingent on the speed of that rollout? Thank you.
Maybe I'll take the first, Bill.
Yeah.
We can move on.
Sure.
From a vote perspective and really how we think about the process overall, what I'm probably most proud of is that our company has taken a very methodical approach to this. If I go all the way back, it really did begin with good consultation with our share register. What was really encouraging was when the register came back and said, "We wanna hear from the board what they believe is in the best interest of the company." It was at that time that we came back and said that we believe that long term, the listing structure of the organization should be in the U.S. and aligned with the North American markets where we compete, and then ultimately where the management team exists as well.
From that point forward, we've taken a pretty methodical approach to how we did that with the two-vote process, and the timing around that two-vote process. I will say that we have very consistent interaction with our share register to understand where the group is and how they think about that movement from a vote perspective. We feel very comfortable and confident in where we are, and we'll continue to have that interaction with shareholders on a very regular basis as we go through this process.
Gregor Kuglitsch, in terms of your second question on the $3.5 billion example that we put up, that was modeled off of fiscal 2021 over the next three years. Clearly that's an example of the potential, and there's a range on either side of that. With that said, that would include the $1 billion share buyback program that we're actively executing today. From an M&A slide perspective, I apologize if there was any confusion on that slide. No, we were not saying post synergies, we could buy them for two to three times. What we were saying is immediate synergies, which we would gain over the first year or two, we could take a 10x multiple, for example, and turn it into a 7x multiple, so giving us immediate synergies.
In addition to that, though, we take those companies, and we continue to grow them and accelerate their top line growth, which would give us even additional benefits over time. For the MDC rollout, we're actively doing that today. We have about the next 15-20 cities targeted for where we want to take this strategy. We'll go back to that term balance that Kevin and I both talked about today. We're doing that in a methodical way and in a balanced way, really taking advantage of those markets that we have some capacity concerns in today and enough volume to put the MDC in to then really accelerate growth.
As Kevin talked about in the presentation, taking that MDC strategy or that DC strategy and really turning it into a local strategy with the best depth and breadth in the marketplace. We just opened Denver. We've got Phoenix that will open this summer. That will be followed by Houston and Dallas. You'll see a steady rollout of these. It'll take us a bit of time to ramp them up, but our teams are actively out there looking for properties and looking for those opportunities.
Thank you, Gregor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That was all the time for today. I will now hand the call back over to Kevin Murphy, CEO, for closing remarks.
Thank you. Let's close by again saying that we wanna thank you so much for the time today. We do not take that for granted. As you've heard, we are a relationship business, and it's very important to us when the time is right, when it is safe, we wanna make sure that we invite you to see our business. We talked a great deal about our associates. We want you to be able to interact with our associates, see what's happening from a supply chain evolution perspective, see how all that comes together with digital investments to make our customers' projects more simple, successful, and sustainable. From today's perspective, it really was a kickoff, a point to introduce many of you to who is Ferguson.
As you've heard today, we believe Ferguson offers a significant value creation opportunity. Our markets are supportive. We have a strong and balanced business mix. We're confident and excited about our path forward as a North American company. We're proud of that long-term track record of outperformance and extremely excited about the opportunities that lay ahead for us. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. We look forward to continued conversations over the weeks and months ahead. Thank you.