Thanks, Quinn. I feel like I'm flying without a net today. I'm gonna try this first time ever, working from an iPad, so no backups. If I screw up, I'll apologize ahead of time. "It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun." That was the description of a football game by legendary announcer John Facenda in one of his iconic NFL Films voiceovers. Now, we're not gonna be quite that dramatic here this morning, but technically, the whistle was blown back in January of 2021 of the game that we're playing right now, with the gun signifying the end of our five-year plan in December of 2025. So that means we're officially at halftime with 10 quarters in the books. Good morning. Welcome, everyone joining us here in person, everyone participating virtually today to hear our halftime report of our 2025 strategy.
Now, for those in the room, I wanna do a special call-out to Koppers board member, Sharon Feng, who is with us in person today. Sharon has served on our board since 2009 and chairs the board's Sustainability Committee. Sharon, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Now, for those of you who follow Koppers regularly, we hope you find today's information valuable in fleshing out in more detail the broad strokes of the story that we've been sharing with you since our initial Investor Day back in September of 2021. For those of you who are new or not as familiar with Koppers, we hope that you discover a company with a simple, straightforward game plan to create shareholder value. A company that does what it says and is delivering upon its commitments.
A company that understands the bigger picture importance of driving a culture centered on providing for people while getting the best out of them. A company who believes there's value in being a responsible corporate citizen for our communities and how we take care of our environment. A company that's built to win. So why are we having an Investor Day here in 2023? Well, because as I've already alluded to, we're halfway through the strategy that we outlined at our first Investor Day in September of 2021, and we wanna share our positive progress to date and the high level of confidence that we have that we'll not just meet, but exceed our previously stated targets.
Now, hopefully, you've all seen the release this morning that signifies that we've moved our guidance for the remainder of this year up from our previous target of $250 million of EBITDA and $4.40 of adjusted earnings per share to ranges of $250-$260 million, and $4.30-$4.60 per share. So with that as a backdrop, let's jump right in. And with that, let me grab my clicker, which is over here. All right. A phrase you'll hear throughout today's presentation is that we believe that we're at an inflection point. Let me back up a second.
Hopefully, actually, by the time we finish this morning, the confidence that we have in responsibly delivering our $300 million of Adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2025, with less investment than previously thought, will lead us to lower leverage and more free cash flow we'll have transferred to each of you. Again, a phrase that you will hear throughout today's presentation is we do believe that we're at an inflection point. And why do we believe that? Well, the heavy spending part of our plan will be behind us by the time we finish out this year, and the benefits derived from those investments are scheduled to be realized over the next two years. Now, what could that mean for delivering shareholder value? Well, it could mean a share price between $60 and $90 in 2025, based upon a couple of simple metrics.
On the low end, if we're looking at enterprise to EBITDA, a simple 7x multiple would translate to $60. Using price earnings, a 15x multiple would deliver around $90 a share. That's somewhere between 25%-50% annual return each of the next two years, and it's not a pipe dream. Both of those multiples represent long-term historic averages for Koppers before we inexplicably dislocated from them a few years ago. Now, if we get nothing else out of our time together today, I hope you walk away as confident as we are that, number one, we're on track, if not a little bit ahead of the financial goals that we laid out in 2021. Number two, we're not just tracking ahead, but we're also tracking ahead while spending less than projected on the growth capital.
Number three, getting to our earnings goal by spending less improves our cash flow profile, which provides greater flexibility for deploying capital. Number four, we do believe we're on the precipice of unlocking significant shareholder value, 25%-50% each of the last three years of the plan, based upon my math, and we're already seeing that play out this year as our share price is up around 30% from year-end. Now, at our Investor Day two years ago, we laid out the five-year goals for our Adjusted EBITDA and cash flow, and the capital that we thought we would need to spend to achieve those goals. At the time, we didn't lay out year-by-year how we would progress towards those targets. Now that we're halfway into the plan, we can put more specificity around those numbers, which you'll see throughout today's presentation.
Now, as we laid out in our plan in September 2021, we stated that there was nothing extraordinary that needed to occur for us to reach our goal. It was a plan that was fully within our control, so long as we didn't see a major global recession. It didn't require a major M&A. It didn't require a new market to develop. It wasn't dependent on unrealistic growth rates. In fact, it didn't require us to grow volumes at all, which is a good thing because we've actually lost $100 million of top line from lower volumes over the past 2.5 years. Our plan didn't require anything other than us to execute the projects we identified that would enable us to expand in the areas we know best....
And optimize our operations and footprint, which frankly, had a lot of room for improvement due to historic underinvestment. All we had to do was control the controllables. So how are we tracking to get to the $300 million without having to spend all that capital that we outlined, while also going backward in volume? Well, it's not due to the projects costing less or any of them blowing away initial projections. It's simply getting the benefits of recouping cost with an associated margin in the inflationary environment that we've all experienced these past few years, that has made up some of the $90 million improvement target, which is enabling us to get to that $300 million without spending all the money that we had talked about.
In the past 2.5 years, we've increased price a staggering $584 million off of a $1.7 billion sales base. That's $70 million of additional EBITDA if we would have recovered our costs at an average 12% margin. That plus the returns on the $300 million. So I know we haven't recovered all that cost at full margin just yet, and that's actually good news because it means there's even more opportunity for us. In our RUPS business alone, I've quantified the need to deliver $30 million more in price to get that business where it needs to be. You probably saw our announcement about a week ago that we had made some inroads with our Class I customer base in that regard, but we still have a ways to go.
Pittsburgh Steelers football coach Mike Tomlin has a way of turning a phrase, and he's so talented and prolific at it, that those phrases often get repeated and referred to as Tomlinisms. You'll hear me drop a few of them here today, with the first one being one of the ones that's most often repeated: "You can't live in your fears." We push leaders hard, head on, to face fear, most famously with the drastic changes we made to our CMC business beginning in 2015. We're doing it again with our quest to get fair value for what we bring to the railroads. I mean it when I say we will either get that business back to acceptable returns, or someone other than Koppers can do it and work for free.
In the past, the mindset was, "Don't lose volume." That's shifted to, "Go get margin." In other businesses, like Performance Chemicals and CMC, it's less about getting more price and more about holding on to our price as lower cost inventory begins to flow through in the back half of this year. So in summary, I'm happy to say that we still have a healthy list of projects that can take us well beyond $300 million when we're ready to allocate capital to them. For now, though, we plan to take a little more time to space out the spending, frankly, give our team a little more breathing room to operationalize the projects they've been working on these past few years.
So as we sit here at halftime with two and a half years of our five-year plan in the books, how do the numbers stack up? What does the scoreboard say? Well, our recently completed second quarter represents our sixth straight quarter of record-breaking sales and our fourth straight quarter of record-breaking adjusted EBITDA. We also find ourselves on track to extend both of those streaks during our current third quarter. And through Q2 of this year, trailing twelve months EBITDA is up $42 million from our $211 million starting point at year-end 2020. We've generated $203 million in cumulative operating cash flow from January of 2021 through our recently completed second quarter. And we've spent $240 million... $249 million in capital net of the proceeds of asset sales and insurance recoveries.
That's 40% of our five-year target outlined in September 2021. And as I already mentioned, all the growth projects we'll need to achieve that $300 million target will be completed by the end of Q1 2024. Finally, we began returning capital to shareholders in the past few years, with $48 million being deployed in either share repurchases or dividends. So again, where are we at halftime? I'd say we're controlling the line of scrimmage, deploying an old-school ground game that isn't necessarily flashy, but rips off chunks of yardage that systematically moves us closer to the goal line. No Hail Marys or trick plays needed here. We just need to keep grinding out yardage and wearing down our opponent.
At Koppers, everything begins with our values of people, planet, and performance, which lead to our purpose of protecting what matters and preserving the future. Now, I hate talking about the pandemic, but there were some positives that came out of it. One of those positives was that it pushed individuals and teams to reflect more on the things they valued as we were all faced with a world that we only thought we'd ever see in the movies. That time for reflection led our management team to reevaluate our company values and formulate our purpose as an organization. When it comes to values, simplicity ruled the day. We all agreed how you treat people matters, taking care of the planet matters, and results matter. People, planet, and performance.
Pursuing any of them at the expense of the other two is pursuing a strategy that ignores the long-term implications of having our values out of balance. Now, you'll hear more about our values and how they are the foundation for the work that we're doing to ensure that Koppers remains relevant far into the future when Leslie Hyde comes up to deliver our sustainability story. Now, as for purpose, I think that everyone at Koppers can align around the work that we do to protect and preserve. As examples, we protect our team members through our Zero Harm culture and preserve their future through well-paying jobs and above average benefits.
We protect the communities we operate in by investing in technologies to minimize or eliminate any potential safety or environmental impact while preserving the future through our investment in programs to promote the future of STEM technology and the development of future leaders at Koppers... We protect shareholders by appropriately managing risks to avoid fatal damage to the future of Koppers, while preserving the future of the organization by balancing various stakeholder demands and delivering on a strategy that drives significant shareholder value. At Koppers, delivering results the right way is foundational to our identity. Across each of our businesses, Koppers products remain enduring, essential, and sustainable.
Enduring, because the market drivers for each of our businesses tend to put each at a different point of the curve on the economic cycle, which helps us achieve positive results regardless of market conditions impacting any single business unit at any given time. Essential, because our products and services provide materials and expertise to mission-critical industries, serving the global infrastructure and society at large. And sustainable, because of our own standards that are upheld consistently and underpinned by our belief that innovation will continue to push industry to better, more climate-friendly solutions. Now, as most of you already know, Koppers is a leader in providing critical products used in building out the global public and private infrastructure. In the rail space, we're the number one supplier of crossties to the Class I railroads.
In utility, we're one of the leading suppliers of utility poles in the U.S. and the single largest supplier in Australia. Our Performance Chemicals business is the world's number one developer, manufacturer, and marketer of wood preservation technologies. Finally, our Carbon Materials and Chemicals business serves as a key supplier of creosote to the North American rail industry, and we're a major supplier to the aluminum industry in many geographies. One of the many interesting aspects of Koppers is that each of our businesses serve markets with products that are concentrated among a very small group of competitors. Koppers enjoys global reach across our business mix, with the bulk of our footprint being U.S.-based. Both of our chemical businesses have operations in Europe and Australia, while our PC business also serves South America through importers and pole treaters.
Our treating business is predominantly U.S.-based, with one crosstie treating facility in Canada and four pole treating facilities in Australia. From a customer standpoint, we supply most of the largest companies in all the markets that we serve. From a concentration standpoint, we do not have any customers that make up more than 10% of our consolidated sales. Now, it's been a strange couple of years, hasn't it? No one ever predicted that we'd be sheltering in place for an extended period of time and then coming out the other side of the pandemic, having to deal with all the impacts that choking off the global economy would set off.
You probably all heard the phrase, "It's sometimes better to be lucky than good," but nothing is better than being lucky and good, and I believe we saw that combination come together in 2020. On the luck side of the equation, in January of 2020, we made some major organization changes that, in retrospect, turned out to be perfect timing for the challenges that Koppers and the rest of the world were about to face. At that time, I created two new roles: a Chief Operating Officer role to instill a One Koppers mindset among our businesses, and a Chief Sustainability Officer, the first-ever at Koppers, to help move us faster in the direction that the world is going and to find ways to make sustainability a competitive advantage. The fortunate timing of those roles right before the pandemic and the pandemonium it would trigger, pure luck.
Now, for the good part. For the COO role, I promoted Jim Sullivan, 10 years now with Koppers, over 30 years in the chemical industry, and the best operations leader I've ever worked with. A relentless, results-oriented leader, Jim combines a winner's mindset with a knack for pushing his teams to reach beyond what they think is achievable. For the Chief Sustainability Officer role, I selected Leslie Hyde, a 24-year member of Koppers and a 30-year veteran of the chemical industry, and probably the most fiercely passionate person I've ever met in the sustainability arena, and that's saying something. Applying the traits she no doubt picked up from her military background, Leslie has established a discipline around process and planning that has set Koppers on a path to punch far above our weight compared to what others are doing with much greater resources.
Also, in February of 2020, we added Jimmi Sue Smith as our Treasurer, and in March of that same year, promoted Stephanie Apostolou to General Counsel. Jimmi Sue, who did a prior stint with Koppers in a previous lifetime, has almost 30 years of finance experience in energy, materials, and chemicals companies. Stephanie, with 10 years of experience in the chemical industry, all with Koppers, may have the least industry experience of the bunch, but since all 10 of her industry years were spent with Koppers, I consider those like dog years. So trust me, she's seen a lot in her time here. You're gonna hear directly from Leslie, Jim, and Jimmi Sue today, as well as from our four accomplished leaders from that head up our four biggest business units in the form of four video vignettes spread throughout today's presentation.
In the interest of time, I won't go through the rest of the leadership team, but suffice it to say, it's a team that's built to win, coming from all different backgrounds and levels of experience to form a fabulous team. A great mix of long-term Koppers experience and new perspectives being added from outside the organization. Now, another favorite Tomlinism of mine came as he was dealing with Le'Veon Bell's holdout when he said, "We need volunteers, not hostages." I've borrowed that line a few times as we've dealt with difficult individuals who wanted to put themselves in front of the organization. I believe I have a team of volunteers who will gladly do whatever it takes, within the rules, to win the game, and the best part is no one's worried about who gets to score the touchdowns. It's just win, baby!...
Looking at the challenges laid out on this page, at times it seemed like we were facing the Steelers' Steel Curtain defense from the '70s or maybe the '85 Bears. But at Koppers, we are a resilient bunch and keep finding ways to persevere. Sometimes that's by drawing up new plays in the dirt, sometimes it's by resorting to the simple plays that have stood the test of time. So as we at Koppers know all too well, if the officials seem to be working against you or you lose your new franchise quarterback for the year with an Achilles injury just three plays into your season, you can't just walk off the field, right? To borrow a phrase from a different sport, there's no crying in football, baseball, or business, for that matter. You have to play the hand you're dealt, and I believe that's what we've done.
During COVID, we leveraged the additional MicroPro capacity we added in the years preceding the pandemic to supply unprecedented demand coming from the home improvement sector, and we rode that wave to our sixth and seventh straight years of Adjusted EBITDA improvement. We implemented 17 strategic projects in that same timeframe, including exiting our last distillation facility in China in September of 2020. As I've already mentioned, we went out and got almost $600 million of price increase to combat the inflationary cost increases that we've seen, and we continue to work in a few key areas to get even more price from customers that are underwater. In response to the Russia-Ukraine war, we've expanded our use of alternative feedstocks and quickly pushed through pricing adjustments to better reflect the constraints on our supply.
At Koppers, we take nothing for granted, and I'm proud to say we have a team, not just at the senior level, but throughout the company, that's agile enough to pivot on a dime, and if necessary, reverse field like Devin Hester taking a punt return to the house. "The standard is the standard," as Mike Tomlin like to say, and while the standard for the Steelers is Lombardi trophies, for Koppers, it's every year needs to be better than the last. No excuses. Now, if I had to boil down what I believe sets us apart as a supplier of critical products and services to the infrastructure markets, I'd say it's the expertise we bring to our customer base that's enhanced by the knowledge and experience we can bring to bear from our interconnected businesses.
We're the global technology leader in wood preservation, with many significant patents for residential treating preservatives. We also deploy a well-respected and experienced team in our carbon-based chemical business that carries forward technical know-how, built up from over a hundred years in the industry, while also advancing the development of new products to serve emerging markets for EV batteries and carbon, carbon fiber technology. Now, for the sake of time, I'll let Leslie touch on how we're using sustainability as a competitive advantage, and I'll finish up this topic by saying that there's no other company competing in our space that has our unique set of capabilities with our vertical integration that begins with our technology and weaves through treatment and product support, and in the case of our rail business, even extends into end-of-life disposal of our products.
It's a powerful combination that's netted us market share gains, technology advancements, and even a key acquisition. There's a lot of activity that continues in the infrastructure space, as evidenced by the numbers you see on this page. $42 billion going to build out broadband in a market that is already replacing poles at a healthy rate. $1.2 trillion dedicated to infrastructure spending from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. $457 billion projected to go into residential repair and remodeling next year, which, while down from 2023 projections, still represents spending at levels well above the pandemic-fueled demand of 2020 and 2021. That's a lot of dollars getting allocated to markets that spend money on Koppers products.
Now, what may not be obvious to many when you look at Koppers is the balance that our exposure to varied end markets and industries brings to our financial results. Now, it wasn't necessarily our intent as we constructed the company as it exists today, but I have to say it's a wonderful by-product. What other company do you know that has eight years running of EBITDA growth while weathering a variety of challenges in each business at different times, but finding a way to leverage whatever might be the current strength while minimizing the damage from those businesses that have found themselves in a tough spot from time to time? Try and follow along as I name the businesses hitting new all-time highs of EBITDA throughout the nine years that I've been in this role. In 2015, it was the rail business.
In 2016, it was Performance Chemicals. In 2017, it was Performance Chemicals and CMC. In 2018, it was CMC again. In 2019, it was Utility. In 2020, it was Utility and Performance Chemicals. 2021, Performance Chemicals with an encore. In 2022, it was Utility and CMC. In 2023, it's gonna be Utility and PC again. Our three segments and the regions and the subsegments that sit below them are amazingly complementary, as demonstrated by our consistent year-over-year improvement at the consolidated level. Now, our, while our business model might lean towards being a little complex, our strategy is actually startlingly simple. It's tried and it's true. It's expand and it's optimize.
Leverage our strengths to expand our product portfolio into new and existing markets through portfolio enhancement, while also expanding our reach into new geographies and using our expertise and network to expand our market share, where the value of what we bring to the table is recognized. On the optimized front, it's good old-fashioned optimization of people, process, and technology, which of course, results in either cost reduction or improved throughput as our network becomes more efficient and provides opportunities for Koppers to compete for even more business. Jim will provide more detail on a few of our cornerstone projects supporting our expand and optimize strategy later during his presentation. Now, for me, these next two slides are the money slides, both literally and figuratively. I believe that we're at the inflection point for both earnings and cash flow....
We made the investments in the first half of our plan to enable a good chunk of the benefits to flow in the second half. And as this graph illustrates, we only saw 3.8% compound annual growth in EBITDA in 2021 and 2022, as we ate cost in Performance Chemicals and RPS. While the benefit we realized from our early low-hanging fruit projects were getting mostly offset by some volume erosion that was occurring for a variety of reasons. Now, for the last three years of the plan, we expect our growth rate to jump to 9.6% as we realize pricing benefits, as well as the benefits from the bigger projects that we've been building for the past couple of years.
With half of this year already in the books, and with the announcement earlier this morning of our increasing guidance for this year, we're proving to be well on that path. It's the same story when we look at cash flow. After a few years of generating just above $100 million of operating cash flow and finishing the first half of this year at -$2 million, we find ourselves at the beginning of the back half of our plan, where the $90 million of annualized EBITDA improvement will begin to be realized as cash. If you just follow this graph, it's approximately $450 million from this point through 2025, after realizing just $203 million over the first 2.5 years, primarily due to $130 million of working capital increases.
You find that further illustrated here, along with what we believe we'll have available to deploy as free cash flow after our normal investments over that timeframe, which is over $250 million after we deploy our normal maintenance and zero harm CapEx of $200 million. As I stand in front of you here today, I can state that I don't really have a particular bias to any one area, as they all bring some advantage. We obviously want to keep growing earnings, and thankfully, we still have no shortage of internal growth and productivity projects to invest in to keep our 9%+ EBITDA growth going after 2025. So we will definitely allocate some capital in that direction.
By year-end, we should be just above 3x levered in terms of net debt outstanding, and I'd like to get below 3 because I believe it will open up some opportunities for share followership among funds that avoid companies operating at our higher leverage levels. So we'll likely also allocate some capital to reducing debt and lowering our interest costs. For those that consider our pension obligation as long-term debt like the ratings agencies do, we also find ourselves at a point where we can economically fund our U.S. plans for about $25 million and offload our pension, which has a certain attraction to it, eliminating one more risk and potential future drag on earnings and cash. On the M&A front, we continue to evaluate opportunities to add strategic pieces to our business that will help us accelerate growth faster than what it takes to build.
One of the things that's changed post-COVID is that inflationary costs to build have increased to the point where the spend between build and buy, and the difference in the risk among the two has narrowed quite a bit, which makes acquiring assets a very competitive option for us now. I also like to think that we've proven our ability to integrate businesses into the fold and get more out of them than they were able to do on a standalone basis. Here's a staggering fact for you: By the time we finish out this year, businesses that we have acquired from 2014 on will be contributing over 60% of the company's EBITDA. Of that EBITDA from acquired companies, over half of it will have been created post-acquisition.
Further reinforcing the transformation we've driven at Koppers, if you look at the flip side of that equation and compare the two legacy businesses, CMC and crossties, the EBITDA from those combined businesses at the end of this year will be about $15 million lower than they were in 2014. It's scary to think of where we'd be if we were just satisfied with the status quo. Getting back to capital allocation, I guess what I'm saying is we'll continue to deploy a balanced approach to capital allocation to further each of our objectives, which will also include share repurchases to, at least at a minimum, offset dilution from our management compensation programs. Today is all about affirming the thoughts of the believers, changing the minds of the skeptics, and giving those that are new to our story something to research and think about.
Less than 10 miles where I grew up outside of Pittsburgh sits the childhood home of the legendary Joe Namath, who memorably predicted a victory in Super Bowl III that no one thought the Jets could pull off. When we introduced our strategy to grow the profitability of our business at a rate that was well above our historic average, we were met with a bunch of doubters as well. You only have to look at the fact that our trading multiples almost average 1 turn below our historic averages since we unveiled our Expand and Optimize strategy to just see that. As we all know, those that bet on Broadway Joe 54 years ago turned out to be very happy that they did.
It's our goal to do the same for those that believe in our story and the value that we believe we're in the process of creating. You see the numbers on the slide. That's what we're signing up for. It's what we signed up for, and we believe that we'll get there and then some, because I believe we've created an organization that's built to win. So I'll finish my comments with the obligatory summary of why Koppers. But I feel like if I had to walk through this slide in detail, I probably didn't do that good of a job going through my previous 20, as they solve for the challenges of how to meet a potential new high-value market opportunity while dealing with the reality of a shrinking raw material market.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our Great Dane, who unfortunately could not be with us here in person today, our Senior Vice President of Global Carbon Materials and Chemicals, Mr. Christian Nielsen.
I'm Christian Nielsen. I'm Senior Vice President of our Global Carbon Materials and Chemicals, or CMC as we call it. I've been at Koppers since 1990 in various roles within the company, and I've held my current position for three and a half years. The CMC business is a global business in every aspect. We had footprint of 11 facilities. It become clear to us that we had to streamline our business, reduce our fixed cost, but still maintain our global presence with one facility in North America, one in Australia, and one in Europe. This has enabled us to focus on operational excellence and on serving customers around the world. Other challenges are mainly connected to the supply of tar. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected tar availability.
In Europe and North America, steel production is moving towards decarbonization, and therefore, we have been working on two major projects, namely alternative feedstock and Yield Optimization. Regarding alternative feedstock, I'm proud to say that 2023, we have 80% petroleum-based pavement sealer base, a 25% petroleum-based anode pitch. As for Yield Optimization, this is a patented process where an oil is turned into pitch. In principle, I can increase the pitch yield of a coal tar from 45%- 70%. A project which will contribute further down the line is the development of ECP. ECP stands for Enhanced Carbon Pitch, and with our new patented Yield Optimization technology, we will be able to produce an ECP with a very low content of trace metals and other impurities. We have strong indication that this product can be used in several industry application.
Most promising is the prospect of using it as coating material for graphite in lithium-ion batteries. Koppers has developed a water-based coating called C-Pro. We believe that C-Pro has a good chance of capture a considerable share of the market. I'm sure you can see that Koppers has a solid plan to reach our target of $300 million in EBITDA by 2025.
Good morning, everyone. In a world where the speed, volume, and complexity of change can derail even the best businesses, we find that there's a pressing need to monitor the external environment for emerging risks, to clarify the issues at stake, analyze how those issues might impact the company, and mobilize the company to address these changes and enhance overall performance. Sustainability has become the new normal, but it's not new to Koppers. We've been doing many of the things anticipated by sustainability for decades. We were ISO 14001 certified by 2003, and were conducting community advisory panels back in 2001. We started an engagement process with our suppliers in 2002, and we've had governance processes like codes of conduct and commercial agent screening for years.
So having the background and coming at this from a position of strength and knowledge, we now actively use the concepts in sustainability to inform our strategy and drive purposeful change throughout the company, all to create opportunities for profitable growth and increase shareholder value. Increasingly, sustainability is a business imperative. The pace of global regulation in this area is exploding, and in many cases, reporting is now mandatory. It's no longer voluntary. Any day now, we expect the SEC to issue its requirements for climate change, for financial reporting on climate change. The EU has published its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and Australia is considering its own ESG regulations. We need to stay ahead of that curve, and we know that investors are watching, too. We've learned that smart sustainability is good business.
A proactive sustainability profile allows us to anticipate and meet these challenges in ways that create sustainable value. When we transform this ever-evolving regulatory landscape and the surge in public opinion into implementable, value-driven business plans, that's good for the bottom line. This is not a tree-hugger, feel-good, marketing-driven thing. This is real, pragmatic, and measurable business strategy directed at the primary goal of increasing profitability. Through sustainability, everything we do is connected. Building on that theme of connectedness, this slide illustrates the three focus areas of sustainability or ESG from Koppers' perspective: people, planet, and performance. These are also, as Leroy mentioned, our values. People come first, defined as protecting individuals and communities while preserving Koppers' future. Our zero harm culture focuses on ensuring the safety of our employees and communities.
Now, certainly, we've seen meaningful improvement in our recordable incident rates, but Zero Harm goes beyond lowering safety statistics. It empowers every manager and every team member to take safety personally. This transforms safety from something you are told to do, to something that's meaningful to you, and that you want to do. It improves engagement, and it translates into improved productivity. We also focus on diversity and inclusion, recognizing that welcoming everyone, regardless of their identity, is good for the team. Our people focus enables Koppers to attract and retain top talent, leading to higher productivity, which helps drive profitability. The planet focus centers on protecting infrastructure while still preserving the environment. Let's take climate as an example. The impact of climate change is increasingly evident in the number and severity of severe storms.
We were reminded of that, of that this week when Hurricane Lee intensified from a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm within 24 hours, an unprecedented occurrence. As these kinds of events lead to increase in risk and an increase in regulation, the need for businesses to fully understand and plan accordingly will become more critical to their long-term viability. Whether we talk about water, waste, or climate, devoting attention across these areas avoids costs, improves performance, and protects the company and its shareholders. The performance focus means protecting shareholder value while also preserving stakeholder interests. For example, take the supply chain. We all experienced the disruption in the supply chain during the pandemic. Does everybody remember the toilet paper shortage? Well, it obviously impacted businesses also.
So ensuring that our partners all along the supply chain are responsible and viable for the long term is critical to our success. For us, this means engaging with those stakeholders to identify areas of concern and find innovative and more efficient solutions, which is good for all parties. Underlying all of this is our belief that these three concepts: people, planet, and performance, work together to drive profitability. It's truly all connected. Sustainability is integrated into every aspect of our company. Our executive leadership team sets and reviews goals. The sustainability committee of our board of directors, which Sharon Feng chairs, provides invaluable perspective. It strengthens our risk management programs as we increasingly see the connection between sustainability issues and other risks to the company. This allows us to address those risks proactively and comprehensively.
We engage with our communities at our operating facilities, increasing their comfort level with our operations and gaining that all-important social license to operate. It informs our strategy as we consider operations at our facilities, our products, and the external forces working on both. As investors and shareholders consider how to factor ESG into their investment decisions, our message is: We are ready. We are forward-looking and carefully consider how to integrate future requirements into our processes. We believe that we are on pace with, and often leading, other legacy manufacturers of similar size regarding ESG. We are truly built to win. But there's plenty of work still ahead. The world is changing, and we need to evolve to maintain our competitive position. We are ideally situated to do just that.
Of course, no discussion of ESG would be complete without talking about goals, and certainly we have set goals, but beyond setting goals, we are making measurable progress. We have reduced our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 49% against a 2030 goal of 50%. This was achieved through operational efficiencies and network optimization, both of which make the business more competitive. We published our first TCFD report in July, detailing our physical and transitional climate risks. While most of the measures indicated a low risk, we did have some medium risks that we are working to address. Approximately 75% of our raw materials are made from recycled, repurposed, or renewable sources, helping us to work toward a circular economy model. In turn, our products strengthen and increase the life of infrastructure and reduce deforestation.
Circular economy thinking leads us to new opportunities, like electric vehicle battery coatings, which you heard about from Christian. We invest in the professional development of our employees worldwide and continue to increase the diversity of our leadership team. These examples and many more offer proof of the connectivity among people, planet, and performance, each helping to drive product profitability and shareholder value. We are active in a number of sustainability groups and measure our progress against some of the world's most respected standards, including the Global Reporting Initiative, which was one of the original standards of reporting. We first reported to GRI in 2013. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, which identifies a subset of sustainability issues that are most relevant to financial performance.
This gives us and our stakeholders independent, third-party validation that our comprehensive and integrated approach to sustainability is on the right track. We are now working to integrate sustainability into our ISO 14001 management system. This is further evidence of how we have, and continue to, integrate sustainability concepts into our operations. Additionally, our sustainability performance has earned the attention and recognition from organizations such as Newsweek and USA Today. Sustainability differentiates us through the innovative and attractive products that we place into the marketplace that create a competitive advantage, and through our cradle-to-cradle approach to product development, usage, and end-of-life repurposing. It strengthens our staying power and durability, it mitigates risk, it optimizes operations, and it draws and keeps top talent, all of which drive profitability and protect shareholder value.
This connected approach, led by our values of people, planet, and performance, creates durability and differentiation for Koppers. It's all connected. It drives our strategy and continues to produce results for our employees, our customers, our world, and our investors. Smart sustainability is good business, and we believe that we are proving that here at Koppers. And now you'll hear from our RPS Vice President, Travis Gross, about the new state-of-the-art treating plant, as well as our ability to offer our customers circular crosstie management. Thank you.
My name is Travis Gross. I'm Vice President of Koppers Railroad Products and Services. I've been with Koppers since 2007, and I've been in this role since 2018. One of the big keys for us is rebuilding our air dried inventories. So in 2022, our air dried inventories were depleted. Demand for the, for the hardwood was there, but the railroads weren't willing to pay the price to get it. And we're looking at our network and saying: Okay, one, how can we rebuild our inventories quickly, and how can we do it more efficiently? So when we acquired Gross & Janes, we got, we got a more robust procurement network. They had sawmills in their network that we didn't previously have.
We were able to avoid some future CapEx expenditures because they had some machinery within their network that we could utilize. In 2022, we procured 4.5 million crossties. In 2023, we're on pace to procure about 7.5 million crossties. Although we are vertically integrated, the input costs for our raw material are at historic highs, so we're forced to renegotiate all of our Class I contracts, so we can get that cost increase. We're making investments into our plants, North Little Rock's a prime example of that. Ties are moved into our system. Those bays are then moved automatically over to the treating cylinders. The doors are opened with the push of a button. The ties are then switched into the cylinder.
When the ties are finished treating, again, with the push of a button, the ties are out of the cylinder. They're moved over to a, what we call a drying shed, area of the treating facility. They sit there for a certain amount of time, and then they're automatically moved out for, for unloading and movement into the yard. We expect to have all three cylinders operational by the end of 2023. Cradle to Cradle is another strategic pillar that we're utilizing to drive results for our 2025 EBITDA target. The end-of-life ties come back into our facility. We sort those ties. We sell some for what we call landscape use. The ones that don't meet that grade are then ground, and they're sold to boilers for fuel.
But the way we differentiate ourselves is we're able to take that, load those same cars with treated railroad ties, and send them back out to the railroad, so the railroad sees that improved car utilization. We've looked at network optimization. You know, we've reduced our footprint with the closure of Denver. We've reduced our footprint with the closure in Green Spring, and we're looking to drive efficiencies with that more compact network. We're putting state-of-the-art technology in our North Little Rock facility. We'll be able to produce north of 2 million cross ties in any given year, and we'll be able to do that with less folks at our facility. We've done a lot of heavy lifting to restructure and to improve our operations, and I think we're right at that turning point now, where we'll start to reap the benefits of our labors.
Okay, so we're gonna take a 15-minute break, and let's return at 9:40 Central Time, which would be 10:40 Eastern Tim
Ladies and gentlemen, if you could begin making your way back to your seats, the program will resume in one minute. Thank you.
Good? Okay. Thank you, and good morning. I'm here to present the Koppers' 2025 Strategic Plan Halftime Report. The scorecard: achieve $100+ million in growth EBITDA by investing $250 million-$300 million in productivity, productivity capital. That is what we stated in 2021. Invest wisely and realize returns once the projects are complete. This is a build EBITDA strategic plan. We are on target to exceed... Sorry. We are on target to exceed our stated objectives. The productivity projects necessary to reach the $100+ million in EBITDA are completed or are nearing completion. The growth will be reached by spending less money than anticipated. We plan to spend $250 million-$300 million in capital spend.
We are projecting that we'll spend around $165 million to achieve our growth target. We have reached the inflection point in the Koppers growth curve. Our strategic plan is built on the concept of expand and optimize. Expand. Expand operations to service identified growth markets. An example, adding a grinding mill to produce additional MicroPro volume to meet an expanding market. Optimize. Optimize existing operations. The best example of this is what we did in our CMC business. We went from 11 plants to three plants to service a changing market, we reduced costs, and we improved profitability. Now, on the graph here, we have some subcategories, like network optimization, maximize utilization, portfolio enhancement, introduce new or improved products, wood treatment expansion, broaden our wood treatment asset base. I will give examples of projects later on in the presentation.
Okay, the graph, the chart. EBITDA, cumulative capital over the strategic planning period. The first half, build EBITDA, spend money on productivity projects and realize returns once they're complete. The build part takes time, and it takes money. Projects need to be identified. They need to be scoped. Equipment needs to be purchased, it needs to be installed, and finally, the projects need to be commissioned. During this phase of the plan, we are spending money on capital, but we are not realizing returns. This is a tough part of the plan. We are now at a point where many of our projects are complete, and several major projects are set to be commissioned.
For example, the North Little Rock plant modernization, the Rock Hill plant micronizing addition, the Leesville peeling and drying operation, the yield improvement project at CMC Europe, and the additional kilns we're adding for our UIP business. All of those projects that I just mentioned are set to be complete no later than the first quarter of 2024. We are at the point where the profitability growth rate of Koppers is increasing, while our capital spend is decreasing. Koppers is at an inflection point. The growth rate in the second half of the strategic plan is two and a half times greater than that of the first half of the plan. The other important point is, we said we were gonna do this by spending $250 million-$300 million.
We are now stating that we're gonna hit our growth targets by spending only $165 million. We are in the first year of what I refer to as a step change year. We have step changed our growth rate. Okay, so we'll walk through some examples. Network optimization, the North Little Rock plant. Here's the background. We had two treating plants, Denver and North Little Rock, both challenged, both needing significant investment and both servicing the same Class I railroad. But this created an opportunity for us. We could optimize our network, we could lower operating costs, we could gain market share, and we can consolidate operations at a modernized North Little Rock facility. So here's the other sort of neat part of this project, Denver.
Denver, because of its proximity to the city center, the Denver city center, the fact that it was 65 acres, the fact that it had a rail siding, meant that it was worth money. We could sell that property and use those funds to help fund the modernization of the North Little Rock plant, and that's exactly what we did. Once fully online, the net results will be consolidated, shared functions at one location. The modernization is partially supported by the sale of the Denver plant. We will have enhanced safety and environmental systems at the North Little Rock plant. We are building a sustainable plant. We'll increase throughput, lower operating costs, increase market share, and have a more diverse customer base. The overall result, more profitability. The status of this project, almost complete. We are treating ties in the new facility as we speak.
The next project, the new pole peeling and drying operation in Leesville, Louisiana. So here's the background. We have a tie treating plant in Somerville, Texas, that has available capacity. In addition, the Texas pole market is serviced mostly by one competitor. There is a strong market demand for an alternative provider of creosote-treated poles. So this is somewhat unique. Texas is the only market in North America that wants a creosote-treated pole. The issue is that the raw material supply close to Somerville is not good. We are building a peeling and drying facility in Leesville, Louisiana, which is close to a strong raw material base, southern yellow pine. We are building a reliable, cost-effective supply chain to supply raw material into an existing treating plant. In addition, the poles use a preservative manufactured by Koppers, which creates two profitability streams.
We will get the profits from the sale of the pole, and we get the profits from the creosote. The net results, profitable growth, and we are and we are positioned for expansion. The status of this project is that it will be complete by the end of the first quarter next year. We've broken ground. Equipment is being delivered. The site is being prepared. It will be done, like I said, first quarter of next year. The last example I have is portfolio enhancement, a new product by our Koppers Performance Chemicals, division. Inpro DC, an oil-borne preservative used in pole treating, not manufactured by Koppers, was regulated out of use. We had the opportunity to introduce a new preservative. While evaluating options, we realized there was a growth, there was a growth opportunity for our existing preservative, CCA.
We used the change in the market to gain market share for CCA, CCA, while introducing our new DCOI product. These products, plus our tech services, our customer services, translated into rapid market share growth with minimal capital investment. The status of this project is it's done. We are selling DCOI into the marketplace, and we're using DCOI at our Vance, Alabama plant. In summary, we are doing exactly what we stated in September 2021, only we're doing it at lower costs. We have confidence in our plan and its long-term success. Furthermore, we are not out of ideas. We have plenty of ideas. We are just stating that we do not need to spend more money on productivity capital to achieve the stated target.
Before Jimmi Sue provides more details on the financials, we have a short video on our UIP business. Thank you very much.
I'm Jim Healey, the Vice President of Utility and Industrial Products Group with Koppers. I've been in that role since January of 2020, and I've been with Koppers since 1985. The U.S. is investing in the electrical infrastructure through government funds. Everyone is looking to harden their grid to bring more power to our homes, our businesses, and strengthen the grid against climate change. We are having extreme event, weather events today that typically used to be during hurricane season. Today, we have them year-round.... All utilities need to be prepared with extra inventory, whether they hold it or we hold it, so they can bring the power back on much quicker than in the past. We have approximately 140 million standing poles today, and a large proportion of that is aging, coming to the end of their service life.
Today, we estimate we're replacing somewhere between 2-2.5 million poles a year. With the demand we've talked about, Koppers is reinvesting in our plants. We're adding drying capacities into 3 of our plants in Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. And on top of that, we will be opening our Leesville facility in Louisiana. The Leesville plant has allowed us to go into a new raw material market, bring in timber, where we can peel it, dry it, and frame it, and take that material over to Somerville, Texas, to use their available capacity in their cylinders. Texas, to us, is a wide-open market being serviced by only one other competitor. We can take our creosote-treated pole with the creosote that we make within Koppers and move our product throughout Texas into Oklahoma and then move up to the greater Midwest area.
It's a very good market right now, as we see it. At UIP, we're working to maximize our use of company assets and capacity. That allows us to manage our inventory to be more reactive to our customers' needs and, looking forward, expanding into new footprints.
Good. Thank you. So good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for coming or for tuning in today, for those of you online. And thank you, Jim, for that detailed discussion of the projects and how our Expand and Optimize strategy has brought us to this inflection point, the point where the investments we made in the first half of this program deliver the financial results that we laid out for you in 2021. Back then, I told you that this was a great business, one where we have unique strengths, and that our strategy of creating value through expanding our market presence and optimizing our network to support profitable growth was the best way to create value for you. Today, I'm here to reiterate that message.
The detail that Jim provided on individual projects underscores the value of our strategy, the ability to drive higher EBITDA and cash flow through investments in assets that we control and we understand. As Jim told you, these investments are nearly complete, meaning we've done what we need to do. Everything is in place for us to reach $300 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2025, which is what gives us confidence about our ability to deliver benefits. By benefits, I mean significant cash flow in the second half of this plan. That is the key takeaway I want to leave you with today, that the EBITDA that we are already generating from investments we have made in the first half of this plan continues and compounds while the growth CapEx abates, providing profitable growth and significant cash flow in the second half and beyond.
Now, there are a couple of things to know about the forecast that we're going to show today. These results include the impact of the initiatives currently in progress under our Expand and Optimize strategy, and they assume that we recoup any additional inflationary cost increases. They do not include any additional projects to which we may commit between now and 2025. You know, all those ideas that Jim has that would provide additional EBITDA, and there's no assumed M&A in this plan, although, of course, we always remain open to the right opportunities. Now, let's start with a look at our performance in the first half. As Leroy told you, our diversified business model and global footprint provide us with a balanced portfolio, which allows us to perform throughout the business cycle, and that shows in our results.
Despite global economic headwinds and EBITDA growth that's been more back-end weighted than we planned, we are ahead at the half, already at a trailing twelve-month EBITDA run rate of over $250 million, with a clear line of sight to $300 million. That's what gave us the confidence to raise our guidance today to $250-$300 million of EBITDA. Oh, I'm sorry, $250-$260 million of EBITDA this year. And all those records that we talk about here on the, on the right side of the slide, we're on track to beat all of those, too. Now, of course, things haven't gone exactly as we planned. A lot has changed in the world since December or September of 2021.
Inflation, supply chain disruptions, and higher interest rates have all impacted our business and our cash flow projections. But this business is resilient, we are resourceful, and we remain confident in that $300 million in 2025. And all this success in the first half underpins our confidence in the results we expect from the second half of this program. Now, Jim showed you his version of this slide, where he detailed the capital investment in our expanded optimized strategy of $165 million. I'm going to stop right there for a minute... $165 million. That's 35% less than the roughly $275 million we expected to spend to reach our EBITDA goal back in 2021. Back then, I said that 3x multiple was much better than we could do in the M&A market.
Well, suffice it to say that $165 million in capital to get $100 million in EBITDA is less than 2x, and way better than we could have done in the M&A market or a lot of other investments over the last 2.5 years. And that is why our Expand and Optimize strategy is the best way to drive shareholder value. Value that manifests itself in cash flow, which is what I'm showing you on this slide. As the growth CapEx required to generate EBITDA levels off and EBITDA accelerates, so does operating cash flow. Growing from about $100 million a year over the last couple of years to $150 million-$200 million in 2025 and beyond.
To put a finer point on that, as Leroy told you, we generated $203 million of operating cash flow in the first half of this plan. We are on track to generate $450 million in the second half. Now, all of this growth comes from the pillars that Jim described, all things that are well within our control. Projects like these projects that enhance our portfolio, expand our wood treatment volumes, and optimize our network. In terms of our business units, the EBITDA growth is going to be heavily weighted toward our railroad and utility products business, raising the margins in this business back into double digits, as well as in our performance chemicals business, which is already our highest margin segment. In total, we expect our adjusted EBITDA margin in 2025 to be between 13% and 15%.
Now, Jim and Leroy told you we're confident in our ability to reach our goal of $300 million of EBITDA in 2025. As most of our major projects are complete, contributing EBITDA and generating cash flow. In 2025, we expect to generate $150 million-$200 million of operating cash flow for the year, and to have free cash flow, which we are defining as operating cash flow, less maintenance and zero harm capital necessary to maintain our current operating levels of $100 million annually. That's double what we expect for 2023. Now, these expectations are down about $50 million from what we told you in 2021, primarily on higher interest expense, but they remain impressive and a solid foundation for significant flexibility and capital allocation in the future.
So over this 5-year plan, we will have funded all of the investment necessary to reach our goal with cash from operations. And as Jim told you, that growth CapEx has largely been spent, with only around $50 million remaining here in the second half. And what you see here is that as we move into the second half, available cash grows substantially. We expect to generate $450 million of operating cash flow over the next 2.5 years, and less than half of that cash is needed for maintenance, Zero Harm, or growth, leaving us with significant cash to pursue our balanced capital allocation goals, which we have and will continue to prioritize based on what creates the most value for you. Since 2021, we've been very consistent in articulating our plan to deploy a balanced capital allocation strategy.
One that includes investing in our business through capital expenditures, maintenance, Zero Harm, and growth, or bolt-on acquisitions, as well as reducing leverage to our 2-3 times long-term target and returning capital to shareholders. And we've not waited until the end of this plan to deploy that strategy, because our confidence in this plan was strong, strong enough to support the reinstatement of our dividend in early 2022, and nearly $40 million in share repurchases in the first half of this plan, all on top of the significant capital investment we've made in our plan to support growth. Looking forward to the second half, we've laid out our capital allocation options here on the right.
Now, naturally, the mix of these priorities are, will shift over time with business conditions, interest rates, and the quality of investments we have in front of us at any given time. But we do expect to remain committed to our sustainable dividend, to repurchasing, at a minimum, enough shares to offset dilution annually... and to reaching our long-term leverage target. Reaching the inflection point in this plan gives us the ability to do that. This business is built to win. To bring this all together, our investment and our Expand and Optimize strategy has already provided us with substantial growth and business resilience over a chaotic few years, and is at the inflection point where earnings and cash flow accelerate.
The financial rewards of this plan are significant and include: annual revenue growth of 5%-7%, resulting in expected annual revenues of over $2.3 billion in 2025. Overall, EBITDA margins of 13%-15%, and $600 million-$650 million of cumulative operating cash flow over the five-year period. $200 million in the first half, $450 million in the upcoming second half, and of course, adjusted EBITDA of $300 million in 2025, setting us up to generate over $100 million of free cash flow annually thereafter. That free cash flow generation positions Koppers for the future, to fund profitable growth, to reduce leverage, and to return capital to shareholders.
I'm excited about the future of Koppers in the short, medium, and long term as the benefits of this plan manifest, and we move from the build phase to the growth phase, the phase of financial strength and flexibility that drives value for you. With that, we're gonna bring up a video of Doug Fenwick, the President of our Performance Chemicals business, and he will talk a little bit about how his team has transformed its wood preservative leadership position by successfully expanding beyond residential products and into the industrial preservative market. Thank you.
My name is Doug Fenwick. I'm President of the Performance Chemicals Division. I've been with Koppers Osmose since 1993, and I've been in the industry for over 35 years. Driving profitability is largely based upon our increase in prices that we were able to negotiate in the Q4 of 2022. We were in some very strong contracts with some very large customers, escalating costs, logistics costs, container shipping, everything was escalated, and it was very, very challenging for us, and that obviously affected our EBITDA in 2022. The Q4 of 2022, we went out with some very significant price increases, but we managed to put all of our programs together. Our business is dramatically more profitable this year because of the price increases that we were able to implement.
Higher interest rates are actually helping Performance Chemicals business today, helping our box store business, because there's been an influx of contractors that have fallen out of the new home construction market and are now going back into repair and remodeling. That's helping the box store do-it-for-me consumer that wants a contractor to come in and do major projects for them, which has been fantastic for our business. We've been able to push through a lot more units now that consumers and contractors realize that treated lumber is back down to these levels and is back to being a bargain again. Koppers Performance Chemicals has historically been a residential preservative supplier to the marketplace. In the last several years, we've put a concerted effort into becoming stronger in both industrial and commercial. A major preservative called Penta was taken off the marketplace.
Koppers was not in that market, but we saw a great opportunity to expand our industrial division. We've instituted a product called DCOI. Our R&D team did a great job coming up with a new formulation of that, a great new surfactant to make the product very soluble and able to use at the treating plants. Over the next few years, we see the DCOI market growing anywhere between $50 million-$75 million in annualized sales. Regarding network optimization, we have multiple units that contribute to that. Our facility in Hubbell, Michigan, takes copper, we process it, and it gives us a competitive advantage over our competitors. We're able to bring in material domestically and versus our competitors that are bringing it in from overseas. Well, the North American market is fairly mature and pounding out significant volumes year after year.
Our international locations in Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia continue to show great growth opportunities for the company. I'm excited about the future of Performance Chemicals with our new group of young engineers and PhDs, and other chemists that are coming up in the company that are gonna provide some great backbone for our division over the next 25 years.
I guess I get to wrap this up before we go into Q&A. You know, we walked through a number of different things, threw a number of numbers at you, and we'll be happy to try and clarify and explain any that might have caused any confusion. Obviously, the theme is we are absolutely on track to meet our targets and likely exceed them. And we're on track to do that by spending less.
Right? Yes, there's some fortunate, for at least us, maybe not the consumer necessarily, some fortunate, circumstances that enable us to do that, right? With the inflationary environment enabling us to be able to go out and try and recoup that in terms of cost and margin. But all that's done is enable us to take a more managed approach to how we're approaching those projects. Because as I said, the projects haven't gone away, and we still have a long queue of very, very attractive projects that we can execute on beyond this period. And, you know, we, we plan to do that. We'll go through that in a systematic way, but we like where we're at right now.
As you see, tremendous value in both earnings and cash flow over this next 2.5 years, and we believe, I believe, I know we have the team to execute on that. So, we're excited, and we're raring to go. So, with that, we'd be happy to take questions. Then, the way we're gonna handle this, because we have obviously those in the room, we have those online, I'm gonna toss it to the operator, who's gonna provide some instructions for the folks online who want to submit questions. Then we'll come to the room, and we'll take any questions from anybody in the room. So I'm going to turn it to the operator.
We will begin that question and...
Why do I feel like I'm watching TV?
For the best sound quality. To withdraw your questions, you may press star then two. A final reminder, please be sure-
Wait for the dot. Okay, I think they have given the instructions, so we're gonna start by taking questions in the room. Obviously, you know, the team is here, not just the folks who presented. We have our business unit leaders in the room. We have our head of growth and innovation, our general counsel. There's plenty of people here to answer whatever questions you might have. I get the nice job of being able to direct the ones I don't want to answer to somebody else who would actually be in a better position to answer. So, where do we want to start off in terms of kicking off questions in the room before we go to those online? Yes, sir, Liam.
Leroy, Leroy, you talked about, you also said you had some alternatives if they didn't agree to the price increases. How much has that factored into your 2025 objectives, combined with some of the initiatives that Travis laid out in terms of productivity and network enhancements?
I would actually say probably, you know, half to two-thirds is factored in, with, you know, maybe $10-$15 million that would be on top. You know, there are certain areas where we believe we are in a strong position to be able to get more value. There's others where there's gonna need to be a little bit of a willingness on the other end, other side, and recognition for wanting to have a healthy supply chain. But I think that, you know, we'll work through that. But in answer to your question, I'd say, you know, half to two-thirds of the numbers sort of built into our numbers right now, with upside coming with the other third to half. Yeah.
Great, thanks.
Yep.
Just quickly on acquisitions, the returns you had from your productivity enhancement CapEx translated to about a little over 1x EBITDA in translating the acquisitions. During some of the discussions, you talked about acquisitions coming more in line-
Yeah
-for valuations.
Yeah.
I can't imagine you're finding things at 2x EBITDA.
No, no.
What segments, you know, do you see the opportunity?
Yeah, true. Right. So, yeah, and I don't want to give the indication, right, that it's, that, that it's a cheap M&A market. I guess what I was trying to really say is, look, things are a lot more expensive today to build, right? I mean, again, you know, the North Little Rock project, we couldn't have started that project at a worse time. All right? Literally in the middle of the pandemic, and so we've dealt with all the things that you saw up on that page in terms of having to execute on that project, supply chain challenges around it, obviously inflationary costs, and we've dealt with through it all.
It's extended the timeline of being able to complete that project and get it online, and we've seen inflationary costs hit these other projects as well. Thankfully, right, many of those cases, we've actually been able to go out and get the additional price we need to still make those projects as successful, if not more. But it is getting more and more expensive to build and the risk to be able to do it, in terms of getting contractors and equipment and stuff like that, in a reasonable timeline, is not what it was pre-pandemic. And so, you know, obviously, if we're able to come to some agreement with someone who's willing to sell their business in a space that makes strategic sense for us, right, we can turn that on right away.
You heard me mention of, I think, the success we've had in bringing businesses online and growing them. Like I said, the businesses we've bought since 2014, half of the EBITDA they make today is EBITDA that has been added post-acquisition. So I think the unique combination of our businesses puts us in a really good position to do that. So it's not that the M&A market's cheaper, it's just that I think the cost to build has started to move up to be a little bit closer to where, you know, getting into the market sooner for us might be worth-...
a little bit of additional premium to pay to, to actually be able to have unit operations today, rather than wait 18 months, 24 months, and in North Little Rock, almost three years, actually, so.
Yeah. Others in the room? Yes.
Can you talk about the competitive dynamics or...
Oh, whoa!
Sorry. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive dynamics for each of the segments and how they may have changed over the last couple of years?
Sure. In fact, maybe Jim, do you wanna touch on that? I think it'd probably be a good one for you to do.
Yeah. So, there's not been a lot of change in C&C. We have, like, one really good competitor that we've been competing against, basically all over the world. For rail and poles, I think most people in the room know that, biggest competitor there is Stella-Jones, so there hasn't been much change there. And there really hasn't been much change in KPC, other than I think that KPC has disproportionately outperformed their competition, right? So we've gained market share. You know, and, you know, just say the market's staying the same, we've gained market share. We've taken volume off of our competitor. We do that with our tech services. I mentioned that with the EnPro project, right? EnPro DCOI and our customer support.
And the other thing that we do is we provide engineering services, so Doug's team can go in, and they'll essentially redo the process control for a plant and modernize it, and they can even monitor it. So we've sort of really made some gains there, and that's why when we looked at the industrial market, we're actually very confident that we could get market share. And that's what Doug sort of one of the things that Doug did as a leader, said, like: "I can go after this industrial business. I'm gonna use the same, you know, skills and techniques that I have on the residential business. I'm gonna apply them against the industrial business," and it's worked, like, it's worked really well. So not a lot of change, mostly the same competitors.
That's the biggest difference, is we've gotten stronger with KPC relative to the competition.
Yeah, and staying in that business for a moment, right? The second, if you will, biggest competitor in that business, I don't know when they were bought by private equity, but they did change hands sometime in the last few years. And, you know, they're trying to make some improvements within that business. At the same time, I think we've been, we've done a pretty good job of actually expanding our market share on the industrial side. That's where, curiously enough, I get into the fact of some of the value around vertical integration.
It might seem a little bit odd that our utility treating business actually was helpful in winning some accounts for Doug's business on the industrial side and because of relationships, longstanding relationships. And in that industry, there's a lot of reliance upon other treaters, dryers, and things like that, when especially when you're running into you know serving storms and things like that. So you've had a business in Doug's area that did change hands, and then you know the other one, who's the big supplier to you know the one of the big box retailers.
You know, their technology. I'd say it's fair to say that that big box retailer is starting to make some moves away from that technology. Doug, would you say, right? I mean, and you know, we have a product that we introduced and are selling into that market today, that you know, we could have never gotten in, you know, three, four, five years ago. So those are a couple of the shifts and changes. Jim. Yep.
Hey, Leroy.
Yeah.
Commendable progress to date.
Thank you
... on the plan. Obviously, a lot of confidence in what you're intending to accomplish here through 2025.
Right.
Are you able to share any perspective or insight on what you see and how you think about Koppers beyond 2025?
Okay. Sure. Yeah, right, we're focused on the game we're playing today. At the same time, I think I mentioned, right, we're game planning for the future. You know, look, a lot of what we do, it's not the sexiest sort of stuff, but it is tried and true, and as I mentioned about controlling the controllables, that really is this strategy, and we're carrying that forward. And I believe it's the same sort of philosophy and mentality that we can continue beyond 2025. You know, you can never say never, but you know, there's no urgent need for us to get into a totally different line of business at this point or in the near future.
I think there's more than enough meat on the bone in the areas that we operate to continue to grow at impressive rates beyond 2025. So I mentioned, and I don't know if it was a surprise to anybody or not, but I mentioned that our volumes... We're actually down $100 million on the revenue line from volume reduction since we started this plan, right? Okay, now, we're not in high-growth markets as it is, but that still might be surprising that volumes went backwards. So what does that mean? Does that mean the mark arrangement with the Texas Electric Cooperatives down in Texas for treating poles that had volumes in Jim Healey's business, that, you know, we were hoping to build upon that relationship and grow it.
We ended up having to exit that relationship, and go our own way with our Leesville facility to serve Somerville and go into that market, but that was $30 million worth of sales that essentially we moved away from. Now, thankfully, well, it's one of the reasons we moved away from it, is we weren't making any money from it, right? It made no sense for us to continue there without some change in that relationship, and so we weren't able to get there. So again, we're building our own path there. So there's $30 million of volume that, you know, didn't really cost us anything.
In Performance Chemicals, on the European side of the business, you know, there's a lot of regulatory activity going on over there, in terms of projects that are getting, if you will, deregistered, or not getting registrations extended. We had some products that we lost, and it's impacted our sales over there and profitability. So, that's part of the impact that we've experienced. In CM&C, we've already talked about the fact that, you know, it is a shrinking raw material market, and they're supplementing that with alternative feedstocks, so they're able to more or less supplement that. But then, take into account the Russia-Ukraine war, which took out, you know, a good portion of raw material supply, and if you don't have the raw material, you can't make product to sell, right?
So those are three sort of key examples of why, you know, from a volume standpoint, things have moved backwards a little bit. And I'll just throw on, you know, again, we were dealing with crazy, crazy, crazy pandemic-fueled demand in 2020. And, while, while volumes have held up and been remarkably, remarkably resilient, you know, we were working off of a number that was, you know, at, at, at that point in time, certainly an all-time peak. So a number of different things that, that have gone into that. But, you know, with where we stand today, we talked about... Well, A, we're, we're restructuring our European Performance Chemicals business and have a plan in place, we think, to actually get that business back up, to, to, not just where it was before from a profitability standpoint, but, but better.
We have opportunity to grow our business in South and Central America. That business, when we bought it, was relatively small from a contribution standpoint. It is now today, our second largest, regional segment below the overall three segments today, in terms of what it produces. And they do that without actually us producing any of our own product there, right? So we have, for not a lot of capital, an ability to actually add some operating capacity down there in a market that's continuing to grow significantly. We talked about the industrial preservatives that we've introduced, with DCOI and our CCA capabilities that give us an opportunity to continue to grow in that market.
And then, you know, again, the other on the residential side product that we've developed and are now marketing and selling into the other big box retailers. So we have plenty of growth levers within our business that give us an opportunity to keep this going beyond 2025. And it's just basic blocking and tackling. It's what it is. To use the analogy for, you know, our halftime report, it is blocking and tackling, which we think we're pretty good blockers and pretty good tacklers. Anything else?
Hey, Lee. Hey, Leroy.
Yes. Hey, Scott.
Thanks for the update, I think, and congratulations on the results.
Thank you.
Seems like, every quarter is a record revenue and earnings, and nice to see the stock, you know, reflecting that, up 30% this year. You talked a lot about getting to $300 million-
Yeah
... still in EBITDA in the next couple of years, but at half the required investment.
Yeah.
That's a pretty impressive data point, and I just thought if you could elaborate a little bit more on how you think you're gonna achieve that.
Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I mean, we—look, again, it's not the. It's not been fortunate for the consumer, but it has been fortunate for businesses, certainly like ours, where, you know, we're in a position with costs going up, to be able to pass that on. We ate a bunch of costs in 2022, right? So yes, you know, we're—we've shown you the proverbial hockey stick, if you will, in the last three years of the plan. It could have been a little bit different and a little more evenly distributed if we were able to or took a hard-line approach to try and claw back some of that cost in the form of price increases in 2022.
You know, we lived up to our agreements, and therefore, you know, you only saw a couple million dollars worth of growth last year. That's been passed on this year, and we're seeing the benefits of that today. So there's no question that, you know, the ability to be able to go out and raise price in the inflationary environment we're in is absolutely contributing to help us get to where we're at. But, you know, I'd calculate, we've probably, through the projects within our Expand and Optimize strategy in these first two and a half years, we've probably realized $25 million-$30 million or so of that $100 million that we had targeted, during that time.
And that's been, you know, it's been chipped away at in terms of some of the volume reductions and stuff that we've seen. Like I said, we have not gotten all our margin back from a pricing standpoint. So those things have helped us to, like I say, be able to step back and say, "Well, you know what? I know we have the plans, and we could spend all this money, but by the same token, let's sort of space this out a little bit. Let's work on our leverage and try and manage that and bring that down a little bit. Let's begin the process of returning some capital back to shareholders. Let's take a balanced approach to how we're looking at capital allocation." So, but I mentioned back at the time, right?
The plan to get there, control the controllables. We did not have to do M&A. We did not have to see crazy growth rates. We did not have to, you know, come up with, you know, all kinds of, extraordinary sorts of events to get to the numbers that we had laid out. It was all about, you know, just, just follow on the plan. Just follow on the plan. And if we got any help, which we're getting, then, you know, we could not only just get there... We could either get there earlier, or we could push out some of the stuff, the bigger stuff that we had, that we might have wanted to do, and, and just space the spending out a little bit more. So, so that's, that's the approach we're taking. Yeah.
Okay, so we'll come back to the room. I'm gonna pause for a second. Then we do not have to pause for a second. I'm told that we got a quiet online group for now, with nothing coming in from the folks online. But again, I'll look to the room if anybody has anything else that they're curious about, interested in. Okay, well, then I'll close it out again by thanking everybody for your time here today. We've enjoyed spending the time with you. For the folks that are in the room, again, you have access to the Koppers team here. We're not going anywhere. No flights are scheduled till later today. So if you have the time to stick around, you know, feel free. Let's chat.
We're gonna have lunch here in a little bit as well, but would love to, you know, to take the time with any of you one-on-one and answer any of the questions you have. So thank you.