The format for today will be a management presentation for the first 20 or so minutes, and then we will open it up for Q&A. We will have a total of 30 minutes. If you have any questions, please type them in the Q&A tab on the bottom of your Zoom screen, and we will get to as many questions as we can, time permitting. With no further delay, Anesa, the floor is yours.
Great. Thank you, Anthony, and thanks to everyone for joining. As Anthony shared, both Tex Clark, CFO, and Mike Smargiassi are with me today. We'll go ahead. This first page is obviously a cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements. As you're well aware, we're obligated to share this, and we're not gonna read it to you, so we'll go ahead and flip forward. All right. Let's get right in. Global Industrial is a leading industrial distributor, and in 2025 we delivered $1.38 billion in revenue. We are headquartered in Port Washington, New York, roughly 20 miles outside of Manhattan, and have a 77-year history. We have approximately 1,900+ employees throughout the U.S. and Canada, and in a few places globally as well.
We're truly experts in the big and bulky segment, with these core products typically requiring LTL deliveries to our customer sites. We provide a broad product offering that includes both national and exclusive brands. Over the past year, we have begun to specialize our customer interaction to provide our customers the products and solutions they want and need for their daily operations. We are a top 20 industrial distributor, and most recently, we were ranked number 18 by Industrial Distribution's Big 50 List. Global Industrial has a national footprint with 7 DCs where we can reach 90% of our customers within 2 days. We have a very robust e-commerce platform, and the majority of our transactions with our customers are digital. We also consistently provided regular quarterly dividends.
On this slide, what you see is our refreshed mission, vision, and values that I reframed for the organization in 2025. These are the core principles that we will guide our behavior and actions, but more importantly, better aligns the teams to enable growth. We will act as one team to enable our customers' success. Ultimately, we will become even more customer-centric and will deliver exceptional value while also giving back to the communities where we live and work. A recent example of giving back to a local community in partnership with a nonprofit called Career Day Inc. We were part of a group of 40 professionals who shared their experiences with more than 600 local high school students about career opportunities. It was a great event and another opportunity for us to give back to one of our local communities.
Lastly, we reframed our values, and they are anchored on driving success for our customers, for our employees, and for our shareholders. Next. What is new or different in our approach? Go ahead and page forward. Thanks, Tex. You know, our customer-centric strategy is the foundation for our growth, and success in 2026 and beyond will be guided by transforming into a more customer-centric organization. This past year, we refocused and realigned our teams to deliver value to our customers by repositioning ourselves to provide a unique and personalized experience through specialization, by offering the right solutions and products through expansion, by providing exceptional end-to-end customer experiences with enhanced services and solutions. This in turn positions us to grow our share of wallet, along with product category expansion to generate operating leverage from current operations and investments over time.
On the next slide, we show building in a broad B2B customer base in a highly fragmented market. You know, this is how we're becoming more intentional in our go-to-market strategy. We're becoming more specialized, as I mentioned a moment ago, in each of the industry verticals that we show on this slide, ranging from industrial to commercial, retail, public sector, healthcare, hospitality, and multifamily. As you're aware, we participate in a highly fragmented market with over 4,000 distributors in North America alone, and we're one of the 20 largest distributors. We have a broad and diversified customer base. No customer is greater than 2% of our sales, so we have no customer concentration. We have significant opportunity to expand the total addressable market we pursue by expanding our offering to natural adjacencies.
As we further penetrate these verticals, we will capture greater share of wallet of existing accounts, along with identifying and capturing new customers across these verticals. Turning to the next page. To capture this larger total addressable market, we are well-positioned due to our wide product assortment. You can see on the left-hand side our core categories, which we have a long history in and strong offerings, such as storage and shelving, material handling, safety, workbenches, carts, packaging, supplies, et cetera, which generate the majority of our current revenue. We have significant expansion opportunity to build and grow an MRO and consumable offering that we can take to market by expanding solutions and products beyond what we currently offer today. Ultimately, serving more of our customers' needs. We also have a robust pipeline of long-standing experience with private label brands.
If we turn to the following slide, on this slide you can see that we launched our private label business in the 1980s, and now we have over 45 years of experience. Our supply chain is global based upon our long-standing and entrenched capability. Private brands at Global Industrial represent approximately 40% of our revenue with 15%-20% margin premium and provide a differentiated value. Specifically, these private label brands are designed to deliver value to customers with quality products at a better price point. We consider this a core competency that provides a strong point of differentiation with an enhanced margin and profitability profile. A sampling of our new exclusive branded products are on the following slide. We develop these products to enable our customers to address their ongoing and new needs.
We have a team of over 20 engineers that are converting customer feedback and challenges into differentiated new products that we bring to market on an ongoing basis. We're always striving to innovate and further enhance our proprietary brand offerings through product development and innovation, and to provide the right product progression for their consideration and application within their respective companies. If we now turn to the next slide, this shows that Global Industrial has had a history of organic growth. Although the Indoff acquisition in April 2023 impacted our operating margins, we're working to drive better leverage within the company, and you can see this progression. Our gross margins are very stable in the mid-30s%, and we have maintained and managed our margin profile, all this while mitigating tariffs and other market disruptions.
Moving on to the next slide, and as we look to see how we're positioned in the market, on this slide, there's obviously a number of important trends impacting the industry, and we are well-positioned to succeed. Despite a rapidly changing marketplace, we have managed our way through it with strong margin performance. Some examples of recent disruptions, such as the 2025 tariffs, shipping inflation, et cetera. We had the ability to react quickly, driven by our pricing analytics, along with strong supplier relationships, and we aggressively further diversified our sourcing and country of origin for multiple product lines. Last but not least, we have an incredibly strong balance sheet that enables us to manage disruption and macroeconomic shocks. The acceleration of e-commerce for B2B, including e-procurement, plays directly into our strengths since a significant portion of our orders come in through these channels.
Due to the digital shift that has occurred, there are also elevated B2B customer expectations when transacting online, and again, this reinforces the customer focus and capabilities we already possess. Lastly, we are embracing, testing, and deploying AI and automation where it makes sense throughout the company. If we turn to the following slide, right? Since joining a year ago, we have been shifting to move closer to better understand our customers and their needs. We have a comprehensive approach to the customer relationship, which drives retention, expanded share of wallet, and we ultimately want to become a true partner and extension of their team to deliver a solutions-oriented approach for their day-to-day needs. We are working really hard to take any friction out of the customer experience.
This, along with our customer engagement through unified marketing, sales, and merchandising while leveraging our CRM deployment, enables us to become more sticky. As we become more customer-centric by better understanding the customer, we should be able to scale the company and deliver profitable growth. How do we intend to do this? On the next slide, you'll see that we have a multi-pronged go-to-market strategy. We intend to become more focused on how we go to market across all channels. Specifically, e-commerce remains our leading and largest channel. We are constantly making adjustments in real time to our digital marketing to improve our return on investment. Our 200-plus inside sales reps provide a one-to-one experience for our customers. While our GPO effort launched in 2022, it now has built out a team and is expanding our GPO relationships within both the public and private sector.
We have established relationships with more senior decision-makers, and we continue to make progress. Lastly, after successfully piloting outside sales in the second half of 2025, we have now expanded our approach to scale and grow the company by investing in just under 24 outside reps that started at the beginning of 2026. These reps have been assigned an established book of business and will also pursue new customers. We look forward to sharing more on our progress on this approach as it starts to mature. Which leads us now to how we have refined the go-to-market strategy. On this slide, you can see that we have focused on enhancing our value proposition to drive profitable growth across targeted industry verticals.
We made significant progress in 2025, and as I shared in the last earnings call, we realigned our sales, marketing, and merchandising teams to reframe our value proposition by industry to better serve the needs of our existing and new customers and ultimately to deliver profitable growth. Merchandising is focused on providing the right products and solutions to support our customers, along with delivering product expansion within maintenance, repair and operations and consumables. In parallel, our strategic accounts, excuse me, grew in 2025, but there remains significant opportunity and runway to further penetrate and grow these accounts. Now turning to the financial review. Global Industrial has a light capital requirement and generates incredibly excellent free cash flow. A key note to call out is we have a debt-free balance sheet, which provides significant flexibility and protection for the company.
You can see on the right-hand side our working capital utilization. Our 2025 cash conversion ratio was 1.1x. Now, if we turn to the next subsequent slide. Our capital allocation priorities include reinvesting back into the business, which we continue to do by refining our go-to-market and building out our sales organization, by expanding our product offering and assortment, and building out our annuity MRO and consumables business. Another key lever for consideration to drive growth will be M&A. We are actively building a pipeline of potential targets. However, it will need to be strategic and very intentional as we look to consider how to scale the business and accelerate our growth. Lastly, returning cash to shareholders, as shown on the next slide.
You can see that we've established a track record of returning capital to shareholders through a quarterly dividend for 11 years, which we increased every year. We also repurchased over 300,000 shares in 2025 and still have 1 million shares authorized remaining for repurchase. We opportunistically repurchased these shares after our Q3 2025 results. To wrap up, our long-term intention is to scale the company through both organic growth and M&A. We believe that we are well-positioned to perform the market, barring yet any unforeseen macro or geopolitical events, and we intend to leverage our operations and footprint. We believe we remain on a path to deliver continued improvements in profitability. We're excited about the short and long-term potential of Global Industrial to drive profitable growth.
At this point, I would like to thank you for your interest in Global Industrial Company, and I'm happy to take your questions along with Tex and Mike. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Anesa and Tex for sharing the Global Industrial story. As a quick reminder for those in the audience, if you do have a question, please do so by submitting your questions through the Q&A tab at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We'll get to as many questions as possible here. I guess, you know, starting off, you know, as you talked about, you know, during the last few quarters, you've certainly seen more growth from the national strategic accounts, the GPOs and some of the enterprise accounts versus your core SMB clients. Just wondering, you know, can you put a number as far as like on that as far as how much of your business is now coming from these larger accounts?
I guess the second part to that question would be, what's the margin profile versus your core clients, for these larger type of customers?
Yeah. Hi, Anthony. I'll go ahead and take that. Again, thanks for the question. I'll start with the second part of the question first. What we've actually found is that our margin profile is actually quite homogeneous. We've seen a pretty consistent margin profile among all of our accounts that are part of our account management group. Right now, this shift in account profile and to larger accounts hasn't been dilutive to our margin profile at all. In terms of the question about how are they growing and what contribution or revenue contribution these larger accounts or GPOs have, unfortunately, we don't break out that segment of our customers at this point.
What we can tell you is that this has been a very intentional effort to go after those deeper buying relationships, and these customers have become more and more, a larger portion of our portfolio and are the fastest-growing subset, within the portfolio that we have today.
Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Yeah. Thanks, Tex. Another question we have here is that, you know, as far as what are the early signs that you're seeing that your go-to-market strategy changes are driving sustainable growth? What gives you confidence that you'll be able to sustain these types of increases that you've seen as of late?
Yeah. No, that's a great question. Thank you for the question. You know, for us, it's a lot of the product assortment, the product expansion, and how we're going to market. We've seen, you know, double-digit growth in categories and across different brands and so forth as we've opened the aperture of what we're offering, whether it's online or whether it's actually going out and meeting with customers directly. We've seen that there's an appetite in the marketplace where they very much would like Global to take on more of their share of wallet or spend, because sometimes they're just frustrated with the incumbents not being able to fulfill their needs or have fatigued a bit of dealing with them in a certain pattern or way.
that gives us confidence, and it's as we capture share, it builds confidence in the sales team, so it's almost a self-fulfilling process for us, and we've seen some good wins.
Thanks, Anesa. That's good to hear. Switching gears, you know, where are you guys in terms of using AI to enhance your business? Certainly would love to hear what you're doing on that front and, what's more, what are you expecting as far as managing the business on a go forward basis with AI?
Yeah, you know, like, AI is ever present in front of, you know, in front of us day to day. We're looking to deploy it and have in some pockets within the business. We're looking at it for our agents in the call centers. Our inbound teams are utilizing it. We're positioning it potentially for upsell, cross-sell. We also have utilized AI to help us with our pricing analytics and along some other dimensions of the company. We're looking also at automation where it makes sense potentially in our warehouses future forward. I would say we're in the very early stages of that. I wouldn't say we're very sophisticated as of yet. We're still learning and cutting our teeth on it.
I, you know, the team is testing, piloting, trialing and attempting to figure out how do we do this in a meaningful way and to make sure that the data that we're feeding into it then is accurate so that it then provides us with good guidance or data at our fingertips to make the right decisions in the moment. More to come, but we're, you know, we are testing, piloting and leaning into it as best we can throughout the company.
Just shifting gears to acquisition. You talked about using your strong balance sheet to look at acquisitions. Can you give us any additional commentary as far as where, what type of opportunities are you seeing? You know, what would be at the top of your wish list in terms of potential acquisitions?
Yeah. No, that's a great question as well. Historically, the company has, I think had a different philosophy in the approach or the thinking. I'm looking for accretive acquisitions, looking for things that are a natural adjacency or can help accelerate our penetration and market share capture, along the lines of MRO consumables complementary to what we do. If it opens up the opportunity to enter a new geography or to be able to acquire a book of business that then provides us with additional selling resources, along those dimensions. We're really building that pipeline right now. Tex and I have visited with a few potential targets that in the end weren't quite where or what we thought would be strategically would make the most sense.
We're on the hunt, and we'll make the right investment at the right time or opportunistically make that acquisition at the right time. That is definitely a growth lever for us that we will pursue.
Understood. You know, the external environment has certainly been quite fluid over the past year. Certainly we've seen a lot of that going on over the last year or so. February marked the second straight month that we saw expansion for the manufacturing PMI. You know, how significant is this and how much of your client base is tied to the manufacturing sector?
Yeah, Anthony, I'll jump in there. The manufacturing will be our largest end market concentration that we have. While we have a very broad base and diverse customer base, that light manufacturing is gonna be our single biggest segment. That should drive benefit. We've historically looked over the past; we've seen very directional performance orientation with that index. As we know, that's been sub-50 for the better part of three years. We saw a nice uptick in January that coincided with the momentum that we saw in our business kind of exiting Q4 and entering Q1.
Overall, I think that's absolutely gonna be providing a tailwind to the business and we expect it to perform in line with that as we have that exposure to that end market. It's been a positive outcome.
Gotcha. Okay. All right. Then, in a month or so, actually less than that, we'll anniversary the Liberation Day tariffs. I guess that should be a tailwind potentially as well. Is that, you know, the right way to think about that?
Well, I mean, when you say tailwind, obviously we're anniversarying the tariffs, but we ought to think of also about pricing capture. As we've talked about last year, pricing, while it's not an episodic event or a single event, pricing is a motion that we're looking at every single day in our business. We did have three fairly significant price moves last year, one in April, one in August, and then one in January as we entered the new year, with that April price move being the most significant. As we anniversary that price move, that's actually gonna be, that's gonna be. I wouldn't call that a tailwind.
We're gonna be ramping that some of that price capture that we're getting and more of our growth will be coming from the volume expansions that we began to see again in the late Q4 time period. Clearly there's again, as you mentioned, a lot of moving parts when it comes to some of those tariff events from last year, and we'll continue to evaluate that moving, I'll call it the moving target, that is, this which we expect they're just gonna change. We obviously know that the Supreme Court had overruled a number of the tariffs last year, but there's still many that are in effect, new tariffs that are going into effect right now, and then we would expect changes again throughout the rest of the year as well.
It's an area we have to continue to be very diligent on. Again, the investments we've made both in pricing, our deal desk, our bid desk, and really our sales team will give us more visibility to how to set that price and make sure that we remain competitive in the marketplace, while at the same time protecting our margin, as much as feasible.
Gotcha. Yeah. So hopefully the volume gains offset any pricing there.
Correct. Yeah.
Right. Going back to slide seven on the presentation. You talked about expanding the total addressable market opportunity. Can you provide potentially more color as to how to think about that? You know, I don't know if you're prepared to give a specific number, but if you could talk about like what some of these initiatives could represent as far as opportunity going forward.
Yeah. I'll try to answer that for you. The way that I see this is where we do serve these industry verticals. We are being more and more intentional on leaning into these and deploying and specializing the sales force to better understand each one of them at a more intimate level to understand the customer needs. Because we are so underpenetrated. You know, we're under-penetrated in any given vertical and in any, you know, with any given customer, and there's tons of runway for us to capture greater share of wallet and to sell them additional things versus what they might be buying from us today.
Where what I want to move away from is where it's more episodic, more of a CapEx like big and bulky purchase to then pull through other products and SKUs that they can use on a day-to-day basis, and that is where I believe the market starts to grow for us, and we start to gain greater share of wallet, greater share of the customer's mind and share of mind, et cetera, so that they think of us as we deploy and become more and more, I guess, specialized in these given industry verticals, Anthony.
Thanks, Anesa. In terms of the private label product, I know it's been around 40% of your sales. How are you thinking about private label products longer term and balancing this with national brands? Just curious what your thoughts are on that.
Yeah. I'll jump in on that, Anthony. I think, as you mentioned, this is a core part of our product portfolio, and it's something that we've been focused on for, again, over 40 years on that. As mentioned right now, again, across the entire business, including our Indoff sector, Canada and the U.S., we're about 40% of revenue is coming from our various private brands. I think one area, obviously, throughout the maybe the last 5-6 years, there was a significant focus on expanding that and growing that share of wallet. We're gonna continue to focus on new product introduction and identifying areas where there's opportunity.
I think one of the variations that we're thinking about right now and some of the shift in strategy is broadening that product set, broadening the relationships with our national brand partners. We've always had good relationships with those national brands, but we know that they are starving for channels to market, and there's opportunities where our customers are looking for those products, and we wanna make sure that we are selling the customer what they're looking for at the right time, while balancing the approach. Again, I would expect to see that we're looking at really more of a balanced growth approach to our vendor relationship, both private brand and national brand.
Mm-hmm. In terms of the impact of the margin profile, you know, the private label products obviously have higher margins. As you look to expand perhaps more of your exposure to national brands, that could have a little bit of an impact on gross margin percentage. Is that the right way to think about that?
I mean, look, there would be a mix shift, but it would have to be pretty sizable.
I think it just depends on how this evolves. What we're starting to see is now, as we have these outside sellers, let's see what they start to bring in. I think that will start to help shape or formulate how realistic or whether that is, how it evolves, I guess is the best way to think about it.
Yeah, no.
It's too early to call just yet. We're just really just getting out of the gate.
Yeah. The only thing I would add to that, Anthony, is we think about the national brand partners and, obviously being partners with them, it would be, as we show drive growth, we gotta continue to work to buy better, get more vendor funding.
Yeah
Really target other methods to grow the gross margin profile, that if the mix of product sets causes any erosion, we'll have to obviously exercise different levers in the business to maintain that gross margin. That's really just muscles that
Yeah
That we'll be working with our merchandising team and sales team to capture.
Just to add to that.
I mean, as we start to scale and grow, say, in the national brands, we should be able to drive better cost positions for ourselves. We should be able to mitigate any of the margin back pressure if this evolves the way that we intend it to.
Gotcha. Okay. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that we may have missed that you want to add and make sure the investors come away knowing about the Global Industrial?
No, I think we've been sharing that we're going through some changes. We've had some early wins, but you know, I'd say we're in the very early stages of that journey and evolution. I think quarter by quarter we'll know more, and we'll start to share more as we start to see how you know, how the sellers do, how what we're doing differently is affecting the changes in the profile of the business. More importantly, what's happening around the world just with geopolitical or macroeconomic. I mean, that's becoming more of a factor in general that we have to really stay laser focused on and stay in lockstep on. Other than that, look, excited about how we performed in 2025. We're excited about 2026.
We have many new things in flight, and I'm proud of what the team delivered in 2025. Now it's how do we make 2026 even better than 2025 is kind of the rallying cry for us. We look forward to giving you updates on a future touchpoint.
I'm looking forward to it as well. Thank you very much, Anesa, Tex, and Mike for sharing the Global Industrial story. Also thank you also everyone listening in and asking thoughtful questions as well. With that, we'll wrap it up, and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you so much. Bye.
Take care. Thanks.