Good afternoon, everyone. Our next presentation for today is the Gorman-Rupp Company, ticker GRC. My name is John Franzreb. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. For those of you not familiar with Gorman-Rupp, Gorman is a manufacturer of pumps and pump-related systems across an ever-widening range of end markets. We are fortunate to have with us CEO Scott King and CFO Jim Kerr. Following their presentation, there will be an opportunity for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A button to submit the questions, and I'll present them to management. With that said, gentlemen, thanks for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John, and thanks, folks who are on, for your interest in Gorman-Rupp. We'll make some forward-looking statements today that are based on our current expectations and assumptions and just ask that you take those into account as we discuss our outlook. As John mentioned, Gorman-Rupp is a pump company. That's all we do.
Our customers tell us we're the best at it in the industry, and that's because we focus solely on customers. Our culture really leads the company, and we know, and all of our employees know, that the customers are the ones with the money. When we take care of customers, they share their resources with us. We make a wide range of high-quality products that are applied across numerous markets, have very solid brand reputations, and all of those things help us navigate changing market conditions.
We're more U.S.-centric in our supply chains than our competition is, and we have an outstanding dividend track record: 300 consecutive quarterly dividend payments for 75 years of consecutive dividend payments and 52 consecutive years of increases under our belt. We're growing. Pumps are vital to our daily lives.
You may not know it, but you use our products every day, whether we're delivering irrigation and potable water, irrigation to crops and potable water to citizens, whether we're transporting wastewater away from facilities so it can be treated, whether we're transferring jet fuel or diesel fuel, whether we're transferring heating or cooling water in HVAC systems, whether we're cooling computers or helping to suppress fires when sprinklers open up in commercial buildings. The uses of our products are numerous, and the industry itself is actually very fragmented. There are hundreds of pump companies in the world.
We think the industry as a whole is about a $100 billion industry worldwide, and there are hundreds of pump companies all around the world. Demand continues to increase as the world is modernizing, and we think the industry is a good place to be. It all started in 1933. Two unemployed gentlemen, J.C. Gorman and Herb Rupp, were here in our hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. They borrowed $1,500 to start the company, and that's the only money that was ever put into Gorman-Rupp.
Our growth since that time has been both organic and supplemented by numerous acquisitions over our history. Our most recent acquisition in 2022 was of Fill-Rite from the Tuthill Corporation. Fill-Rite is North America's leading provider of fuel transfer pumps for farmers and contractors, and it's turned out to be a great acquisition.
Our mission statement hasn't changed since 1933 when Mr. Gorman and Mr. Rupp joined together, and it's really to provide quality products that are competitively priced, delivered on time, backed by reliable service, and a profit that provides an equitable return to our shareholders as well as providing our employees competitive wages and benefits. I think it's great that that mission statement has stood the test of time and have every expectation that that mission statement will continue to be what it is for the long haul.
The six world-class brands that you see represented across the center of this slide span multiple locations that allow us to provide localized solutions while maintaining very high standards of quality and service. Gorman-Rupp, from a culture standpoint, is focused solely around taking care of customers. Our operating model is really fostered to do that.
It ensures efficiency and effectiveness across all functions of the company while allowing our employees to take care of customers. It starts with that culture I mentioned earlier: high-quality products, well-trained employees. Those employees are enabled to take care of customers, and they're incentivized by one of the industry's oldest profit-sharing programs at really every level of the company. We try to keep most administrative aspects of the business at the corporate level.
Definitely, it's in the green at the top of this slide. That allows our employees down at the blue section of the slide on the bottom, at the local level, to respond swiftly to market changes and customer needs. That helps make sure we keep our customers satisfied, and in doing so, we continue to grow. Diversity in our product offerings is a real key strength of the company.
From pumps you can hold in your hand, like the one at the bottom left of this slide, that cool server racks in data centers, to pumps that move over a million gallons of stormwater per minute, like the one in the bottom right, and almost everywhere in between. We are extremely diverse in our product offering, and that diversity really allows us to capitalize on opportunities across multiple different industries, even during challenging economic conditions.
We don't always know where a pump is applied. We sell a lot of our products through distribution, but this is a pretty reasonable representation of the markets we serve. It's rare that all of these markets are up at the same time, but it's also extremely rare that they be down all at the same time.
The application of our pumps across a wide array of these industries really reduces risk during economic cycles. Like all of these markets, right now, there is some special strength in the municipal market and some tailwinds for us in data center construction that impacts our HVAC, fire suppression, and OEM markets. I'll now turn things over to Jim Kerr, our CFO, for some comments on our recent financial performance.
Thanks, Scott. I'll give a brief financial update, talk about our capital allocation priorities, and then turn it back over to Scott to talk about our growth initiatives before we open it up for questions. We've had significant top-line and earnings growth over the last four years. This has been driven by organic growth as well as the acquisition of Fill-Rite in 2022. We acquired Fill-Rite.
They were doing about $130 million in sales. What we liked about Fill-Rite is they fit our acquisition criteria, the great brand recognition they had. Also had a nice margin profile that was actually better than legacy Gorman-Rupp companies, so we knew they would help add to our gross margin and EBITDA margins. In addition to that, we've had nice organic growth. In 2022, we had organic growth of about 15%, and in 2023, organic growth of about 16%.
Some of that was pricing with the inflation that was happening at the time, but we also feel we took market share during that period as well. What we attributed that to is during COVID, we kept our strong inventory position like we always have. We maintained our workforce, and we have very strong, very strong long-term supply chain relationships that really played out during COVID and were an advantage for us.
As we grew the top line, you can see we also grew EPS significantly. A lot of that was gross margin improvement. As we had that double-digit organic growth, we were able to leverage our fixed costs as well as our labor and overhead. The adjusted EPS in 2024 of $1.75 was a record for us. Although you can see here sales were fairly flat between 2023 and 2024, we feel optimistic as we head into 2025 due to our backlog and the strong incoming we saw throughout 2024.
In addition to growing the top line, obviously, that's resulted in a nice improvement in adjusted EBITDA as well, not only in dollars. You can see from 2020 to 2024 at about $125 million, about 2.5 times where we were in 2020. Again, that organic growth plus the acquisition of Fill-Rite, and we've gotten to 18.9% of sales, which also is a high point for us. We still feel there's a little bit of opportunity there to continue to grow adjusted EBITDA as a percent of sales as we continue to further grow the top line. I mentioned backlog and incoming orders. Our incoming orders were strong in 2024. They were up about 6.8%.
Q4 was actually the best quarter in terms of year-over-year improvement, so the trend was strong throughout the year. That has contributed to our backlog being about $206 million compared to $218 million at the end of 2023. We had thought backlog would actually come down more than that, but given the strong incoming, it was nice to see backlog hold up at these healthy levels. As I mentioned, it gives us good optimism.
We feel optimistic about 2025 given the combination of the backlog we begin the year with and the incoming trends that continued throughout the year. As we have improved the top line and the adjusted EBITDA, we have seen a nice improvement in our leverage ratio. We actually were debt-free before the acquisition of Fill-Rite and actually for most of the company's history. Fill-Rite, again, I mentioned, met all of our acquisition criteria.
We felt it was a nice investment for us that over time would add significant shareholder value. As you can see, we levered up pretty significantly on day one at 4.9%. We had confidence in our own ability to generate cash as well as Fill-Rite's ability to generate cash and knew that we would delever pretty quickly.
As you can see by the chart here, each quarter we have delevered nicely down to below three times at the end of 2024, a combination of paying down debt as well as increasing EBITDA. As we move forward, we expect to continue to pay down debt at a pretty good pace. We paid down $43 million of debt in 2024. We would expect in 2025 and 2026 to pay down similar, if not greater, amounts of debt each year going forward.
Improving our leverage allowed us to refinance some of the debt that we took out at the time of the acquisition. We took out an expensive piece of debt that was an unsecured $90 million that was at SOFR plus 910 basis points. Two years into the deal and two years we had a no-call of two years on that debt. We refinanced that in May of 2024. In doing that, we reduced our debt, increased our term loan, took our term loan out for a total of five years, and the net result of all those transactions saves us about $7 million a year in interest expense compared to the interest we were paying prior to the refinancing. That'll continue to pay dividends in 2025.
We do not annualize that until the end of May of this year, so we will have some nice interest expense benefit in Q1 and in Q2 as well. With paying down debt and hopefully at some point in time SOFR coming down, we expect continued improvements in our interest expense. In terms of capital priorities, you look at the history and you look at our current priorities, they are pretty much the same. We have always been good about investing back in the business, and we will continue to do so.
We invest about $20 million a year in CapEx. Most of that is machinery and equipment, tends to give us increased capacity, increased efficiency. It is one of the reasons when we had double-digit organic growth that we were able to lever the way we did. It is years of making investments into our machinery and equipment. We will maintain our dividend track record.
Scott mentioned in the beginning, 52 years of increases, 75 years of dividends. Continuing to pay down debt. I mentioned on the previous slide we were down to 2.9. We'd expect to continue to improve that. Once we do, looking for additional acquisitions, unlikely they'd be the size of Fill-Rite. We don't want to lever back up like that, but we are comfortable with having some debt on the balance sheet as long as it's for the right acquisition.
We'll be patient, find something that meets our acquisition criteria, and hopefully down the road here in the next couple of years, have another nice acquisition to add to the portfolio. Talked about dividends. Just a chart here showing our dividend track record over the years. I'll turn it back over to Scott to talk about some of our strategic initiatives going forward.
Thanks, Jim. The pillars for growth outlined here are really core to our strategy. Across the top, it really does all start with taking care of customers. All of our employees know that. It's what we ask of them, and their culture is centered around that. We do think we have the best culture in the industry. Our customers tell us that we're the best performer in the industry. I'm really grateful we have rock-solid governance.
We invest in our employees. We've shared our profits with those employees for 90 consecutive years, and we're active in the communities we operate. One of John's peers in the analyst community refers to us as kind of old-school ESG, if you will. From an organic growth standpoint, we continue to expand our market share, first again by taking care of customers so they stick with us.
We also continue to innovate and make new products that customers see value in and train and educate our employees in distribution so they're the most knowledgeable in the industry. Our new product development is focused on solving challenging applications and customers' problems and improving energy efficiency and emissions for our products. Often now, the innovation is occurring more in the controls and monitoring of pump equipment than it is necessarily in the iron of the equipment, so to speak.
Whether it's in our facilities, at distributors' facilities, or at customer locations, Gorman-Rupp offers the industry's best training on proper selection and application of pumps. After all, sales folks generally only sell what they know, and it's important that our distributors are well-trained to be able to sell our products. International growth represents a pretty significant opportunity for Gorman-Rupp.
By leveraging our existing facilities and expanding our distribution network, we're capitalizing on favorable market drivers like population growth and increasing infrastructure needs across various regions. Today, approximately one quarter of our sales are outside of the U.S., and we expect that portion to continue to grow. Fill-Rite especially presents an opportunity in that regard. The most recent acquisition had only 5% of its sales occurring outside of North America when we made the acquisition.
Our operations are really well invested in. We carry inventory to support customers because after all, pumps are emergency purchases. We sell through the best distribution in the industry, and we have industry-leading technical expertise. I just finished my term as chairman of the Pump Industry Association called the Hydraulic Institute. Gorman-Rupp and its subsidiaries lead technical standards development for HI, and that's an important part of the industry.
The company's history is supplementing its growth through acquisitions. That'll continue to be a focus once we get Fill-Rite's debt paid down. Selectively acquiring companies that complement our existing product lines has been a great way for us to grow. It really helps us enhance our capabilities and drive long-term growth. Over the years, we've developed a really strong reputation in the industry as being a good place for a pump company to land once it becomes available. In summary, customers tell us we're the best pump company that they deal with.
Our culture is really what sets us apart from the rest of the industry. We're growing, and we think we're well-positioned to continue to grow both organically and in acquisitions in the future. We have a strong track record of both reinvesting in our business and in returning capital to shareholders. We certainly appreciate your attention today and would be happy to take some questions.
Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Jim. If you have a question, please enter the Q&A box, and I will present it to management. I'd like to start this off with, I guess, the topic for the past two days. What's your assessment of the tariff environment and its potential impact not only on you, but on the competitive landscape?
Yeah. I mean, it's uncertain at the moment, John, for sure. As far as the competitive landscape, Gorman-Rupp is better positioned than almost all of our competition to navigate the tariff environment because our supply chains are more U.S.-centric. We don't believe that the Chinese tariffs are going to be removed.
We think those are going to stay in place. We're less impacted because we don't have as much of a Chinese supply chain as some of our competition. To the extent we needed to, we've already passed those costs into the marketplace in pricing. As far as Canada and Mexico, we expect that those are negotiating ploys and probably won't stick for the long haul.
If they do, the handful of things that we know come from Canada and Mexico, like medium horsepower diesel engines, like fire pump controllers, like some electric motors, the entire industry is subject to the same conditions there, and that pricing will get passed on into the marketplace as well if those tariffs do ultimately stick. One thing we're continuing to watch closely, we don't use a substantial amount of steel and aluminum just in and of itself.
We do buy a lot of iron and aluminum castings, and the steel and aluminum tariffs probably have the potential to move scrap steel and scrap aluminum pricing, which are the input costs to castings. We'll continue to watch that and make adjustments into the marketplace as we need to. Right now, we're better suited than most of our competition, and we'll see how it all plays out.
Makes sense. Just a follow-up on that, Scott. How many pumps are—can you kind of quantify the pump market that actually comes from China where you think the tariffs will stick?
You're asking about the supply chain for pumps and how much of that's coming out of China?
Yeah. It's competitive. How much pumps are imported?
I would say there are at least as in dollars. I would say at least as many dollars in casting purchases coming out of China as there are ones that are being generated in the United States, probably even more coming out of China than there are being produced in the United States. I've never seen any industry data specifically on it, but anecdotally, knowing our competition, that would seem to make sense.
It is both components and finished parts coming out of China. It is probably more the components that are the bigger driver for most of our competition. They are buying components and sending them elsewhere.
For what it's worth too, John, the industry as a whole at about $100 billion, probably $40 billion of that is pumps that are sold into China. And in a lot of cases, those pumps are manufactured right there in China too.
Just curious. Question from the audience. Can you talk a little bit about M&A opportunities? Maybe a little bit about, given the diversified customer base and fragmented marketplace, where would you be looking? What kind of product lines or end markets would you be targeting as far as M&A?
Yeah. We have a set of acquisition criteria that are in the longer version of this deck that's out on gormanrupp.com that I'll point you to. But to speak about it, one nice thing, Fill-Rite really confirmed that those are the right acquisition criteria for us. Fill-Rite fit those criteria to a T. What we're going to be looking for is a pump company, one.
That's what we do, and that's what we'd be looking to further expand into. It has to be a high-quality product with a culture of the company that's available that matches the culture within Gorman-Rupp. It'd be pretty hard to go into a company that wasn't focused on customers and all of a sudden instill a culture that was. So it's got to be a product that we don't have with a good culture.
It should be in a niche within the pump industry that's a specialty application. Those tend to be more profitable. They also tend to have stickier relationships with customers. I think we'd prefer the company be a U.S. company. It could be a European company as well, but I think we prefer it to be in the U.S. I think we'd prefer it to have a U.S.-centric supply chain that worked out very well with Fill-Rite and has with some of the other acquisitions we've made over the years.
From a size standpoint, I think we'd rather make one sizable acquisition as opposed to multiple small acquisitions. They all tend to take about the same amount of effort, and why not move the needle as far as we're able to? As Jim mentioned, I don't know that our next one we'd necessarily take on the kind of debt we did to buy Fill-Rite. That was a unique situation. Fill-Rite really was kind of a unicorn at the time when we found it.
Our new product development is focused around expanding within the niches that we're already in. To get into a new niche, we feel it's more efficient to buy into that and buy a brand than it would be to start that up through new product development and try to penetrate market share that somebody's already got pretty trenched into. That is where we would look to do acquisitions.
When we did buy it, we kind of operated the same way I shared with you earlier in a few slides ago, in that we'll let that operating division stay very close to its customers and be pretty nimble to take care of them. We'll try and remove all the things that distract operators from being able to do that, like investor relations, like cash management, like cybersecurity, all those kinds of things. We keep that to a relatively small group of folks at the headquarters.
From what I recall, though, Fill-Rite had some new product opportunities that you were kind of excited about. Can you talk about the relative success of the Fill-Rite new products relative to your expectations?
Yeah. Fill-Rite has continued to grow under our ownership. We actually first invested in a new, larger facility for them in the Kansas City area, Lenexa, Kansas. They went from 40,000 sq ft there to 140,000 sq ft specifically to accommodate new product introductions. They've introduced a couple of products. One, a three-gallon-per-minute OEM-based product that's taken off pretty well.
They've also introduced an eight-gallon-per-minute product, which is the industry's most common size, but a product that Fill-Rite really didn't have for whatever reason over its history. That's gotten a lot of attention, and we expect it to be a pretty solid success as it rotates into the retail and e-commerce channels through planograms and various other things. We are excited about that too. Fill-Rite's got a nice funnel of new product development opportunities, as do the rest of our divisions as well.
Jim, you kind of pointed out that that backlog continues to remain high. You kind of expected it to come down a little bit more than it did, but the booking profile is good. I know in the past you've kind of articulated that it's a little bit more elevated than you deem optimal. Can you talk a little bit about the backlog? Has it been a hindrance? Have you taken share? Maybe a little color on the backlog profile relative to historical trends?
We definitely—it has not been a hindrance. We really never got behind in our backlog where we were losing orders. Now, if you look at our past due backlog, it is pretty much normalized. When we do have past due, a lot of times it is the customer not being ready for it yet. Some of the shift in our backlog is that if you look at our incoming for 2024, it was very strong and municipal. Some of those products are longer lead time.
When I say longer for us, it is still within a year, but it is out a bit. We replaced some of the quicker-turn backlog with some of the longer lead-term, longer lead-time municipal projects. The quality of the backlog, we feel, is very good. As I mentioned, we like where we started the year, and we like the incoming trends as well.
Can you guys talk a little bit about your primary end markets and what you're seeing in 2025 that may be different than what you saw in 2024?
Yeah. Substantially different, John. I don't know that we're seeing anything in any market that's different than 2024 of substance. The themes through 2024, municipal continued to be strong. I think it will continue into 2025. We had some strength in data center work where just about every data center is going to have a fire pump in it.
A lot of data centers these days are going toward liquid cooling instead of air cooling. We supply a number of small fractional horsepower pumps to the in-rack cooling OEMs. Those show up in the OEM market. When cooling demand gets so large that the pump can't physically fit within the rack anymore, they go to kind of the end of row, if you will, of those racks.
There, the HVAC integrators have started to buy what would more traditionally have been HVAC pumps, but are certainly well-suited for larger volume computer cooling applications. I think there is some strength there. Ag is still just okay. I do not know that we necessarily see it picking up. I thought maybe we would not in 2025.
I am not sure that is materializing at this point. We like all of these markets because they are all mission-critical applications, stuff that has to operate in order for processes to function. Demand is going to continue to be strong, we think, across all of them and grow as the world continues to modernize.
Question from the audience about the repairs percentage of revenue. Do you think you can grow that marketplace and does it carry better margins?
It does carry better margins. From some respects, we're careful about pricing on repair parts. You can really tick off a customer by saying they're good on a pump. We're not the cheapest pump manufacturer out there. You sell them a pump at a bit of a premium, and then if you gouge them on repair parts, they're probably never coming back to you. While the margins are better, we're careful about that.
One interesting aspect of Gorman-Rupp's product line, fire pumps and Fill-Rite pumps and some of the small fractional horsepower pumps, you really don't sell repair parts for that product. Fire pumps really don't run unless there's a fire. Fill-Rite and the small fractional horsepower stuff tend to be at price points where if something wears out, the pump tends to be just replaced outright.
If you remove those markets where there isn't a lot of repair content, we're probably a closer proxy to 20% of the revenues that do consume repair parts. We've got some focus in a couple of areas to grow some service revenues and things like that. Do I see it being 20% of revenues with the product type mixes we have? Probably not. In any given year, that could be 10-12%, and maybe it'll go up a percentage or two over time.
Okay. Gentlemen, we are out of time. Do you have any closing remarks?
Thanks for your interest, Gorman-Rupp. If anybody has questions, John, you can certainly point us your way. Thanks for your time.
All right. Thank you all, and have a great day.
Thank you.