Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. Presenting next is the Gorman-Rupp Co. Sorry, trading on the New York Stock Exchange, GRC. And here presenting on behalf of the company today is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Jim Kerr, and Finance Director Ron Stoops.
Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. As he mentioned, my name is Jim Kerr. I'm the CFO. Scott King, our CEO, couldn't make it to the conference today, so I'm going to present the business overview, and then Ron will present the financial update. So Gorman-Rupp, to do the required disclosures there on forward-looking. Gorman-Rupp is a pump company. It sounds simple what we do as pumps, but as you'll see as we go through the presentation, there's a lot of complexity to the variety of products we offer, as well as the number of markets we participate in. We've been around a long time. We were founded in 1933 by Mr. Gorman and Mr. Rupp. Jeff Gorman, third generation, still involved in the business and is the chairman of our board. And the Gorman family still owns about 20% of the shares of the company.
Our competitive advantage and how we differentiate ourselves really around the quality of our products, how we take care of the customers and customer service, and our people, and we'll talk about each of those as we go through the presentation today. We're a dividend-paying company. We just announced last month a dividend increase that represented the 52nd consecutive year of increased dividends for our company, so a track record we're very proud of, and then going forward, we think we have some nice opportunity for growth, and I'll talk about that a little bit after Ron does the financials. Industry overview, just a little bit about the pump industry. Now, it's a pretty broad term as you look at that first bullet there. It covers a lot of different products. Whether you know it or not, every day you interact with pumps in some way.
There's not a lot of good information out there on the pump market, but based on some of the industry data and information we have, we estimate the pump market worldwide is about $100 billion across the world. So even though Gorman-Rupp's pretty well-known, pretty well-established public company, we're a little less than 1% of the total pump market worldwide. And the reason for that is the pump market's very fragmented. There's a few big players, but really there's a lot of niche players out there, smaller companies serving different parts of the market. Pump Industry is fairly mature, but there's still some good opportunities for growth both in the short term and we think over the long term. A little bit more about the company. Now, we have broad diversity in terms of our markets, as you see in the second bullet there.
We participate in fire suppression, industrial, ag, construction, municipal, petroleum, and OEM. We sell through distribution. The reason for that is we want distribution to work closely with the customer. And when you're trying to do that across the U.S. and in other countries, we couldn't build a structure to support that. So we train our distribution. We ask our distribution to carry inventory. We ask our distribution to provide service. And we have good long-term relations with distribution. From an international breakdown, we're about 25% international sales. We were about a third. We did an acquisition of a company called Fill-Rite back in 2022. Most of their sales were North America, so that brought us down to 25%. As you'll see, we have some opportunities for growth in the international markets.
Excuse me. And supply chain, we think this is important.
We're primarily a U.S.-based supply chain, and we manufacture primarily in the U.S. That served us well during COVID. A lot of companies were having trouble with their supply chains. Our long-term relationships with our suppliers, as well as them being local in the U.S., we really had less disruption than most of our competitors. Excuse me, got a dry throat from talking all day.
So how do we operate? We have a number of brands. The Gorman-Rupp brand was the original brand founded the company, and then the GRI brand, also another brand that we started from scratch. The other brands on here, Patterson, National, AMT, and then lastly, Fill-Rite have all been acquisitions we've done over the last 30 years. When we acquire a company, it's a good company. We tend to keep the brand, keep the people, and try to help them grow.
As I mentioned, Fill-Rite we purchased in 2022, by far the largest acquisition the company's done. You can also see a little bit about our international footprint here. The Mansfield, Ohio, is the corporate headquarters and the home of GR Pumps. GR Pumps has locations in Canada, South Africa, Netherlands, and Belgium. And then our Patterson division has an Ireland facility that serves Europe. Also on this page, I wanted to point out the original mission statement that Mr. Gorman or Mr. Rupp came up with back in 1933 still holds up today. It covers about taking care of customers, taking care of shareholders, and taking care of employees, all the things we continue to do today.
Our operating model, given all those brands and given the complexity, we try to take things away from the divisions and let them focus on the customer-related items.
So at the top there, you see the things we do corporately. We take IT, we take healthcare, we take insurance. And at the bottom, you can see the things we want them to focus on: sales, R&D, and all the things that are close to the customer. I'm sorry, really got a dry throat here. Down the left, you can see the things we expect of all of our divisions: quality products, customer-focused. We educate our customers and our distribution. Product availability is important. Pumps is an emergency business, so we encourage all of our divisions, all of our distributors to carry inventory. We did that through COVID, and it really paid off when we came out of COVID. Repair parts, part of our approach is to be fair on repair parts. We don't gouge the customer. We take a long-term approach to that relationship.
On a people side, we train people. We help them with their career development. We promote from within. We have profit sharing for every single employee in the company, regardless of position, participates in profit sharing, which really helps align everyone around our goals. You know, I talked about pumps being a complex business. On this slide, you can see at the top the variety of the types of pumps that we produce. At the bottom of the slide, you can see the size of the pumps we produce. We produce pumps on the far left there that can fit in your hand. We produce pumps on the far right there that can do a million gallons per minute in certain flood control applications. A wide variety of pumps we produce. It's why we have the different brands.
It's why we have the number of facilities we do. There really is a different manufacturing process for each of these types of products. And I talked about markets, and then we participate in a lot of markets. We like this diversity. Not one market, it makes up more than 25% of our sales. We think that's helpful from a standpoint of consistency. Not all markets are going to be down at once. You know, you may have a market or two that's down, but typically you'd have other markets that would be up to offset that. So we like that consistency. We get a lot of questions about our markets, and we get a lot of questions about the drivers of those markets. We don't have time to cover all that today.
But if you go to gormanrupp.com on our full investor deck, we go through each of these markets, give some examples of the products, give some thoughts on the drivers, and some more information that you might find helpful. And then lastly on this slide, repair parts, we do about 10% repair parts. But if you back out some of our products that don't require repair parts, like fire pumps or Fill-Rite fuel transfer pumps, probably more like about 20% of our business is repair parts when you back out those particular product lines that don't consume any repair parts. At this point, let me turn it over to Ron to give a financial update, and then I'll come back up and talk about some of our outlook going forward.
Thanks, Jim. As you mentioned, I'll cover a few of the financial highlights, and then I'll go through a little bit of our capital allocation priorities, and then I'll turn it back over to Jim to cover some of our growth initiatives, so from a sales and EPS standpoint, we've actually been growing at a pretty healthy clip the last two years, more specifically double-digit growth, double-digit organic growth. The growth in 2022 from an organic standpoint was 15%. In 2023, that organic growth was 16%, so what's really driving that? There's certainly a part of that that's driven by price, but we're also gaining share in the market, and a few things that are allowing us to gain share are really how we serve our customers. One of the things that's important for some of our businesses is lead time.
It's a priority for us to maintain strong inventory positions and levels, as well as maintaining our workforce. One of the things during COVID that we did is we maintained our workforce, knowing that when things rebound in the economy after COVID, that things are going to be much faster and people were going to be looking to hire skilled labor. Also from an inventory standpoint, having that inventory on hand to service our customers and shorten those lead times, we think that's allowed us to take some market share. The other thing we've done is we've actually grown or invested in our distribution network. A majority of our sales are done through distribution, so it's important for us to train our distribution network, as well as invest in new territories and new areas where we don't maybe have exposure or have light exposure.
And the last thing to point out, I guess from a sales standpoint, is a couple of years ago, probably five or six years ago, we revamped our strategic planning process. That was led by Jim and Scott, our CFO and CEO. But if you take a longer look back, I guess, than what we have on this chart, our organic growth probably wasn't as strong as we wanted it to be. So really took a hard look at how do we drive that. And some of the things we looked at are how do we drive new product development and how do we go to market. And one of those things was improving our distribution network. So I think you're seeing some of the fruits of that labor and some of the improvements here in the last couple of years.
So if you look at Q3 in particular, our sales were actually up over last year on a year-over-year basis, but down on a year-to-date basis, only a little less than 0.5% for 2024 versus 2023. As I mentioned, we had double-digit growth for 2022 and 2023. So coming into the year, we knew it was going to be a hard comparison. So I think staying relatively flat or being close to that is still a healthy sales number for us. And despite sales being flat on a year-to-date basis, our EPS is up about 30%. And a lot of that was driven by our margin improvement and then reduced interest expense, which we'll talk about a little bit more in here in a minute. So adjusted EPS, Jim mentioned that we bought the Fill-Rite business. That was done back in 2022.
Fill-Rite was very good at generating cash. And then along with our legacy GRC business, has always been very strong at generating cash, even in downturns in the economy. So if you look at 2023, our Adjusted EBITDA was actually a record high of $122 million. That was actually a 37% increase from where we were in 2022. And excluding the Fill-Rite acquisition, our legacy businesses on an EBITDA basis actually improved year-over-year 31% from 2022 to 2023. So as a percent of sales, EBITDA ended up at 18% of sales in 2023. And that was actually the third year in a row we had successive improvements in that metric. Looking at 2024, Adjusted EBITDA on a year-to-date basis is up 3% over where we were in last year. And on a trailing 12-month basis, our Adjusted EBITDA was $125 million. Incoming and backlog.
Our incoming orders for the current year have remained strong, which actually has led to our high levels of backlog, a little bit higher than I think where we would expect our normalized run rate to be. On a year-to-date basis, our incoming orders were $496 million, which is up about 4% relative to where we were last year, and that is across most of our major markets. That wasn't any in particular market, and then backlog at the end of Q3 was $208 million, and that compares to $218 million where we were at the end of the year, so we think that the healthy incoming orders in our backlog position set us up well for the remainder of this year and going into early 2025. As I mentioned, backlog is a little bit of an elevated level.
I think long-term we would expect that to get down closer to $150 million-$175 million on a normalized run rate. So looking at our leverage, prior to the Fill-Rite acquisition in 2022, the company was actually debt-free. We've historically been pretty conservative on the balance sheet and as it relates to debt. So it may have been a little bit of a surprise when we went from no debt to 4.8 or 4.9 times leverage. But that kind of speaks to how we felt about the Fill-Rite asset. We felt strongly about that when we did the acquisition and still feel strongly about that business.
We were confident, I think, in the cash flow that's generated from our legacy business as well as Fill-Rite that we'd be able to service that debt and get that leverage down relatively quickly, which I think you can see here going from where we were at the acquisition date in Q2 down to 2.9 times at the end of Q3 in 2024. The other thing to note is that's actually a little bit faster than what we had originally anticipated and communicated to the market when we did the acquisition. Two things that are driving that. We already talked about the improvements in EBITDA, but the strong cash flow generation has actually allowed us to pay down some of that debt. Our debt net of cash has decreased over $50 million over the last 12 months.
Along with that, our improved leverage has actually allowed us to refinance the debt. So in Q2 of this year, actually in May of 2024, we refinanced our debt through a series of transactions. Specifically, we amended and extended our term loan facility and took out a small private placement loan and fixed a portion of that debt. The other major thing we did is we reduced the overall debt, as you can see there in the total. And then the biggest thing we did was eliminate our high interest, the subordinated credit facility. That was the last piece that we needed to get over the hurdle to fund the Fill-Rite acquisition. So it was actually at an interest rate of SOFR plus 910 basis points. So we're happy to get that refinanced.
All told, the results of all these financing transactions, we expect to be a savings of about $7-$7.5 million in interest expense on a go-forward basis, and that does not include any improvements in SOFR. A portion of our debt is still variable, so if SOFR were to continue or SOFR were to come down, that'd be an additional savings, and then on capital allocation, we have historical capital allocation on the left and then our priorities on a go-forward basis on the right. Historically, the primary uses of capital have been reinvesting in the business. That's been about $20 million per year. Most of that is machinery and equipment, and a lot of that is replacing old equipment, but it's not just a straight replacement. Oftentimes when we're getting new machinery and equipment, we're increasing our capacity, increasing our productivity and efficiency.
And a lot of times that allows for some level of automation or unmanned machine time. The other priority or historical use of capital is dividend, but we have separate slides, so I'll talk about that more in a minute. And then we made a handful of acquisitions. The largest one you can see there in 2022 was Fill-Rite. And then there was a handful of other acquisitions that we've done historically to grow inorganically. On a go-forward basis, I think the priorities are still to continue to invest back in the business. We expect that to be around $20 million a year in machinery and equipment. We're going to continue our dividend track record, both of a quarterly dividend as well as annual increases. And then the third thing would be prioritize deleveraging or continue to deleverage.
And then longer term after that, I think is looking at acquisitions, but that likely won't happen until we get our leverage down to around two times or less than that. As we mentioned, we are a dividend-paying company. So we have 299 consecutive quarters of dividends and 52 years of annual increases. That actually puts us in the top 50 of all U.S. public companies in terms of annual increases. I think it's referred to as a Dividend King. So that's a history that we're very proud of and something that we're going to look forward to as we go forward.
Thanks, Ron. I'll talk a little bit about the go-forward. As I mentioned, the pump industry is a pretty mature industry. With that, we still think we have a good outlook for growth. We don't give guidance, but from an organic growth standpoint, we would expect to grow in GDP and then plus some things from our new product development and taking market share to get us mid-single digits over the long term, and then on top of that, to grow through acquisitions when we bring down our leverage, so let me talk a little bit about some of the things that we believe will drive that growth. Our culture, I've mentioned a couple of times, is very important to us. All of our employees are empowered to take care of the customer. That's really a foundation of the company. I mentioned the profit sharing.
We have a strong safety record. We're active in our communities. All of that leads to good employee engagement and long-term employees. Our employees, on average, are with the company for more than 10 years. Most of our turnover comes from retirements, and we have to replace people when they retire. Beyond that, we have very little turnover. We believe we have the ability to expand market share. We think we did that coming out of COVID with our approach to maintaining our employee base, maintaining our inventory, and really being able to deliver when things started to turn back up after COVID. First rule always, though, is we take care of our current customers. We don't want to lose a current customer. It's very expensive to go get that customer back. We need to develop new customer relationships, but not at the expense of our current customer base.
There's a lot of things going on with infrastructure that we think will drive that, not just it's been driving that. That's been our number one market so far this year, but going forward, both short and midterm, just the replacing of the aged U.S. infrastructure, the infrastructure bills that have been passed, and the focus on water and wastewater and flood control, and then it's the increased demand for flood control and stormwater management continues. We do a lot with R&D. We spend a couple % of sales on R&D, and we're very consistent about that, and that has paid off over the years with some new product developments that we've brought to the market. New product development really is focused on how do we solve problems that are out there, listening to our customers and coming out with things that will help them.
Some examples are sewer systems getting clogged and how do we develop pumps for wastewater systems that prevent clogs as people continue to throw things down the toilet that they shouldn't do. So not always the most attractive things, but things that we have to solve for our customers and enhancements to pump efficiency. Regardless of government regulations requesting that, our customers want to do that. It saves them money if they can operate pumps more efficiently. Some examples of the new product development on this slide at the bottom left, that was an eight-gallon pump that Fill-Rite came out with. It was just a gap that they didn't have. One of their competitors had an eight-gallon-per-minute pump. They didn't have that. The guy spraying, that's a HydroSeeder to spray grass seed. So we came out with a pump that does that.
The bottom right, those are pretty interesting pumps. Those are really some of the most sophisticated pumps we have. Those fall under the pumps that I talked about that can fit in your hand. We've used those in computer cooling applications. We've used those in EV chargers and a number of other things. So again, just gives you a variety of the type of pumps we have, as well as the R&D focus that we have. Customer training and service, I talked about that as well, training both our distribution and our end customers. We love to bring people into our facilities. We think it's helpful for them to walk through, see how the product's made, meet some of our employees. We'll do that every chance we get.
We have a lot of capabilities at our locations to simulate conditions that are out on the field and show people how to maintain pumps when things are going wrong. We have facilities where they can tear down a pump and put it back together and show how all of that works, so a lot of focus on training our customer and, again, that long-term relationship. International growth. I mentioned we're about 25%. We think this is an area of growth for us. We had been at 33 before Fill-Rite, but we're well positioned. We have facilities, as I mentioned, in a number of countries. Using those facilities as the foundation, we have the opportunity to expand distribution in Europe, South Africa, and other areas, and serving those distributors out of these locations, and then the Patterson facility on the far right, that's in Ireland.
To date, they've been focused mainly on fire pumps, but Patterson does a lot of other municipal applications, and we'd like to use that Patterson facility to serve Europe with some of those other municipal applications. And then lastly, I have on the page here is Fill-Rite. Fill-Rite is primarily North America. We have to do some market research and understand the market better and understand the needs of any modifications to the product. But given Fill-Rite's brand name, given the quality of the product, we think international expansion for Fill-Rite is definitely an opportunity for us. And then operational excellence. We have about 2 million sq ft of space across all the divisions I've talked about that we operate in. Ron mentioned we do a good job of investing back into those locations.
So if you were to take a tour of our facility, you'd see a lot of automation. You'd see a lot of equipment that gives us a lot of capacity. So a lot of capabilities we have at those divisions and really the ability to leverage that capacity as sales grow. Most of our locations today operate one shift. We could really leverage those locations as sales grow by adding shift and continuing to invest in automation and increase capacity that way. Ron mentioned acquisitions as well as I did at the beginning. We have a long history of acquisitions. These are the ones from 2010 forward, but we talked about the Patterson brand, the AMT brand as well, on top of National and Fill-Rite, which we're showing here. As we deliver, we'd like to get back to acquisitions. We have very disciplined acquisition criteria.
Fill-Rite, I think, showed us a couple of things. One, if we stick to this criteria, there's a good chance for success. We talk about we'll stay in the pump business, but that's still pretty broad. There's a lot of niches we don't participate in today, and one of the key things on here is the cultures need to match. We're not going to buy a company that makes cheap product that you sell at Home Depot or Lowe's. It just wouldn't match with the brand and the image of Gorman-Rupp. We're going to buy good product, good brands, customer-focused companies, and then, like I said in our operating model, really try to take things off of their plate that's back office items and let them focus on serving the customer, coming up with new products, and doing those types of things.
The other thing I think we learned from Fill-Rite is doing an acquisition of a little size probably is better than doing a number of small acquisitions. The workload is about the same when you do a small acquisition. Your chances of success aren't always as great, and we found with Fill-Rite, that came with a good bench strength, good R&D pipeline, and a lot of things that you don't get with a smaller company, so maybe not the size of Fill-Rite. Again, I think that would be tough to do from a purchase price standpoint, but something $50 million to $100 million in sales makes sense for us versus we've done acquisitions as small as $10 million or $15 million in sales over the years, and lastly, just to kind of wrap up where we started, we're a pump company. We're very diverse. We focus on quality.
We focus on customer service. We think our people are a key differentiator, and we think we're well positioned to grow in the future beyond GDP, hopefully do some acquisitions and continue to add shareholder value. That's all we have. We can open it up to questions.
Apologize for the voice. Any questions?
Sure.
I have a general question. You said potential tariffs on in your competitors to strengthen pricing?
Yeah. So there's a sign up here. Repeat the question. So the question was about tariffs and how we expect to impact us as well as pricing. So given we're U.S.-based, we do have a little bit of exposure to China and some other countries, but we feel that there's tariffs. One, we have a track record of being able to pass those on to the customer, so we would expect to do that. And then two, we'd be much less exposed than a lot of the other companies that operate in our space, including ones that manufacture overseas and bring things into the U.S. So not ideal, but I think we would navigate it probably better than most of our competitors. So it could be an opportunity, actually, but we'll see how it goes and how broad they are, what countries they are and all those things.
But yeah, we definitely have a track record of passing it on to the customer. And when we were experiencing high inflation, we were able to pass on two price increases per year to our customers. Didn't receive any pushback. When we do price increases, they're pretty well thought out. They're pretty reasonable given the conditions. No one views our price increases as trying to gouge or take advantage of the situation. They understand that it's a real price increase we need to pass on due to our costs going up. Any other questions? Sure.
Yeah. The cadence on kind of the backlog normalizing here and what's kind of one or two key drivers there in terms of getting from the number for that $150-175 million?
Yeah. So typically, most of our backlog, I think 70% of the backlog ships within six months, and then the rest of it ships typically within a year. Getting the backlog down really is a function of the incoming. As we mentioned, incoming remains strong. And then the other thing that can impact our backlog is some of these municipal flood control projects I've talked about. Those can have a year-plus long life in terms of being in backlog for that long. So sometimes that can impact the aging of the backlog and how far out it goes. The good thing about our backlog, thanks, Ron, over the years that it's been high since COVID is our delivery times weren't ideal, but they were still better than our competitors. So never did our backlog get to a point where we had people canceling orders.
To me, that would be when it becomes critical is if you're getting orders canceled because your backlog's too long and your delivery dates are too long, that would be an issue. But the fact that, again, back to that U.S. supply chain, U.S. manufacturing, again, our lead times weren't ideal back in 2022, 2023, 2024. They're better now. I guess they're back to normal now, but 2022, 2023 in particular, they still were better than a lot of our competitors. Any other questions? Sure.
One curiosity question. Your distribution network is your feedback interface to bring new information back to your technical group, etc., groups, and so on. How does that work, basically?
Yeah. So the question is about distribution, how we get feedback. We have an internal sales team, and their whole job is to work with distribution and train distribution, get feedback from distribution. We have distribution councils. We'll bring 10 distributors together, meet on site, and get feedback from them. It's where we get a lot of new product ideas. We get a lot of market sentiment about, okay, how are your customers feeling? It's an ongoing feedback loop through our internal sales team, which really is a training and relationship team with the distribution, and then bringing them together at times to talk among themselves and for us to moderate that and see what's going on in the market. Yeah, it's a valuable resource for us, for sure.
Sales is more than just sales.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes, definitely. And they're a big part of the feedback loop. And we bring them in often for training. We bring distributors in. We feel the only way they can be a good distributor is they understand the product, understand what they're selling. And a lot of what's important in a lot of our businesses is applying the right pump to the right situation. So you can have a good pump, but if you apply it wrong and put it in the wrong situation, it's going to fail. So we really rely on distribution to understand what the customer needs and what the best solution is. And sometimes the customer doesn't necessarily understand that. So it's that education we do that helps make sure we get the right pump in the right place. Any other questions?
Got a couple more minutes here.
I think you consider yourself to be at the higher grade for most of these products, and I only really know publicly traded companies, but would you compare yourself in any way? I know that there's so many different SKUs that's hard to market.
Yeah. If you look at our deck, we not only break down the public companies because it's hard to compare. Actually, we list the public company, and then we list the brands we compete against. Most other public companies aren't pure public companies or pure pump companies, so it's hard to get information on them. But we know what brands we compete against of those public companies. But again, public companies make up a small portion of the $100 billion worldwide market. A lot of it's just small niche players. But again, no matter who we're competing against, it's really the quality of the product and the customer service that we provide that boils down to having the right people on our team. Anything else? All right. Well, appreciate the questions, and thanks for joining us this afternoon. Have a good conference.