All right, our next presentation here is going to be Jewett-Cameron Trading Company, traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol JCTC. Presenting from the company today is the Chief Executive Officer, Chad Summers. Chad, take it away.
All right, thank you, Robert. Good afternoon. I know it's 3:00. You guys have been sitting probably in meetings all afternoon. I'm going to do my best just to kind of have the slides available for your review, but I'm going to not try to read them all. You can read them online at your leisure. I do want to make you all aware of who we are, what we're about. As Robert indicated, you know we are a 70-year-old NASDAQ-listed company, really focused on designing, supplying, and delivering innovative crafted products for pros, DIYers, and dog owners. We do it in three primary categories. We do it in the fence category, dog containment category, and then sustainable home goods. I will highlight some of those here on these slides so you're familiar with who we are, where we're at today, and where we're going.
Those down there are some of the brands that you would recognize. Just to get the numbers out in front of you, again, all is available online. You know, been $45 million-$55 million in revenue over the years. You know, you can see the customer base that we have, a very solid, sustainable, large retail customer base, heavily focused on building products. Costco and others have been great partners over the years as well, both in-store retail as well as online and through distribution. As I mentioned, you know, fence products, pet products, and sustainable products. Fence is, by and large, our largest category. Historically, it has been. Part of that is made up of both our wood products as well as our metal and composite. I'll show you that in a second, just so you're familiar with those products. That is our primary.
That is our focus area. We've had a long, great history in our Lucky Dog pet products. What I would describe them as is pet containment. Welded wire, chain link, kennels, crates, X-pens. I'll show you those as well. Our most recent one in these sustainable home good products, we started as Lucky Dog Poop Bags, picking up pet waste. We rebranded a year and a half ago into MyEcoWorld so that we could offer bin liners and yard debris bags as well. I'll show you more. We do have one subsidiary right now, our Greenwood Products subsidiary. They sell OEMs, really engineered solutions of panel products. I'll highlight a little bit about that. We also had a seed cleaning operation that we closed down in 2023. We have that property available.
I'll talk a little bit about that. This is just a quick view of our sales by those product categories. What I would highlight here is a couple of things. One is, if you look at the fence category, we have really focused on the metal fence, a lot of proprietary products in that area. That growth, the red bars are the ones that continue to grow. The lumber is represented there in the gray through Jewett-Cameron Fence Board Pickets. That used to oscillate quite a bit. Now we've kind of secured a sustainable business, supplying it for major DCs for several different retailers. You can see a sort of flat line. We expect that to be able to be strong and growable as well. You won't see the big highs and lows anymore. The pet was greatly impacted by the pandemic.
It went up, and then it went down because of downstream inventory. Those products we've had for a while, they do not go bad. Now, with the current trade and the tariff issues going on, some of that pet inventory just became a lot more valuable. As people are preparing to maybe rebuy and source import themselves, we have quite a bit of that inventory that we've held on to that is going to be solving some problems here in the near term. The gray in the sustainable represents when we launched Lucky Dog. Great success. We hope to get back to that. We wanted to rebrand and expand. We felt that Lucky Dog could not go into bin liners and yard debris bags. It was too much focused on the pet. MyEcoWorld allows us to do that. Great growth right there.
Greenwood was negatively affected by the pandemic because so many of those panels go into bus floors. Bus manufacturing sort of flatlined during the pandemic, not because of getting the floors, but because they could not get the computer chips to finish the buses. They produced all the buses, then they sat waiting for the other supply chain issues. When that got resolved, our sales went back up. This gives you a better feel when we talk about our fence products. I mentioned the lumber, the cedar fence board products that are a big part of that category. We started as a lumber brokerage business at the very beginning. We still have lumber brokering in our business. It really got us into the lumber aisle at these major retailers.
Then we began an acquisition trend and developing some of our own patented products as well, starting with the Adjust-A-Gate over there. We've sold millions of those Adjust-A-Gates over the years. It's been a great product. It's in the wood aisle. We expanded into an adjustable chain link gate as well, another Adjust-A-Gate called Fit-Right. Then in about 2018, 2019, we launched our steel fence post. One of the major fail points in most fences is a rotting out treated 4x4 post. This fence post is meant to mitigate that. That's been one of our greatest successes here this last year, which I'll highlight again in the next slide. Just to round out the other fence products, we also have a compostable, I mean, a compostable, a composite high-end fence solution as well.
You would get this through like a Pro Desk at Home Depot or Lowe's. It is a composite low maintenance with aluminum post and composite materials. We also offer a welded wire temporary fencing. You'll typically see this around parking lot sales or events, you know, down in cities. The Perimeter Patrol is a great product as well in our fence product. Where we've really highlighted in recent press releases over the last six months to last year has been in our displayers. I just wanted to highlight this is what the displayers look like. If you go into those major retailers, for many, many years, you would see the Adjust-A-Gate displayers. It's been in thousands of stores.
The great progress we made this last year was getting a new designed displayer of our post, our Lifetime Steel Post in those same lumber aisles. It used to be in the steel aisle. Now it is in the lumber aisle. That growth has been really exciting here this year, even out of season, because up north, most people are not building fences in the winter, the fall and winter months. The sales have still gone up exponentially as a result of getting that in. We are very excited for the season to see the performance of the sales of the post now that we are in season. With the pet products, I do not have a picture of the chain link, but you can imagine what that looks like. We have the welded wire and the chain link kennels.
We have welded wire kennels, pet crates, as well as X-pens. Really, our focus is not all pet products. It is really just pet containment. That is the focus of that. As I mentioned, our most recent addition is our sustainable products. All of everything we do is about enriching outdoor spaces and improving the lives of pros, DIYers, and dog owners. Offering these compostible bags, and now another alternative to traditional plastic bags is our post-consumer recycled bags. We have that all to the highest standards, all very certified, no concern over greenwashing or anything else. We are very proud of the opportunity with all the plastic bans and all the interest and alternatives to traditional plastic to add this to our portfolio. It also offers more year-round sales and more regular purchasing because many of our products are built to last.
These allow for opportunities for consumers to want to get up and buy these over and over again. This just highlights that Greenwood subsidiary and the engineered solutions of our panel products. It's not limited to that, but that is an area of high concentration we have right now. We also have the proprietary dB- Ply Technology. It's a unique technology. It's sound dampening. It eliminates the vibrations of buses, so it reduces driver fatigue. It could go into any other variety of applications to kind of reduce the sound. It's a pretty exciting product. We've had a lot of success over the years, and we're looking to expand that penetration in the marketplace in different applications. I'll kind of leave it on this for a while.
This is really, you know, our company has gone through a lot of change in recent years. For most of its history, it was owner-operated. When I came in, really kind of set a course of strategic direction. We rebranded. We invested in operational enhancements. You know, we set out some clear strategic growth so that investors like yourself could be aware of who we are and where we're going. We did not used to do these types of shows, these types of conferences, getting out there in front of it with earnings calls and everything else. We're really adamant about getting our story out there so people could see what it is we're investing in. When you look at our growth drivers, what's going to drive the top line is really going to be in the displayers.
We do think that the Greenwood and the MyEcoWorld have great potential for growth. We've seen it in the past. We look forward to seeing that in the future. The real focus there is on the pros and getting in front of that. It is the major retailer's focus is getting in front of the pros and solving their problems. When you look at the bottom category there of supply chain security and operational efficiency, we've done a lot to that. I'll talk about that here on the next slide a little bit on the sourcing expansion that we started about two years ago. The distribution expansion to be able to reach our customers more effectively. We're located up in Oregon, but we want to make sure that we're getting that final mile and reach more quickly and cost-effectively on the East Coast as well.
The margin initiative, we've had margin decline for a number of reasons. A couple of supply chain crises didn't help. Now with the tariff challenges, we're navigating that. We're in a pretty good position to navigate that. We're right now doing a pricing overhaul to make sure that the legacy pricing that I walked into is being managed better to make sure we're getting the margins we should be getting on our products in our different channels. Of course, just continuing to innovate. We have a new Adjust-A-Gate Unlimited. I brought a little sample up here just to show that. It's a low profile gate. We've had the Adjust-A-Gate full frame out there for many, many years. We need to keep innovating to dominate in that fencing space that we feel like we have great street cred and great track record in.
It is really the only complete gate kit on the market. It is much less visible than all the other steel frame gates out there. I just wanted to show off its low profile because all of the steel is basically hidden in the joints. It is a very innovative product, continuing to do that. We also have the opportunity with the seed property to be able to capitalize on that. We put it on the market last summer. I can share a little bit more about that, maybe in questions later. Given the recent developments, if you follow the news and the trade wars and tariffs, I wanted to highlight here because we just sent out a press release just a couple of hours ago highlighting a new development that I wanted to share.
Because what's not represented on here is this week I've also got now sourcing out of Indonesia. When you look at our sourcing out of China last year, over 90% of our production and our sourcing was coming out of China. By June of this year, I'll be down to 3%. I know for the year or 2025, it shows 21%, but that's just in the first half of the year. By June and into next year, depending on the results of the tariff challenges going on and where the dust settles, we are now multi-sourced so we can go where the best price and the best quality is available. We started that about 18 months ago.
Going on two years now, not knowing that this was going to happen, but it really positioned us well to navigate this, certainly better than a lot of our competitors who are not able to get out of China fast enough and be able to continue to supply their goods. This is just a photo of the seed property. Many of you are not from Oregon. You may not be aware that our location out here, this is one of the fastest growing communities in Oregon right now. It is 11.6 acres. We have over 109,000 sq ft of warehousing space that is available. It is unique. It is a unique property. We bought it in 2000, continued to operate the seed cleaning facility for all those years.
In 2023, we just didn't think it was worth continuing, getting harder and harder to maintain the equipment for it and everything else. The value of that property continues to appreciate. That Highway 26 right there is a major thoroughfare coming out of Portland, going to the Oregon coast. It is a corner lot. There is a lot of value to that property. You can see with the zoning of rural industrial, there are a lot of applications and a lot of interest. I would just say the timing of that, you know, we listed it going into an election year. There was a lot of ambiguity kind of going into the fall. Now that the dust has settled, we anticipate increased interest in that property. Yes, we listed it in July of last year.
You could imagine, you know, people were a little hesitant to move forward, but we're seeing already some increased interest in that property. As far as the revenues, just the key financials, you can see, you know, the revenue in the peak of the pandemic there. We were able to supply a lot of the dog owners and the home projects were going up. As I mentioned before, the downstream congestion from the inventory of pet definitely had the biggest weight against our revenues. The margins have declined. Again, we were investing a lot and managing some of those challenges, not only from the pandemic, but mainly the two supply chain crises when container costs went from $2,500 to $20,000. Those prices could not be absorbed by our customers overnight. Those activities kind of ate away at some of our margin.
Our success of our Lifetime Steel Post has also contributed to some of the margin because getting those displayers created to keep up with the demand of our big retailers actually was a high-cost domestic. Now we're actually producing those internationally. We expect those margins to improve in the future. There is our balance sheet. Actually, we've reduced our inventory. Our peak of disclosure was February of 2023, and we've actually decreased our inventory by 60%. This is just doing an annualized at the end of the fiscal years of 28% reduction in that peak inventory. Again, our seed property is on the books at less than $600,000. I know we've listed it for $9 million, but it's not likely to sell for $600,000.
You can imagine the value of that property and the improvement to the share price when that transaction occurs is going to be good. The other update from our Q2 disclosures of a few weeks ago is that we were not borrowing for quite a while, and now we've tapped into it at the beginning here of our Q3. It tends to be a seasonal usage because we have to ramp up for our season. That's where we're at. There's our leadership team and our board. With that, I'll kind of wrap it up and answer questions.
Yeah, I'll start with a few, and then if the audience has some questions, we'll start turning it over here. Maybe first off, talk about the metal fence products, right? You had that slide there that talked about sort of the growth trajectory of metal fence.
A lot of that's being driven by these placements of the LTP displayers. Again, you've sort of had the displayers in what, 2,000 plus stores? The LTPs are, you know, I think about 300 stores. For those maybe not familiar, talk about how driving the displayer growth hopefully will drive demand and pull through going forward here.
Yeah, I do. It is a great question. To clarify on that, because I don't want to undermine the value of that movement that we had. For many years, we did have the Lifetime Steel Post in these major retail stores. The way that they were structured is they were put in the chain link aisle with the other metal products. In order to capitalize, like we do with our Adjust-A-Gate in the wood aisle, we had to design a displayer to get it into the wood aisle.
When pros and DIYers are coming in buying their fence products, they can now see the displayer, understand its value, and then conveniently consume that product. When you consider, we put it in just 21 stores in Southern California in May of last year. The success of that quickly led to other regions of the big retailers clamoring to get it. We had to control that growth. We expanded to 100 by August, and I think it was 200 by November. We had a goal of getting to over 300 or to 300 by the end of February. We exceeded that and got into over 334 stores and continued to expand. When you think about those displayers, I know they do not seem very sexy, but they are like a vending machine.
Once you get into those stores and you get a parking spot and it gets planogrammed, the replenishment is key in that process. Once it gets into that process, you know, we wanted to manage that growth. If you think about most fence projects, they typically have one or two gates, but they have dozens of posts on every fence project. So far, the point of sales have been extraordinary, and that was out of season. We are very, very excited, as I mentioned earlier, to see the impact of that here as we go into the fence building season.
This is a 70-year-old company, right? It has sort of had this eclectic mix of businesses from seed cleaning facilities to fencing and such. You have talked about sort of transforming this business here over the last couple of years.
Talk about some of the maybe the key things you've done and where this business goes. What does it sort of look like in five to ten years?
Yeah, yeah, it was very much owner-operated for much of its history. It was very eclectic. A lot of eclectic acquisitions. We've really pared it down. We did invest heavily. That's part of the SG&A increase. We invested in people. We invested in resources. It did position us to navigate some of the challenges of the recent years because of the supply chain crisis, the pandemic, and now the most recent tariff wars. If we hadn't done what we did, we probably couldn't have navigated those as well as we did.
Looking forward, really just continuing to focus on our fence products and innovating in other outdoor spaces to continue to meet the needs of pros and DIYers is where we see ourselves going and dominating more in those major retail stores as well as other distribution.
On the tariff-related issue here, talked about 90% of product was being sourced out of China. I know there's global steel tariffs across the board, but there's also sort of the incremental China tariffs. You've moved a lot of the production to other areas with lower tariffs. I think you've utilized the analogy of you're not quite a cruise ship, but you're also not sort of a kayak. It sort of takes a minute for this to move and for you to start seeing the impacts of the lower cogs into the future.
Maybe just talk about, you know, when we can start to see the impacts of some of the movements that you've done here over the last couple of years.
Yeah. Just to expand on that reference, you know, we're not that big, but I say that we turn at the speed of a cruise ship. We're not a kayak. I can't spin on a dime. Seeing the effect of all these initiatives that we've done is going to take time. We believe it is starting to gain traction. We've seen evidence of it. I think on the focus of the metal fence I showed earlier, you can see that reality. It doesn't drop to the bottom line. It's painful on those earnings calls to say, hey, margin went down, costs are still high, revenue is not jumping yet.
We do believe that we're positioning ourselves well for that to gain more margin moving forward.
One more for me, and then I'll open up here. If you maybe go back to the previous slide there, Chad, on the balance sheet right there. Currently I have $23 million of shareholder equity. Book value or stock's currently trading at, I think, about a $13 million valuation. Again, as you mentioned, there's a seed cleaning facility that's on the books at $600,000. You got it listed for nine, you know, probably valued somewhere in the middle of those two. Talk about if you were to sell off the facility or some sort of a transaction there on the seed cleaning facility, what might that look like? Are you looking at special dividends, reinvesting in the business, some combination of the two?
Yeah, I know we're running out of time, so I'll be sensitive to shortening the answer on the limited time available. We haven't disclosed exactly what our plans are. Part of that reason is because it depends on the number. You know, if I have it listed for $9 million, I might choose to spend $9 million differently than if I sold it for less than $9 million. We do want to focus on, and the board is focused on, adding shareholder value and investing in what's going to grow and sustain this company into the future. Really, at this point, that's all we've kind of stated, that we do want to add those dollars and put that capital to good use to improve shareholder value.
All right, very good. Anyone in the audience here? Jim?
Yeah.
Yeah. The way I'll answer that is, you know, what's most important is when you get displayers in is not running out of stock. The last thing I want is an empty vending machine sitting there, and then it gets kicked out of my parking spot in those aisles. The first thing is making sure we have enough. We're in a good place for that with all that multi-sourcing. That's great. The other part is we have plenty of those displayers. It's just working with different regions. Typically, a retail region will be 30 stores, 80 stores. We just choose those regions. We're not trying to get in every store in all of Home Depot and all of Lowe's because not every market is a Lifetime Steel Post market.
It's really about getting into the right stores in the right aisle and making sure we manage that growth. Right now, we're just managing the demand because the demand's coming in, and we want to fulfill that, you know, effectively and not have a misstep. Sorry.
When I try to look at companies like this, I don't find many companies that are kind of selling industrial-type goods through specialized retailers that are still public. You have had 70, like very decades and decades of being in, I guess, a company. Why is this company still public? Have there been PE effort, like people buying the company?
Yeah. I know we're out of time, just to recognize the time card in the back.
I know I wasn't there when it went public, and the owners are not here now that took it public. I can't go into all the details of why they took it public. I would say it's the most common question I get is, why are you public? It's a challenging question to answer given that I walked into this public company and I want to add value. It was also largely privately held while publicly traded since 1996. When one founder passed away and the other one retired, the whipsaw effect of where the ownership was when it was primarily internal driving the shareholder value for themselves versus now virtually all shareholders outside is a big difference for me to manage through that.
You know, as far as what are the possibilities in the future, we haven't disclosed what those are and what that might be. One more question?
I would just like to echo what he said over here. That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned your discount to book value. What's the historical average?
The historical average of our book value?
I mean, you're saying you're taking a 45% discount. Like, what's it been historically?
I'm sure the CFO would answer that.
Yeah, yeah. I know. We have the book value per share at the bottom of the slide there. You can see the historical. I guess we just have to match the stock price up to the book value here over the last couple of years. I think we've traded around maybe a high of five or six dollars over some periods of time.
If you're looking at the share price, just to give you context, and again, you can look just on our history for many, many years, you know, it was around $4, $5, $5.50, you know, and then it jumped during the pandemic and then went back down to $4, you know, $4.50 again. That's been kind of the history of the transaction there. Again, it was pandemic-driven, capitalizing on all those sales, especially with the pet and home products. Thank you all. Appreciate you guys taking the time.
Thanks very much, Chad.