Work as a great employer, but we want to be known as good stewards to the environment, and we also want to be good, known as strong to support our local communities. I will tell you from the top down, this is something that we've always done. The mission statement kind of followed afterwards. We've always tried to support our local communities, and the team takes pride in doing that. LKQ's roots are in salvage, right? We started in nineteen ninety-eight, really got on the map in two thousand and three when we went public. But if you look through the history of the next twenty years after we went public, obviously, we grew quite a bit, but we diversified.
Diversified in different product lines, diversified in different geographies, and then today, the good news is every one of our segments is the number one in what they do. North America, number one in collision distribution of parts, number one in salvage. Our Europe operation, number one in hard parts. The markets that they operate, collision and paint, they're number one. Our specialty, number one in SEMA accessories and product lines, as well as number one in RV and marine on the wholesale distribution side. In our self-serve, which is our pick-a-part business, where consumers come in and get their own part, we're number one in that space. Our philosophy has always been to be number one or number two, the leader in everything we do to make sure that we get the benefits of that scale, and we can give it back to our shareholders.
Today, I want to make sure we accomplish a few things. First, I want you guys to get to know me, get to know my team. You'll get to hear about a few of them on stage today. Also, during lunch, you'll get to interact with a few of the folks that support North America and some corporate folks. I want you to learn about our experience, our capabilities, and more importantly, to understand our strategic, financial, and operational objectives. I will lay out our strategy. I'll talk to you and show you how we're expecting the overall market to grow, our outlook on operational targets for revenue growth, how we will invest in organic, as well as inorganic...
Inorganic revenue growth, our capital allocation strategy, and how we're going to return cash to our shareholders. You're also going to get to hear from our two largest segments today. So John Meine is going to talk about North America, how he's going to grow share, how he's going to deepen that moat. You're going to hear from Andy Hamilton, our CEO of our European operations. He's going to talk about some of the efficiency drivers and how he's going to widen the moat around our European operations. And then Rick is going to wrap up, kind of helping explain how we take that strategy, back it into action plans to make sure that we deliver on the financial objectives that we have. So that's, once again, a key theme for today.
Last year, when our board began to do a search for the CEO role, and I put my name in the hat, they had said, "Well, why you, Justin? Why should you be the next CEO?" And I pretty quickly pointed out to the success that we had in North America, but that was kind of the past. And so they said, "Why else do you think you should be the next CEO?" And so this is a slide I shared with the board that I want to share with you guys, and it's how I approach leadership. It's how I've approached leadership, whether I was the CIO, I led supply chain, or my last seven years stint as the president of North America Wholesale. The first area is strategy, setting the strategy. Looking at the portfolio of what we had to offer.
When I was in IT, I had to look at systems. What systems did we have that were fueling growth? What systems did we have that needed fixed? What systems did we have that just needed to be decommissioned or didn't make sense for us to operate and continue forward? As a CEO, obviously a little bit bigger portfolio than just IT systems, but what businesses do we have that make sense, that need fixed, that can fuel our growth in the future, versus ones that don't necessarily fit long term? Ultimately, figuring out the strategy for the business and then communicating it down. Now, setting the strategy is one piece.
We then have to invest in human capital, build the team out, a team that challenges the status quo, a team that holds themselves accountable to make sure that they can ultimately, number three, deliver on the results. Our culture will spit out employees that do not deliver, plain and simple. I value delivering on what's expected, and I hate surprises. I met with some of you individually on different investor meetings, and hopefully, you guys know that I hate surprises. Our business needs to be predictable. Our business needs to be consistent. We have to be better. We will be better, and that's my commitment to you guys. And as you get to know me and Rick, you're gonna see how our culture, once again, wants to deliver, but it can be fluid. And it comes down to the... Oh, sorry.
It comes down to the last piece, managing relationships. Even though I've been in automotive for 27 years, I've been with LKQ for 20, I still value relationships with our employees, our customers, suppliers, our investors, our board of directors, to make sure that I get that feedback, and as a CEO, my job is to balance that feedback and bring it back in the strategy if we have to alter things. We're a large company, but what I want to make sure LKQ does not become is one that is very rigid and does not move and cannot adapt. If you look at what we did in North America during the pandemic, we right-sized the business relatively quickly, got costs out of the business.
In addition, when there was an opportunity in front of us, like supply chain issues that occurred in 2022 and 2023, we capitalized on that as well. I want to make sure that our teams can react fast and adapt to risks and adapt and seize opportunities that come in front of us. One area that we will not adapt on, one area that we will not change, is our foundation is built on integrity and trust with people. I've talked at our leadership conferences in the past, I've talked with other employees. I don't care if the employee is the best performer in sales or the best performer in operations, if the team does not have an integrity and trust, they don't have a spot at LKQ. That's one of another commitments that I have to you guys. But this is my approach to leadership.
Once again, I've had this for a decade and a half. Obviously, different roles, strategy comes a little bit different, but it's critical for us to make sure we have the right strategy, we have the right team that we can execute on. And once again, I value those relationships, relationships with you guys, where I can get that feedback and make sure that we're ultimately looking after the right strategy. Now, I talked earlier about our mission statement, how we want to be good stewards of the environment. And for us, sustainability is more than just a program we kicked off a few years ago. If you look at our roots in salvage, we are a sustainable company. We are the largest auto recycler.
If you guys paid attention to some of the stat videos that Joe played, we processed over seven hundred and fifty thousand vehicles last year. Nine hundred thousand metric tons of scrap was saved. Fourteen million, fourteen million liters of fuel was reused in our own delivery trucks or, mostly in our own delivery trucks. We also recycled over two million tires, not to mention the millions and millions of parts that we sold to shops harvested off of those vehicles. So from a sustainability standpoint, LKQ is green. But sustainability also means that we need to make sure we deliver consistent results, sustainable value to our shareholders, to all of you. First is on the financial side. We want to deliver better operating margins, better cash flow, but ultimately make sure that we live up to the ESG responsibilities that a company like LKQ should.
Number two is our people. I talked about how it's critical to have our talent, but we invest in our people all the time. We invest in diversity, we invest in inclusion to make sure that the different ideas that come with diversity, the different ideas that come with inclusion... We're a global company, 50,000 employees across many different companies, countries, many different cultures. We have a diverse population of employees. We strive to include them to, once again, make sure we have new, fresh ideas and new ways of thinking. LKQ has historically given back to our employees in, with improving our benefits, retaining top talent, as well as promoting a lot from within. Of the presenters here today on stage, all four of us have been promoted into our current positions, all from within. The third area is on the governance side.
For us, it's not just governance at the board where we have strong governance scores, but it's also in the ethical policies and procedures that everything that LKQ does. Governance is very key for us. Now, getting into my priorities. As an investor, you can expect two main areas from me: focusing on operational excellence and focusing on maximizing total shareholder return. Now, how will I drive operational excellence? The easiest word is simplification. My teams hear me talk about this quite a bit, but simplification, starting with the portfolio. Reducing the complexity of our businesses, both internally and externally. Also, looking at simplification operationally. Some of the businesses that we have today are integrated, some are not. Some are always looking at best practices, standardizing things, some are, some are not. That's an opportunity for us to get cost structure better, improve our operating margins.
But then the third one is expanding our Lean Operating Culture. Some of our businesses do really well at this. The problem with some of our other businesses that don't have it, they may get the right size, they may get the cost out of their business, but if lean is not a culture that they have operating day in and day out, costs could creep back in. So we want to expand the lean piece to make sure costs will never creep back into our organization. And the fourth area is grow. We want to grow share of wallet with our customers. The most profitable revenue we can get is one more part in a truck going to our, our existing customer base. So we have a lot of initiatives on how to grow organically.
Once we deliver on the operational excellence and we enhance our margins, we drive better free cash flow. It gives us the flexibility to invest back into the business, whether that's fueling organic growth, mega yards that you're going to hear John Meine talk about, large salvage yards, investing in new DCs, new service levels for our customers, or if there's truly highly synergistic, small tuck-in acquisitions that we can bring on that bring good returns, we'll continue to do those, but we will be primarily weighted towards returning cash to our shareholders. That's clear. So let me expand my message on simplification. On the portfolio side, divestitures are being looked at. Our whole, our whole portfolio is being looked at, and I will tell you, divestitures up until 2017 were pretty new. They're not new to LKQ now, we've done 16 since 2017.
Most of those have been in Europe. Additionally, we did one large one called PGW in North America. So for those that don't remember PGW or know it, Pittsburgh Glass Works. It was a business that both manufactured automotive glass, and it also distributed aftermarket glass to installers. Our intent was always to just get the distribution piece, but we had to buy the whole thing. We spun off the manufacturing piece. We were left with the distribution piece, but about six months later, I inherited the responsibilities of PGW. And at the time, not very profitable. In fact, it was negative EBITDA. Now, from a simplification standpoint, I could have integrated the business, gotten costs out, drove up margins, and made it a better return. However, it didn't fit. It's a different customer base, different product line, different supplier base.
It just ultimately didn't fit with our overall business. So what did we do? We fixed it, we divested it, and actually made a profit on the sale. So divestitures are not new. Looking at the portfolio is something that we've done in the past. I will tell you, I'm aggressive at it. I'm looking at anything from locations, to product lines, to businesses that we have that do not fit in a long-term strategy of build LKQ. When it comes to the portfolio, I'll challenge the status quo. A few of you may have picked up, I had said it in one of the comments, that there are no sacred cows. We are looking at everything. Nothing's off-limits. So then simplification runs over to the operational side.
Being here for twenty years, I will tell you the businesses that I've seen that have been the most robust, the most profitable, the ones that can react at a much faster rate, are those businesses that are integrated. Those businesses that constantly look at streamlining their operations, using best practices, those businesses that have that lean culture on a day in and day out of every department, of every aspect of their business. One of the ways we did that, and Rick helped me on the North American side, was focusing on data-driven metrics to make sure that we had the visibility to manage and measure what we wanted the teams to work on. We're working on grabbing more of that data globally to make sure that we can manage that and our teams can manage it more effectively. I leverage the OKR template.
If you guys aren't familiar with that, it's objectives and key results. Pretty simple framework, where a company can take a strategy at the highest level and cascade it down through the organization, so every employee has an OKR, an objective and key results that they can be measured towards. Ultimately driving accountability and alignment within the teams out in the field to make sure that they're marching towards and pulling on the rope in the same direction that our goals are and our long-term strategy is. So those two principles of measuring with data a little bit more accurately, leveraging the OKRs, is something that we will be expanding globally. As I mentioned, the most robust businesses we have are ones that are integrated. We still have opportunities to integrate in our operations, such as in Europe.
You're gonna hear Andy talk about some of the initiatives on the screen of inventory optimization, footprint rationalization in his speech, but truly driving an integrated business, best practices, lean operating model, so we can get the best returns out of that, out of that business today. Now, Rick is gonna cover this in more detail, but here's a quick preview. I talked a little bit on capital allocation, but obviously, we wanna drive enhancing our margins, improve our free cash flow, or driving our operating cash flow, and then invest back in for growth. The best growth we can have is, is organic. If there are truly tuck-in acquisitions, I'm gonna talk about my M&A strategy and philosophy here in a minute.
But if there are truly highly synergistic tuck-in acquisitions, we will look at them, but we will be, given our financial strength, prioritizing returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends, share repurchase, and debt repayment. But once again, Rick is gonna go into more detail on that. So now talking about the M&A philosophy. I will tell you today, maybe a little bit different than in the past, we have no pressure to fuel our growth via acquisitions. Zero. No pressure from the board, no pressure from management to ensure that we're buying companies just to continue to grow. I'm gonna talk about the market growth that we have coming up here. We have a strong opportunity on just normal market growth and initiatives we have that we don't necessarily need to do acquisitions. Now, doesn't mean we won't do them.
We have reduced overall dollars. If you look at our total capital allocation, we've reduced the total dollars, which will automatically do a couple of things. One, make sure that the acquisitions we do look at acquiring or buying have higher hurdle rates, better returns. In addition, because that total dollars has been reduced, there's no large acquisitions. Plain and simple, no large acquisitions in the pipeline. But it, it goes beyond that. These businesses that we're gonna look at need to fit strategically. Does it bring some value to us? Does it bring the ability to say yes more often, improve our service levels, gain more share? It has to fit strategically, first and foremost, well, second, I guess, after the financial piece. Third area would be the culture. Is it a culture that can fit and integrate into our business with low risk?
The last thing we want to do is buy a business and find out that the culture resists, and all of a sudden, the value of that business, whether it's revenue loss or whatever, is gone. So we want to make sure that it fits in our business. From a financial standpoint, I talked about reduction of total capital dollars, but a few other metrics that we changed is making sure that it's accretive in the first year and a half. The last area is making sure that we look at and analyze the returns over a 3-year period. Historically, we've done 10 years. We're looking at it over 3 years to make sure that acquisitions are helping us improve our ROIC. The last piece is when a business brings an acquisition to us to look at, it has to have a plan for integration.
We've acquired a lot of businesses in the past that have not been integrated. We will not continue to make that mistake. We will make sure that if there are acquisitions that we want to bring in, there will be a plan to integrate, a plan that Rick and I feel we can execute against and ultimately hold our teams accountable to achieve. So key points on M&A, higher hurdle rates, reduction in capital allocation, which means no large acquisitions. So I talked about we don't necessarily need to acquire businesses to fuel growth because we see all of our markets have an opportunity to grow over the next 10 years. So the data you're going to see up here is over the next decade.
Every year, the teams do a deep dive in understanding what's happening in markets, industry dynamics, market trends, to make sure that we understand risks, we understand opportunities, and we can ultimately hold our teams accountable to grow above the market. We want to know what's happening in the markets, short term and long term. Obviously, the further you get out, it's harder to predict that, but we do deep dives constantly to make sure we understand what's happening in our core markets. Now, despite some disruptions caused by EV or some collision, collision avoidance, once again, all of our segments, I'm going to talk through them, all of them have revenue growth opportunity, just the market themselves, not to mention initiatives to grow above the, above the market.
But I'm going to start with our North American side on the collision, and John Meine is going to go in more detail when he talks about North America, but just a little bit insight into high level for what we see over the next decade. We have some headwinds. If you look at TLV or total loss rates, which is quite honestly, it's an economic situation. It's what's the value of the vehicle, what's the value of repair, and if those things get out of kilter, one way or the other, total loss rates go up or total loss rates go down. But over the last several years, we've seen some trends. In our model, we predict that's going to modestly grow. The other headwind we have is ADAS technology or collision avoidance systems. This isn't new for LKQ.
We saw a decline in actual repairable claims starting in 2019. Our model has that factored in when we look at penetration of vehicles in operation with this type of technology and what does it do to repairable claims. But then if you look at the other piece of the tailwinds that we have, APU growth. APU growth has grown since I've been in the industry. We expect that to continue to grow. The car part growth, number of parts per estimate, just cars themselves are more complex, more parts on the front of them, which translates to more parts on the estimate. In addition, these parts are more complex, which brings inflation, not just normal inflationary benefits of raising prices, but if you look back at a fifteen-year-old vehicle, a truck, it had a steel bumper on it.
Then it had high-strength steel, more expensive. Then it had aluminum, more expensive. Then it had extruded aluminum, even more expensive. So if halogen headlights go into LED headlights, the parts on their vehicles today are more complex, are more expensive. Overall, we take that, combine it together, we're showing that the collision market per year grows 1-2% for the next decade. The other businesses that we have in North America is our hard parts business in Canada. We acquired that, with Uni-Select under the brand name of Bumper to Bumper. Today, that market has an opportunity to grow at the 2.5 to... I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was on the wrong page. My apologies.
And so in the market of, in the North American hard parts, that has a business opportunity to grow 2.5%-3.5% per year. It has value of car part growth, the aging of the car park, and inflationary pressures that I talked about. In addition, in North America, another big segment we have is major mechanical. So think of large items, engines, transmissions, transfer cases, axles. We remanufacture those as well as we sell them used. Those businesses are playing in a market that is very similar to hard parts. Car park is aging, inflationary benefits. If you look at something like transmissions, five years ago, we were selling four or six-speed transmissions. Now we're selling eight or 10-speed transmissions. Those things come at a higher price.
We're showing that the market is going to grow 2-3% per year for the next decade. Jumping across the pond to Europe, the EV impact is happening over there a little bit sooner than North America, but if we still look at the aftermarket sweet spot for which we play, the EV penetration is still relatively small. It will grow, but we also have some other benefits of complexity of car products that we're selling, such as synthetic oils, more expensive. Not as many mechanical water pumps, but more electrical water pumps, more expensive. In addition, we expect that car park to slightly grow and continue to age, all leading to a mature market growth in Europe of 0.5-1.5% growth per year for the next decade. Then you take our other two businesses, our specialty and our self-serve.
We expect those businesses to have modest growth for the next ten years, and if we add on to that, share gains. I'm going to talk about some of the share gains in a minute. But we have share gains on that, allowing LKQ to have a growth opportunity of 3%-5% or so, or mid-single digits, per year for the next ten years. Every year, our teams at a location level go after share gains. Meaning, are there customers that are buying collision parts, but they're not buying paint? Are they buying starters and alternators, but they're not buying our batteries? The teams locally always go after more share of wallet, more parts on that truck to deliver to our existing customer base. From a corporate standpoint, we're looking at some larger initiatives over the next decade.
Things that we can leverage, our core strengths and grow organically on different areas. First one is a salvage and reman expansion in Europe. We're number one recycler of automotive vehicle parts today. We heavily weight that towards North America, but we do have a decent operation in our Sweden market, where we do buy salvage vehicles, sell engines, sell collision parts in the market, leveraging our scale of Europe and our distribution footprint. That is products that we can expand, leveraging the North American technology and the North American expertise to expand that product line, both reman and used, into our European operations. And at the same time, getting the benefit of the green initiative that's going on across Europe right now. Also, in Europe, we wanna expand collision parts. We're obviously number one in North America on collision parts.
There are some parts in Europe where we're number one in that business as well. Being able to leverage, once again, our footprint, expand collision parts, expand paint into that area, is an opportunity for us. In addition, we're seeing that while the European market is behind the industry of North America, we're seeing some tailwinds that are beneficial, meaning we're seeing some insurance companies start to look at more alternative parts. How do they drive the repair costs down? So they're looking at more salvage parts, more recycled, because of the green initiatives and the cost savings, as well as collision. So we see expansion of collision in Europe as an opportunity. Bottom left corner, the third area is growing hard parts in our operation in North America. Once again, we own a location called Bumper to Bumper, a leader in the Canadian market of hard parts.
We'll consolidate that, consolidate that market, expand new locations, expand product lines, source out more parts to be able to say yes more frequently, truly leveraging our scale of Europe to help us buy better, buy more efficiently, and buy a better broad range of parts, so once again, to be able to say yes more often. That is an area that we started to do. We started to do some roll-ups there, small in nature, and some location expansion. Then the last area, I would say, is EV. Some of our competition that's gonna put their head in the sand, EV will be a risk, plain and simple. We started to look at EV, the market dynamics, what we think is gonna happen, to understand that opportunity, and we started investing that if you think of hybrid vehicles.
The history of a vehicle went from ICE or gas engines, internal combustion engine, to a hybrid, where it had a battery and an engine, to full EV. Today, we remanufacture hybrid batteries in North America, both nickel- metal hydride as well as lithium- ion, and we've began to invest and work our teams across the globe, Europe and North America, on being able to remanufacture EV batteries. One thing we know for sure today is there's a huge demand, and there will be a huge demand for an alternative battery, an alternative to OEM, that high-cost battery, whether that's a used battery or whether that's a remanufactured battery. If that doesn't exist, EV cars will continue to decline from their value, and they won't penetrate much.
So we know that there's gonna be demand, and if you fast-forward futuristic, when there's actually a large population of seven-to-eight-year-old vehicles, electric vehicles on the road that need batteries, we will be continuing to play in that space of remanufactured EV batteries globally. In addition, getting raw materials to feed into new batteries is hard. A lot of pressure from mining these days. So we're gonna, we're gonna play and continue to play in the recycling of those batteries, those end-of-life vehicles with those end-of-life batteries, to make sure that those components find their way back into raw materials, producing into a new battery. So once again, some people see EV, EV is gonna be impactful. We see it more of as, the opportunity than we do as a risk.
We'll also work with our European teams and North American teams together to understand those other product lines that are gonna go along with EV. EVs go through tires quicker, they go through suspension quicker, they go through brakes at a different rate. So all those different opportunities, we wanna make sure we're, we have a comprehensive list of products available to EV vehicle owners and workshops. So before I kinda set the stage for our next two presenters, let me just recap my strategy. Driving operational excellence, simplification. You're gonna hear me talk about that. My team hears me talk about it. Simplify portfolio, simplify the operations. One of the other initiatives was getting to know me. Maybe I spent a little bit too much time on me, but hopefully, you guys get to know who I am and how I lead.
Then, you know, going back to driving operational excellence, simplifying the business, enhancing margins, ultimately leading to free cash flow, where we'll invest in a business, but primarily, and Rick will talk about this, primarily weighted towards giving cash back to our shareholders. That is the priorities. Now, setting the stage for our next two presenters. North America and Europe, roughly $6 billion each. Combined, they're 80% of LKQ's global revenue.
If you think back to those other opportunities that I mentioned on reman or salvage in Europe or collision parts, you're gonna see that while sometimes the product overlap is regional, like more collision or more salvage in the U.S., the size is still material, giving us a competitive advantage how we feel that those are our core strengths that we can win when we expand into different markets with those product lines. These global positions create cost of goods benefits, not just on a product itself, but on the freight and also the cost structure to support that from a supply chain standpoint. Stated differently, we see the value of these two businesses combined worth more than them individually. We feel North America and Europe are better together for a couple different reasons.
One, I talked about the volume of products, procurement savings on cost of goods, but it also gives us geographic and product line diversification, which is always great. In addition, we have strengths regionally that we can start to leverage on best practices that we started to do in the last seventy days, more effectively than I would say we've done in the past. Looking at things like procurement, supplier source, sourcing, product sourcing, remanufacturing, not just EV, but we remanufacture engines and transmissions in North America. We also do some remanufacturing of engines in Europe, bringing those teams together to make sure we have the right technology and the right teams looking at quality and looking at product development in the remanufacturing world. Leveraging tools to help us on e-com, logistics, warehouse management, automation, all these things bringing value to us.
The other piece that opens up is on the financial side. If you guys remember earlier this year, we issued some bonds, EUR 750 million bonds, that brought us attractive terms. In addition, possible because of our size, we're able to have $400 million today of vendor financing, and that number has an opportunity to grow. Both businesses are, for us, core. They operate in resilient markets, non-cyclical, non-discretionary in nature, and there's a lot of overlap and opportunity to learn from each other and grow that from a revenue standpoint. I talked about the EV opportunity. Once again, we're seeing that EV occur in Europe at a faster rate than North America, but we're learning from that on a global standpoint to make sure, once again, EV is an opportunity for LKQ and not a risk.
Lastly, our size allows us to leverage our Global Competency Center, what we call GCC. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. Our GCC is. Think about when companies offshore workload, but this is not a third party. This is our business, this is our employees. Our operation, primarily in India today, started. I took over that in two thousand and fourteen, when we had only 80 employees in our India operation, working on a small subset of a business in North America. We've expanded that today to 1,500 employees working across all segments. Once again, these are our employees, not third party. They obviously bring the benefit of labor savings. It's substantial, but it goes beyond just labor rate arbitrage. It goes beyond just administrative functions and what some people put as a back office.
We do things and leverage those global things I talked about to make sure that we're looking at automation globally. We're looking at footprint logistics globally. We're looking at branch replenishment, making sure that we have the right logistics and the right product lines in our branch profiles. We're looking at that globally. The team there does more than just admin functions. They manage within marketing, procurement. If you guys remember last Investor Day, I talked about this as North America. We have over 100 people that buy every salvage vehicle we do today in North America out of our GCC operation. Today, they also now help the team on self-serve bid on the 500,000 vehicles that they buy through self-serve. This is truly a strong strength of LKQ.
or a big strength of LKQ, that quite honestly, any of our competitors that would try to replicate this, especially in-house, would have a very hard time doing that from a cost standpoint. And so I'm going to end with that, but before I turn it over to John Meine, because we're so proud of our GCC operation in India and also a smaller GCC operation that supports it in Poland, I want to show a quick video of that team over there, and hopefully, you guys will show the excitement that that we feel about our team over there as well. If you guys can please roll that video.
Please welcome to the stage Senior Vice President, President, Wholesale North America, John Meine.
Morning, everyone. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for everybody joining online. I'm John Meine, Senior Vice President, Wholesale - North America. Just a little about myself: I started in the industry in nineteen eighty-seven. I'm dating myself here, but I started with Keystone Automotive Industries in Chicago. Worked there for close to twenty years, various positions with the company. In two thousand and six, I started my own business. It was an aftermarket collision parts company in Atlanta, Georgia. Three years later, sold that company to LKQ and happily been an employee ever since. From two thousand and eleven to twenty twenty-one, I served as Regional Vice President of the Southeast, and during those ten years, we enjoyed the company's best margins, lowest SG&A. Really had a great team in the Southeast, still do.
2022, I assumed the position of Vice President of the East Division and ran that for two years, and then January of this year, I backfilled Justin in my current role today. So I'd like to touch on my team a little bit. Like Justin said earlier, we, we do a good job of building our bench, promote within. 75% of my direct reports are promoted from within. 21 years of tenure on average, 171 years of experience. These folks are best in class. I'm also proud to say 25% of my direct reports are female. And again, these folks are the best and best in their core markets. These guys are proven leaders, proven successful, just a fantastic team. Three pillars that I focus on is safety. I just talked about my team. Have a great team.
We have tens of thousands of employees underneath these folks. I'm very passionate about making sure I expect everyone to go home in as good or better condition as how they came to work that day. It's very important to us. Second is leadership. Leaders build leaders. From 2022 on, we've promoted a lot of people within. I think close to 100% of our promotions are from within. We're proud in how we build our bench. We do a great job working with HR to do our succession planning, and our bench is a little thin right now. We've promoted a lot of people in the last two years, so I'm focused to work very hard to rebuild that bench. Last is operational excellence. It's one of my pet peeves. I love to gain efficiencies.
I like to pull costs out of our business model. But talking about operational excellence, the folks that work for me, they know how to drive a business, especially during a down market. I mean, they're the best in the class. In the last five years, the team, we grew margins by over five hundred basis points over the last five years. So looking at our core markets, not only do I have the best leaders in each core market, but I have the best business in each core market. We're the leader in aftermarket collision parts. We're the leader in the salvage market, leader in reman. Thanks to the acquisition of Uni-Select, with the FinishMaster stores, we're the market leaders in Paint, Body, and Equipment. We refer to that as PBE.
With the acquisition of Uni-Select, our parts in Canada, while we're not number one, but we're working hard to get there, we definitely have the number one brand in that market, and all these markets are very resilient. Talking on the integration of Uni-Select. We're gonna realize $65 million annualized synergies by year three. But I wanna touch on what this team did. We took a $1 billion-a-year business and fully integrated it in 9 months. I'm talking parts, people, warehouses, everything. We had HR, all the people onboarded. We'd go for a weekend, and say, there'd be 30 locations. Friday night, we'd go into their locations. By Sunday, it'd be broom swept, product out.
By Monday morning, IT had all the customers programmed in our system. Supply chain moved all the inventory in our warehouses. HR had all the people on board. I mean, just an amazing effort in the background. Monday morning, we were delivering parts to hundreds of new customers seamlessly. So just can't say enough what the team did. That was a tremendous, tremendous amount of flex in our integration muscle for sure. Just fantastic. We also eliminated any duplicate public costs. We're leveraging Andy and his team in Europe for improving our margins, especially on the private label sales. And as far as the sales team goes, they're fully aligned. I'm talking from techs, sales reps, ASMs, our go-to-market strategy. We are 100% one team. So Justin talked on how resilient the markets are.
Over the next ten years, we're gonna grow 1%-2%. But currently, in North America, we're feeling a little temporary, unusual headwinds, and these are short-term headwinds. So we all know 2024 is probably the mildest winter on record. Absolutely mild winter. Excuse me. So we're also experiencing some macroeconomics, and what I mean by macroeconomics is insurance premiums are up 20% over the last two years. A lot of folks are going to higher deductibles. A lot of people are deferring getting their car fixed because disposable income's a little tight. So we see that as a temporary, temporary headwind for us. The other headwind is total loss vehicles. So Justin talked about ADAS and TLV rate.
We always know that's gonna be there, but this year we're seeing a little abnormal high, especially because used car prices have just dropped so dramatically. We believe that's probably gonna finish out the rest of this year. Some of that could spill into 2025. How do markets historically run? You can see long-term headwinds I mentioned before. TVL rate, we think is going to normalize, come in around 1% a year. ADAS, we think will continue at about 1% a year, but the tailwinds will outgrow the headwinds. APU usage will go back to pre-COVID level, grow at least 1% a year. Parts per claim, because of the vehicle technology and the complexity of the vehicles, that will continue to grow. VIO growth, we think that's going to grow at a normal rate.
It always has, ever since I've been in this business. And last, parts inflation. And, parts inflation isn't going to go anywhere. Parts are just going to get more expensive. So what we think is a good way to measure our business, how's our organic growth versus year-over-year repairable claims? And as you can see, over the last, since twenty fifteen on, we've outperformed repairable claims by four hundred and twenty basis points. Now, in twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-three, we took advantage of some market dislocations. There was a strained supply chain, a limited inventory, high inflation. There was a UAW strike. All that allowed us to significantly outperform the market.
However, the main reason we outperformed the market is the size of the moat that we built, and I'm going to let you-- I'm excited to tell you a little more about advantages we have in our growth plans. So why we win? If you take a look at our distribution network, it's absolutely unmatched. It's took us twenty years, plus thirty years, to build this out. But if you look at salvage, a good salvage competitor, I mean, a good salvage competitor is going to fill about 25% fill rate. Our fill rates come in at 75%, and you can see by our distribution network how we do it. If you look at the purple in the Southeast, I could get a part from Norfolk, Virginia, down to Mobile, Alabama, get to Florida within a day or two days.
So we gain another 62% revenue off that extensive network. We'll get our 24% same-store sales. We call that, that's a local store buying and selling to a local customer. But we'll get another 62% by having our distribution network, and then we'll get another 14% because we could move product from another region, whether we ship it or whether they're cross-docked touch, we can actually move that product down. That's a huge advantage for us. And as far as our value proposition, there's nobody in the collision industry that has all three, reman, salvage, and aftermarket. I mean, that's just a big moat for us that we built. Nobody can match that. It really helps us compete against the OEMs. OEMs are our biggest competitor. They dominate. They have the major percentage of the market.
There's other aftermarket distributors like Empire, KSI. There's some other folks out there, but our main focus is OEM. That's, that's our main competitor. And as you can see, we normally come in 10%-30% less than list prices. And that bodes very well with our insurance partners. They're looking for cost containment, and it really helps our relationship with them. And then we also have a good relationship with the MSOs. MSOs, as we all know, are growing in the market space. They're going to continue to grab market share, and we'll win with the winners. They want to buy from somebody that has a national footprint, and we're the only folks that can provide that. So our core businesses, how are we going to grow them? First, look at the collision one. We're going to continue to launch new brands.
We just recently launched our LKQ Refinish brand. That is a private label, PBE brand. We're going to deploy digital tools, increase how we can cross-sell and upsell through our sales assistant tool. We're going to continue to get wallet share by increasing our already excellent service with faster service times, and we're going to expand our national footprint to continue to have the right part at the right place at the right time. How are we going to grow our salvage business? So this is a location in Crystal River, Florida, north of Tampa. So this is what we traditionally do. We have probably 50 acres there where we could set cars. We just bought 70 acres adjacent. As you can see, we're getting ready to clear it out. We're going to build it out. We'll be able to set cars in another 70 acres.
So what does that do for us? That improves our part availability, improves our fill rate, and our margins. So by having those extra acres, a small yard might be twenty, thirty acres, and you can sit on your cars two hundred and twenty-five days, two hundred days. We feel you need to sit on your cars a year to get that value out of the car. So when we have more acreage, we can sit on our cars longer, and then we're going to sell deeper into the cars, and that's going to raise our gross margin per car. So that's a big advantage. That's how we increase the moat.
Vehicle procurement, we're using machine learning and algorithms, so we could actually look at each vehicle in the auctions with our friends from GCC, and we can see what's the request, what does the market want, what car do we want to buy, how much do we want to buy for that car? What is each part worth on the car? I mean, we literally look at every item of that car. And the same thing on part inventory, and we're using AutoDISM. So this is all, again, machine learning. It tells our dismantlers, "Do I dismantle this part? Do I leave it on the car? Do I put it in the yard? Do I put that part in the warehouse? How fast am I going to sell it?
Do I stock it or not?" All this information, and what it does is it just takes that decision out of the human error, human element, and turns it all into data, database decisions, everything we do. Really helpful. Also, we gain efficiencies. When you have a mega yard, we might have 20 bays versus 3 bays or 5 bays. Imagine having to have five little small 20- or 30-acre yards. You got to have a dismantling manager, each one. It's hard to get standard operating procedures in. You get the mega yards. We standardize with the scale. We get much more efficient. Remanufacturing. How are we going to grow our remanufacturing? We're going to increase our capacity. With the Tri Star acquisition, and we're currently increasing capacity in Dallas, Newnan, Georgia, and Mexico.
So we'll be able to support our growth just by increased capacity there. We're also going to introduce new products, like remanufactured rack and pinions, remanufactured turbos, many new products we could put out. And as Justin talked about, we're going to keep an eye on the BEV, the EV space, working closely with Andy, who's coming up next. As Europe seems to be a little ahead of the U.S. as far as the EV goes, but we'll be working closely with them and look for opportunities there. Now, we have reconditioned two batteries in U.S. We did a Chevy, we did a Nissan LEAF and a Chevy Volt, both were successful pilots. So again, we're keeping our eye on that.
Also, new areas with our Bumper to Bumper business in Canada. We got a large customer base, a new customer base, that we'll be able to sell our reman products to, too. How are we going to grow our paint? If you look at this chart, it's a little messy, but all the, all the circles in green, we only sell parts to. Only circles in yellow, we sell parts and paint. We deliver virtually almost every body shop in the United States weekly. We have relationships. We have credit lines already set up. We know these folks. We deliver every week. A little under 25% of our current parts customers buy paint from us. That's who we're going to attack. That's a huge opportunity.
The legwork's already been done as far as the relationship, credit limits, all that good stuff, so that's an excellent opportunity for us. Grow our Canadian hard parts. Bumper to Bumper, man, we got a good team up there. We have the number one brand in Canada. We really, really have a good brand. We're going to enhance our relationship with the member stores we have up there. We're going to continue to look to go from three-step to two-step conversions. We've already done quite a few since the acquisition. As Justin said, we're going to look for high synergy, some small M&A, some bolt-ons. We're going to do some greenfields up there. We'll expand our portfolio. We're working with Andy and the European team to get some margin and expand our private label portfolio. That's already in process right now.
We're also leveraging the European team to enhance our B2C e-commerce business. That's a big opportunity for us that we'll hope to kick off Q1. We're also going to look at more cross-selling opportunities across the whole LKQ portfolio. Now, keep in mind, Canada is the only geography that we actually have all of our core businesses in the same place. So we're looking for big opportunities there. How are we going to cross-sell in that market? So what to see in the next three years? Like I said, our core businesses are going to grow 1% to 2%. We have a robust pipeline of initiatives to help us get some market share, to grow another 50 basis points to 100 basis points.
And lastly, possibly some small M&As that could add up to another 50 basis points. So all in all, North America, we're going to grow 1.5% to 3.5%. In closing, I want to summarize what we're going to focus on. Our strategic objectives are simplify the businesses, work on our operational excellence, and in turn, that will enhance our margins, will enhance our give us some profitable growth, and we got to continue to work on our talent development. Like I said, the bench is a little thin.
We're going to work hard there and strengthen that bench back up, but that's what we do well, so we'll do that shortly. From 2025 to 2027, we'll have annual organic revenue growth, 1.5% to 3%. Average annual organic EBITDA margin improvement, 10 to 20 basis points. And we're going to drive free cash flow through continuing optimization of trade working capital. I think I'm a little early, you have a little longer break than expected, but that's it for my presentation. Thanks, everybody, for coming out.
The program is about to begin.
Please take your seats. Mobility. empowers us to imagine, enables us to create, inspires us to innovate, drives us to go further. Mobility defines who we are, the automotive aftermarket leader. In 1998, LKQ was formed to circulate products and materials in North America. Today, we are also here to deliver car parts and services across 20 countries in Europe on time. We are here to accelerate logistics and ignite your business every day. Our purpose expresses why we are here: to create a sustainable future with safe, clean, and affordable mobility for everyone. LKQ, keeping you moving.
Please welcome to the stage Senior Vice President, President, and Managing Director, LKQ Europe, Andy Hamilton.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome back. Hopefully, everyone managed to get a quick break. And welcome to everyone on the podcast. I think I won the competition for the longest job title, anyway. My name is Andy Hamilton. I am the President and Managing Director of our European segment. I have been in the automotive aftermarket for thirty-two years, and in that thirty-two years I have been involved in both the retail side and the trade environment. And in the last thirteen years, I've had the pleasure of being part of LKQ. So I was in the originating first acquisition outside of North America, and I was the COO for that business. Just to tell you a little bit about me.
In that time period, two thousand and eleven, I was involved with the management team in that first acquisition, so our Euro Car Parts acquisition for LKQ, and I was responsible for the operations and the commercial side of that business and the organic growth of that business between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and sixteen. Put that into context, we grew the U.K. business under the LKQ ownership from two hundred and seventy million to a billion during that time period, and that was predominantly organic growth and organic expansion. With then a small executive team led by our European CEO, I then spent three years in Europe, again, with a small team, and we were working specifically focused on a couple of major acquisitions. That was Rhiag and our Auto Kelly, Elit businesses in Eastern Europe.
Then in 2018, I was also involved in the Stahlgruber acquisition, which was in Germany and Austria. I've had the privilege and the benefit of being, over that three years, in every single one of the markets we operate. I understand what those markets look like. I understand the nuances. I understand what the market leaders are doing. I know what great looks like, and I also have seen what not so great looks like in some of those markets. During that time period, our U.K. business, we also made a number of acquisitions. One of those acquisitions was a distressed, large distributor in the U.K., called Andrew Page, and that had created some challenges within our U.K. operations.
We had separate leadership teams, separate systems, separate portfolio, and it was creating a lot of conflict and a lot of complexity in that U.K. business. So at the start of two thousand and nineteen, I was asked to go back to the U.K. as CEO, and we put together a new leadership team, and with the sole purpose of bringing those what were five businesses in together as a single operating business. We did that, and we also did that pretty much right away through COVID as well. So some interesting hurdles that we came across, but we ended up building a single management team, a single organization, single brand. We brought those businesses together, those processes together, those systems together onto a single platform.
And we took that business from what was a mid-single-digit EBITDA at the start of two thousand and nineteen, within three years to a significant double-digit EBITDA, and continues to be the leading margin across our European portfolio. Some of those themes are now carrying through. I understand what we need to do from bringing these businesses together, and now I've had the privilege of working with the European team and the wider European team from the start of this year. Similar to John going through, we have the best leadership team in the European automotive aftermarket space. Nearly two-thirds of our European executive have come through the businesses. They understand the markets they operate. A lot of them have been market leaders within those markets and functional experts within those markets.
We have over eight years of tenure on average across the executive team, so we know not only from a pre-versus post-pandemic environment in each of those markets, but we also know some of the technology shifts that have been happening within the aftermarket space. So we understand what's going on, we understand where we are, the model we have currently, but more importantly, where we need to go in the future, and we've been working quite intensely over the last couple of years around our diversity and inclusion. Now, from ultimate mobility, from the end driver in every one of our markets, it's pretty consistent between female and male drivers. But ultimately, the automotive is and has been quite a male-dominated environment.
We've been working quite hard, consistently across the regions, to really improve that diversity and that inclusion and that gender progression, and giving us a much better balanced input with our leadership and our strategies. And I'm delighted that we are now, from our exec level minus one across Europe, we have 30% of our leaders are now female, and we continue to try and move that forward. Who are we, LKQ, in Europe? So we are the sum of over 80 acquisitions, so there has been complexity. There has been a number of acquisitions that we've been pulling together, but we are number one. As Justin alluded to this morning, we're number one in Europe. We are number one in seven of the markets we operate, so we are clear market leaders in those markets.
We have the relationships with the customers, we understand the market dynamics, and we are delivering those top podium positions. We're also podium players in another three markets. So 10 out of the 18 markets we operate, we are on the top podium steps. That does mean, though, that we know that there are further opportunities, both in organic and inorganic, in not only the markets we're operating as a podium player, but the markets where we're inside that top 10, but we need to get to that podium position. So we've got plenty of growth opportunities coming through in the markets that we operate. Collectively, we're just over EUR 6 billion revenue, EUR 6.3 billion in 2023, and that is built on a bedrock of 26,500 colleagues. Now, our colleagues are our prize assets.
We are predominantly a B2B business, and it's all about relationships. It's relationships with both suppliers and relationships with our customers. Those 26.5 thousand colleagues are what makes us special and what makes us so successful across the European footprint. We have 900 locations. Any eagle-eyed would have spotted that was over 1,000 last year or prior year, but that 900 is net of the divestments that we've decided to take this year in making sure that we are working with the markets and the portfolio that we believe can take us forward. That's where we are geographically, who we are, and why we win. We're market leaders on an unparalleled level when it comes to footprint.
The key-to-key time in collision repair is very different from the key-to-key time in service, maintenance, and repair work. So in a collision repair, it's normally days and weeks before getting the car from the initial impact through to fully repaired. In a service repair environment, you've got to service and repair that car the same day, and it needs to go back to the owner. So the size and scale for us and our footprint in the markets we operate, it's about the ability to service our customers multiple times per day in those markets. That's what sets us apart. So we're not an operator that's in one market, trying to stretch ourselves to another market. We are operating within those markets, and we're providing multiple deliveries per day to the customers, which is what the critical point is.
Our range and availability continues to improve. We've been working with the leading partnerships on tier one suppliers, and we've been looking on how we've consolidated those relationships and strengthened those relationships over the last few years. That's also supplemented by our private label proposition, which we're now also working with John and the Canadian team to make sure that we can share best practice and those purchasing synergies. And that world-class logistics system, so we are one of the main or the only main player, pan-European, that has logistics footprint right the way across Europe. We have the ability to move product. We have the ability across all those markets to get that product as efficiently to the end consumer or to the workshop in the best possible time. And over the last couple of years, we've been working tirelessly on our concepts and innovation.
The automotive aftermarket or the automotive markets are evolving, the technology is evolving. The independent workshop, which is our primary customer, has to evolve with it. And we've been putting a lot of effort into our tailored services, our training, our workshop concepts to ensure that those customers are fit and capable to do that work in the future. Put that in context, things like our One LKQ Academy, we will train twenty-four thousand technicians on EV and hybrid over the next four years. That's our commitment. We've made that commitment publicly as well. This is all about getting the independent aftermarket ready to be able to manage the shift in those technology changes. So we've talked about who we are as a business and how we win.
Some of the market dynamics, the fantastic thing is we are in a stable and we are in a reliable market, which is actually continuing to grow. As Justin said this morning as well, we know that vehicle part, so these numbers, this isn't the whole of Europe. These are the markets that we operate, so we're just making sure that we are addressing the markets that we operate within. But we know that markets or those volumes and those vehicle parts are continuing to grow. And while there are technology shifts, those technology shifts are probably not as substantial as what was perceived two or three years ago. And the hybrid technology has an internal petrol or has an internal diesel engine. So it has as much requirements from a service maintenance perspective as a more traditional ICE vehicle.
So we have a stable market. The market is growing, the vehicles in operation are growing. We do have some temporary headwinds. So COVID, the pandemic, as well as the semiconductor issues, we did see new registrations drop in 2020 and 2021, coming into 2022. And those drops in new vehicle sales coming into European markets then obviously have to filter through their age profiles. So we've seen that, and it's temporary, because the new vehicle sales, whilst they haven't completely recovered to 2019 levels, they're now significantly higher in 2023 and 2024 as they were in 2020, 2021, et cetera. So we've got some temporary noise. That is putting some softer elements into our five to 13-year bracket. But we have we also know that we've obviously got this EV piece.
The flip side of that is we've got an aging vehicle park. Because there's less new vehicles entering the European vehicle park, it is aging, and it's aging quicker than it has done in the last ten years. So the fourteen year onwards plays very well into more as a mid and entry-level product capabilities and the independent workshops having to provide a lower cost of service and repair to those vehicles. So there are opportunities, and there are tailwinds, while we recognize that we've got these temporary measures coming through on the new vehicles, or the lack of new vehicles that were entering the market. Geographical footprint, as I've mentioned, we're market leaders in seven, we're podium in another three. We've got opportunities for both organic and inorganic expansion in the markets where we are not on that podium steps.
And from a technology perspective, as Justin again mentioned this morning, we've got all the experience and understanding in the U.S. around salvage and around recycling. We know that salvage will play a part in EV remanufacturing and service as we go forward in the vehicle parc. We know it looks like probably two-thirds of batteries in battery electric vehicles, when it gets beyond ten years old, are gonna have problems. So there's gonna be opportunities and business channel opportunities in and around EV and around EV remanufacturing, and we're in the best possible position to be able to take hold of that opportunity. Key opportunities that we're working on, I'm gonna mention category management in a few slides. That's something we're doing around transformation. I've talked about the workshop concepts.
Concepts are our way of protecting and supporting and helping the independent operator to grow. The workshop belongs to a concept umbrella that provides them with technical support, training support, digital support, tooling support, et cetera. That's about us working as a partnership with that independent workshop to be able to service and repair the vehicles. We see a much higher wallet share penetration when a workshop belongs to a workshop concept that's been managed within our portfolio. We know that the remanufacturing will play its part as we move forward, especially in that technology shift that we're seeing. What have we been doing? One LKQ was announced and mentioned back in 2020, just pretty much as well as the pandemic hit at the same time.
As I said earlier, we are an amalgamation of 80 acquisitions in Europe. So the One LKQ design, the One LKQ principles, was about how do we bring those 80 acquisitions together as a single organization, as a European enterprise, as a European team, and as a European business? And so we've been working tirelessly over the last four years, putting a lot of those foundational building blocks in place. We have aligned with our key suppliers. We have seen improvements in our payment terms and our rebate terms and our vendor financing. Those things have been starting to come through, and we're seeing the benefits of them. As we've aligned more and more around our procurement and our suppliers that we work with, we've also seen the benefits around stock level rationalization, and we believe there's more to come. We have designed and we've implemented a European organization.
So we now have a European umbrella. That European umbrella is in 10 functions, your typical functions from an organizational perspective, and we've now aligned the regions with those organizational functions right across the actual portfolio and the business. We've started working on all the processes, and we've now, over the last 18 months, we've now defined all of our European best-in-class, end-to-end processes that will feed into our ERP systems and our back-end processes as we move forward. There's 2,500 of them. All the teams have been involved. Each region understands where they are now, how they need to close those gaps on those processes, and prepare themselves for this transformation that we are underway. We have progressed with our system harmonization. Back in 2019, 2020, we had over 40 ERP systems.
We now have a European ERP platform. It is stable, it is robust, it's proven. We've been working on it for the last two years. It's in two of our core markets, and we're now confident it's probably the most mature and the most stable platform that we have, and we now have a rapid acceleration program to bring a lot of the other regions and markets onto that platform as we move forward. We've harmonized, and we've aligned all of our policies and processes down by function. We've bring a lot of the back-end work in. We've harmonized our HR systems, our IT systems. A lot of our landscape is moving in the right direction, and then we've rolled out customer propositions, so I've talked about the workshop concepts.
We are specifically focused on capabilities around hybrid and EV and making sure that LKQ Academy, that training platform, which is in all of our 18 markets, has that capability to provide that, that requirement into the markets. We have 2,200 training courses on our LKQ Academy, and that's in 14 different languages. And we have hands-on technical expertise in each market that is then doing not only the online, but it's supporting that with offline and making sure that our customers really feel the value, and help them moving forward. Our key account management is progressing.
More and more, as we've been working together as a European group over the last couple of years, we're now looking at pan-European key account opportunities, aligning understandings and knowledge, and making sure the capabilities that are proven in one market can translate to another, and we're starting to see those benefits coming through. And the digitalization roadmap has been a bit of a silent workhorse behind the scenes. Most of those acquisitions, they all had their own digital capabilities, and most of them were homegrown. We've had to effectively create a roadmap that's gonna replace them with enterprise-level, scalable European capabilities. We've built that.
A lot of those capabilities are now ready, and we've been rolling out, and will continue to roll out over the next 12, 18 months, with a number of the markets with new digital capabilities, which are at a scalable level that we can now really bring the rest of the regions and the rest of the markets onto. And we've done all of that while having to obviously manage some of the challenges that we've seen in the markets and the industry over the last few years. We've seen high inflation rates. We've seen pricing volatility. And we've had to try and manage that pricing volatility. That we can then build and support that with our product leadership, this is part of the transformation plan. We have a large SKU consolidation.
I'm gonna mention that on the next couple of slides, so I won't dwell on it here, but that will provide us an opportunity to really expand our private label capability across the markets. In hand, that's gonna allow us to even further rationalize our supplier footprint. Now, in the last three or four years, we've seen improvements in our working capital and in our cash flow. We've obviously done the vendor financing. We've seen improved purchasing positions. We out of 3,000 suppliers that we work with, maybe 90% of the revenue comes from a third of those suppliers. So there are further opportunities around improving our working capital, improving our efficiencies, simplifying our business model, and that's what the product leadership, process and initiatives will be delivering. All of that is then wrapped up with the operational improvements.
So we've got some customer growth opportunities we believe that will give us above market position. There's a lot of work going on with the product leadership, and then within the operational improvements, we have blueprinted per market where our optimum locations are. So taking into account all of the current business opportunities, all of the vehicle park, all of the known operators, the workshops, et cetera, we've blueprinted every market. So we have a target plan for each market, regardless of whether we're number one, number three, number five, as to where we can position and where we can invest from an organic perspective, and potentially later on, within organic tuck-ins as well.
The asset rationalization, as we move to more of a single platform and a single back end, there are opportunities to also rationalize some of our assets and our processes and systems, as I've said, we will continue to harmonize and bring those together. Following the ERP rollout, or the whole transformation program, we will also be introducing our central procurement organization that will really allow us to manage and logistics without borders across mainland Europe, because it'll be one set of stocks, which are essentially controlled and centrally managed. And we are continuing to leverage the opportunities with our global competency center. So we do have capabilities there now.
We believe, as part of this transition program and moving to the new target operating model, that anywhere between 30% and 50% of our processes within the next three years should be able to be managed through that Global Competency Center, and again, giving us further operational leverage and further opportunities. So couple of slides on category management. I thought it was important to pull this out. It's a significant program. Up until now, we've been working primarily on purchasing synergies and purchasing benefits. However, the amalgamation of those 80 acquisitions means we have a very diversified product portfolio. We have over 900,000 active SKUs across Europe.
If you remove some of our channel or our adjacent channels around truck and around motorcycle, what it means is we have around 750,000 active SKUs that we're managing on a daily basis across that portfolio. We believe we can rationalize that portfolio, those SKUs, by around a third over the next three years. We have reviewed now 25 major product groups, which represent around 425,000 of those 740,000 SKUs, so just under 60%. Now, those 60% of SKUs is over 85% of our revenue, so we've already reviewed, and this is by market, by brand, by category, by team, going through every single brand, every single SKU, and making sure that we are looking at how we can take this forward.
We believe that from a brand perspective, we can actually improve the commonality of the brand, so making sure it's the same brand and the same in each of the markets with that product in place. It's currently around 20%. We believe we can get it to over 60% over the next three years. So again, when you think about the working capital around the purchasing synergies and purchasing strengths, there's a lot of opportunity to streamline and to improve that scale and opportunity. So this is well underway. We believe by 2027, as I said, we should be looking at SKU consolidation of around 30%. Now, there's two sides to this story.
There's one around optimization, simplification, taking products out that we don't need, but there's also a bit around how we then optimize the availability on the shelf. So as an example, we've got the branch Branch A and the Branch B. In Branch A, you've got five brands on the shelf. So the reality of the purchasing decisions have been made by the time it gets down to the branch. This is on a braking product. We've now got five brands on the shelf. Now, the problem with five brands on the shelf is you have limited space, so you end up with the fastest-moving SKUs available in each of the brands, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've got the full application available in that branch to service the customer.
By actually consolidating the number of brands we've got, having chosen tier one brands that we're working with, having selected brands in the mid-range and obviously our private label as well, we believe that we can not only simplify our portfolio, but actually increase the applications of what's available on the shelf, the ability to say yes far more frequently, and hopefully, as close to every single time. We have seen this work. We've seen this work in the test environments. We've seen this work in regions that are already further ahead of this. We believe that this will comfortably provide us the ability, better engagement with our customers and offset any risk as we transition through the SKU consolidation as we move forward over the next couple of years.
As I said, I've talked about a lot of transformation work, so we are really focused on doubling down on getting the transformation work completed between now and twenty twenty-seven. A lot of lifting is going on to make sure that we're into that single back end, consolidated processes, getting the work, GCC work, et cetera. It's still based on, and I said this earlier, we still obviously have our prime, our prize asset, which is our people. So we have 26,500 colleagues. It is critical, that we continue to, work with, develop, and coach, and, help them to grow. We are in an environment, as I said earlier, we're predominantly B2B, so those, colleagues need to work with our customers, and that relationship is critical, and those colleagues need to take our customers on that technology journey as well.
So we put a lot of effort and focus in on our customer, on our colleague growth and make sure they're equipped, and they have the skills and expertise to support our customers. We are obviously looking at talent expansion and development. We have digitalized that whole roadmap, so every colleague has personal objectives and has personal growth objectives that we can now see. We are now using consistent framework across all the European footprint, which will also then align from a global perspective. So we can see how people are developing, we can see how they're performing, and we can start to really make sure that the succession planning and the pipelining and the benches, as what John has also mentioned, are continuing to fill up. We've talked about our diversity and inclusion.
Across Europe, our exec level minus one is now 30% female, and we've seen that coming through in the regions as well. We're making sure that we've got a diverse diverse group of colleagues in those regions so that we make sure that we're really thinking about how we're addressing both our customers, but ultimately the end customers. Our reward and recognition programs are now aligned. They're aligned at a European level, but more importantly, they're also aligning at a global level, so we make it as easy as possible to move people around. Moving it, whether it's by region to region, or whether into region to European role, or even into global roles and moving colleagues between North America, Canada, and Europe.
So all of these things are going on to make sure that we are creating the opportunities to allow people to move, and we've aligned on our values and cultures as well. So we are working with one set of principles, one set of guiding rules around how we work together and making sure that that's consistent across the segments that we operate. So finally, hopefully, you've seen from the presentation, but also from the commentary, we are really doubling down on the simplification and the operational excellence in the European segment. We believe that once we've achieved and we've got past that tipping point of having the majority of our business onto that single set of ways of working, those simple set of processes and systems, that we can then really accelerate some of our further inorganic opportunities, both by channel and by geographies.
But we are really making sure that our operational focus and simplification is where our priorities are. We know that that's gonna give us enhanced margins. And we also know that will enable us to really then plan out and map out where our growth opportunities are. We continue to focus on talent development, and that is critical. We do see that some of that channel development, when we start looking at reman, we start looking at salvage, we start looking at EV, we start looking at data and digital, that we'll bring some new expertise and some new capabilities into the organization as well. But we'll also make sure that our colleagues have got the opportunities to also come through in those areas.
All of that combined, we do believe that we will have above market growth in revenue on 2.5%-3%. And even through this transition of doubling down on the transformation, we do believe that we can deliver 20-40 basis points per year on EBITDA margin expansion as we go through this period, then once we're out of this period, we've got obviously a lot more exciting opportunities that we can develop. All of that, based on also free cash flow, with the continued work on the trade working capital, and hopefully, as you've seen from the category management and the supplier rationalization,
there's further opportunities to drive through on that working capital improvement as well, so with that, and with 19 seconds to spare, that was good timing. Hopefully that was informative and useful, both for people on the webcast, but obviously for everyone in the room. I'm more than happy to discuss any points around the break as well, and with that, thank you very much, and I'll see you later.
Please welcome to the stage Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, LKQ Corporation, Rick Galloway.
Good morning for everyone here in the room, and good morning for everyone, or good afternoon for everyone who's joining us on our webcast. I think this is working, but I'm hitting the wrong button. Now it works when you hit the right button. So one of the things that I was told before I walked up here was that I'm standing between a nice panel discussion where you get to ask all of your questions and lunch, and so I think the hint was, let's make sure you're expeditious on your communication, so I'll do that. The other thing I realized as I was looking at the online site, the camera angle probably needs to zoom out a little bit, with Andy being up here and being a little bit tighter.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. One of the things that I wanna do with all of you here in the room and everyone online is give you a little bit of a picture of LKQ and the personality of LKQ. If you will, think about looking under the hood a little bit of who LKQ really is. Myself, I can't believe it, next week is gonna actually be two years in this role as CFO for LKQ. I started with LKQ back in twenty nineteen. In July of twenty nineteen, I joined LKQ as Justin's CFO for our wholesale North America organization, and worked there for the last three years, and then I got into this role. Prior to joining LKQ, I spent about a decade with a company called Alcoa.
I was with Alcoa during the split between Alcoa and Arconic. I ended up going with the Arconic organization, the aerospace side of the business there with Arconic. And then, the early part of my career actually was started off with the company called Grant Thornton as an auditor. As we talked about, one of the things that I wanna show you is a little bit of the financial snapshot, right? Most people that are listening in, or most people who are in the room, it's rare that I get to talk to a bunch of finance people, and so I get to be the premium speaker at the end of today. The operations folks, you know, they normally put me in the other side of things.
But when I think about our snapshot, what I typically talk about for the snapshot is I talk about it being our scoreboard. So the scoreboard, and I'm gonna get back into that here in a few minutes, but where are we at on the trailing twelve-month? Trailing twelve-month, we've delivered just about $14.5 billion of revenue. We've had a little over $1.7 billion of EBITDA, and just over $750 million of free cash flow. We're around $4.3 billion of debt and an overall liquidity of $1.4 billion. We are an investment-grade company. I'm very proud of that, something that we wanna maintain, something that we're adamant about maintaining.
Part of the discussion that we just had between John and Andy is: Why did we have John and Andy come up? Over the last twelve months, John and Andy were 85% of the revenue and about 90% of our EBITDA. Rounding out our EBITDA, there's around 8% that is our specialty organization and about 2% that is our self-service organization. What makes LKQ different than other organizations? One of the things that makes LKQ different than other organizations is our people. That is single-handedly the biggest opportunity, the biggest thing that we have, that Nick talked about before when Nick was here, that Justin talked about, John talked about, and Andy talked about, is our people.
I wanna show you a little bit of the way that we kinda think about our people and the way we partner together from the finance function to the operations function and all the support functions amongst LKQ. I do things just a little bit differently, and most of you who know me have seen that I do things just a little bit differently. This doesn't really fit in a finance presentation, but we're gonna talk about it anyway. Okay, so what is this? LKQ is a very competitive organization. Individuals within LKQ are exceptionally competitive. I'm exceptionally competitive. Justin is exceptionally competitive. We like to win. When I got here in 2019, I talked a lot about winning, and I still talk a lot about winning.
That conversation of winning is something that is a mantra that we go across the overall organization and talk about winning. When I go and visit one of our facilities, the question that I ask the operator, operating leader as we're walking around is: Are you winning? The question, "Are you winning?" is an interesting one if you haven't defined winning for them. One of the things that I like to do with the operations team, and also our finance folks, is ask them: Are you winning? Normally, that response comes in and says, "Well," especially when I started in 2019, "Well, what, what do you think is winning?" And I go, "Ah, I'm not gonna, I, I wanna know what you think is winning. Has our message been properly communicated throughout the organization?
Do you understand what winning is, and are you delivering on that winning environment and the winning expectations?" That's what makes LKQ so different. The drive of competitive nature, the drive of winning, makes things different. So I wanted to illustrate this a little bit of the connectivity that we have within LKQ, an example of the way we sort of were, what we've turned into, and then talk about where we're going, okay? Back in 2016, what you're looking at right now on the screen, there was the Monaco Grand Prix. There was an individual that ran, was the, with Formula One driver named Daniel Ricciardo. Daniel Ricciardo, when they started off the race in 2016, the race started off under caution because they just had a bunch of rain. Everyone had wet tires on, okay? So envision this.
Everyone has wet tires on. If you're a Formula One fan, you get it. If you're... Most of you are Americans, this is another race. It's not NASCAR. It's a different kind of racing, right? So, this is what Europeans would call real racing, right, Andy? It, he agrees. And so when you think about Formula One racing, the tires mean a whole lot. So they all started off with wet tires. During the race, some of them moved to intermediate tires. Then the track dried out, and they needed to move to slick tires. What happens prior to this is that Daniel Ricciardo came in and got his intermediate tires, okay? When he got his intermediate tires, what happened is he got in the lead. He got a nice lead.
When he got into a nice lead, number two behind him was a person named Lewis Hamilton. Lewis Hamilton was coming up on his side, but Lewis decided to go right from wet tires to slick tires, skipped the intermediate step. His crew chief at R- Daniel Ricciardo's crew chief decided, "We're gonna shift over, and we're actually gonna put on slick tires immediately." Let's watch for a second how that transacted with the overall video here. Go ahead and play the video.
They haven't got the tires ready. The tires aren't ready! No tires. Ricciardo is sat there waiting. Did he make the call? Did the team make the call? Whoever made the call, the tires weren't ready. Super soft tires going on. Hamilton now makes his way around Anthony Noghes, the final corner. Ricciardo put in a really decent lap, but is it gonna be enough to come out of the pits and lead this Grand Prix? I rather get the feeling that it's gonna be a tight one. Here comes the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton. Ricciardo on the inside. Hamilton takes the lead, but Ricciardo, of course, has that inside line into Sainte Devote. Hamilton now leads after a pit stop that saw Daniel Ricciardo sat stranded, waiting for his tire.
So when I think about this, what just happened, linking an organization with the mission, the strategy, the objectives, and then the overall action plan is critical because if you're not linked throughout the whole organization, you're gonna fail. You're gonna have issues like this, and there's sometimes where we have issues like this. What Justin laid out, and what we've talked about for a long time, is the overall mission statement. The mission statement hasn't changed. The mission statement's been a clear mission statement. What Justin just laid out for us with John and Andy is a different type of strategy. The different type of strategy for us is really looking at shareholders, all of you, stakeholders, how do we create operational excellence, and then how do we return the proper amount of capital to our stakeholders? That's the strategy. The strategy is pretty clear.
What we then did is we take it down to our objectives. Our objectives, specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-based. If you read any books, you've often seen that that's a SMART objective, right? That's what that ends up being is the SMART objective. We take that approach, and the measurability of what we do is what it makes LKQ different than everyone else that you're gonna walk around. The strategy is great, and the strategy is interesting, but how do we actually make it happen? We make it happen through setting up real objectives, which Justin talked about, his objectives and his key results, the OKR process. So back in twenty nineteen, when we started working on this, we worked on this playbook for North America wholesale organization to drive accountability, drive measurability. We focused on things like key performance indicators.
Key performance indicators are something that drives the organization, sets the tone, and shows what winning really is to the operators, taking something that is complex and making it simple for the organization. If you're the one moving parts, if you're the one delivering parts, how do you know that you're winning? You don't know you're winning by the fact that the stock price is up or down for the day. The way you know you're winning is by looking at time-based initiatives, time-based metrics to drive performance. And why I talk about the scoreboard is because what we wanna do is put points on the board. How do we, every single day, put points on the board? And that's what's different about LKQ than many other organizations that you're gonna see.
The team knows how to put points on the board, and they're confident with the points being put on the board. How do we deliver? So in North America, the playbook, going after KPIs, going after time-based initiatives, setting it up to where not only do we know we're winning when the scoreboard comes up, but now we know we're winning during the day. During the day, literally doing a gemba walk throughout the day to figure out if I've dismantled enough vehicles, if I've shipped enough parts, if I'm delivering enough parts for the day, and does that mean I win the day, or does it not? I mean, I win the day?
What Andy talked about is now that that foundation has been built using One LKQ Europe, we're at an optimal time right now to take that playbook and move that playbook over to our European operations. Essentially, what John talked about, taking a billion-dollar FinishMaster business that you can't even see now because we integrated it in nine months, is an integration muscle that we are building and are setting a foundation for our European operations. That's what makes LKQ so different than everybody else. So when that happens, why don't we take a peek at what that looks like when you're all aligned? Go ahead and roll this video. That's the way a pit stop is supposed to be. That's amazing. Just over one second to change four tires. What happened with Daniel Ricciardo is he took thirteen seconds to change a tire.
This was just over one second. He lost the race by seven seconds. If he just would have gotten half of that back, he would have won the race. It's critical to be aligned from top to bottom, and that's what makes us so different than everyone else. When you think about where we're going, what we're doing, where we're headed, is targeted financial results, driving incremental profitability, focused on the balance sheet to drive incremental free cash flow. One of the tools we have, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about it in more detail, is our vendor financing program. So when we look at what John and Andy spoke about, starting off with a TTM number of 12%, okay? Looking at the overall opportunities, we talked about profitable revenue growth. John specifically talked about growing in the core.
He talked about the salvage and the remanufacturing part of our business, where we're number one, but growing in that core and then using what we have, where we're better together, on teaming up with Andy on the hard parts side to grow our Canadian hard parts business. How do we take that expertise over in Europe, where we've grown that European expertise, tap into that, learn faster, and become the number one player in Canada? That's where we're headed. Andy talked about the customer loyalty through our workshop concepts, driving this customer loyalty, making sure that we had customers that want to do business with us, and then on top of that, he talked about collision space.
How do we grow an APU that's in the mid to high single digits over in Europe to a much higher number, where we all talk about being in the upper thirties for North America? We can play a game in that. We can play into that market space, and that's something that we have vision to be able to go do because we have the best people to go do it. When you look at the gross margins, gross margins, we put it roughly a push over the next three years. There's some puts and takes back and forth. We're gonna get private label. We're gonna get SKU rationalization. Those will help us on the positive side, but quite honestly, there's gonna be some inflation that we're gonna expect, and we're gonna expect a little bit of limited price increases.
Price increases have been a little bit difficult to go pass through in certain areas, so call it a push. But where we end up seeing nice margin expansion is we end up seeing it through the vision that Justin, the strategy that Justin just put out. What Justin put out was a strategy of simplification. Simplify the portfolio, simplify the way we look at the business, simplify the way we operate the business, take lean operating tools that we developed and have proven over in our North American operations, take those over to our European operations and expand the margins from the platform that we've already got. That should give us around ten to twenty basis points every year for the next three years, is what we think that'll do. What most people forget about is they forget that a lean process is not just the P&L side.
Most people talk about lean operations as a process that helps us on the P&L side. That isn't just what lean operations does for us. A lean mentality is essentially doing more with less. How do we do more with less? Get rid of the inefficiencies and get rid of the waste. So let's talk a minute about the balance sheet. Let's talk about the value stream that happens on inventory. When we look at the time from ordering to the time delivering to our customer, Andy talked about availability, and we got to make sure we have everything on the shelf, but we got to make sure we don't overdo it as well. How do we shorten that cycle? How do we make sure that the inventory levels aren't growing while our revenues are growing? How do we maintain it, or how do we even decrease it?
We talked about footprint rationalization. That's an opportunity for us. We talked about SKU consolidation, another opportunity for us, and then overall network optimization. Both businesses have opportunities to grow these items and simplify the overall business to focus on a reduction of overall inventories, thereby driving more free cash flow. We talked a bit about the receivables side. You didn't maybe catch it, that we talked about the receivables side, but we talked about the integration with our customers and our customer loyalty. Because of the size and scale of what LKQ does, we can partner with our customers like no one else can partner with our customers.... Like no one else can partner. And the way that that happens is through integration and being able to take our systems, mirror it up with their systems, and making sure that we create a contract, essentially, through our customers.
The way I talk about it within the organization is I talk about, let's first look at our delivery performance. How are you delivering? How are we delivering? If we're delivering at 99% on time, then my expectation from our customer base is just that they pay me at 99% on time. That's a focus for us. That's something that we can do and something that our systems allow us to do much faster than anyone else. So where are we gonna extract some dollars on the balance sheet? It's gonna be the payable side. We're gonna extract dollars out of our payable side by extending terms. You start thinking about the supplier rationalization. Here's the contract that essentially creates with our supplier rationalization. We're going to give you more volume. In return, you help us with not only the P&L side, but help us with overall terms.
That's what ends up happening, is we partner together with our suppliers. They realize that they have a nice size growth, nice size opportunity, and now we can actually pull some more dollars out of this, and I'm gonna talk in a minute about vendor financing, which is another big opportunity for us. So what have we done over the last couple of years since I've been in this role? Since I've been in this role, we've done a couple different things. We refinanced $2.5 billion of a credit agreement. We issued our first investment-grade bonds at $1.4 billion on investment-grade bond. We had a Canadian term loan of $700 million, and we had some euro bonds that Justin talked about earlier of 750 million EUR, all under an investment-grade rating.
We've now pushed out our weighted average maturity to four years. We've got some flexibility. We are determined to maintain and improve our overall credit rating. We think that's the right place for LKQ to be with the mature organization that we have, and we are set up in a great opportunity for us to have available prepayment if we wanna prepay some things. And when you start looking at what our overall credit is, we have a borrowing rate around about 6.1%, and our fixed versus variable mix is around 75% fixed to 25% variable, and we're pretty comfortable with where that's at. So vendor financing. Vendor financing is one aspect of payment extending. It's one aspect.
It's the one we get questioned the most on for most of you, but it's one aspect of our overall extension of terms. What we've seen since Q1 of 2023 is a 9.3% organic growth. What does that mean? Europe has grown 9.3%, okay? We've gone from $240 million to $375 million, extracting value and bringing more cash to our investors to be able to reinvest back into the business in whichever way we need to, okay? What we also did is, when we acquired Uni-Select, we had $63 million in our Canadian business, and we've extended that to $70 million since August of last year. That extension, it's important to understand, that's about 60% utilized.
There's plenty of opportunity for us to go after more, and with what our credit rating is, we have an opportunity to go after and stay very competitive in that environment and extract more dollars. So what do I expect in the future? More of this. Similar type trajectory. That's what you should expect, okay? So what did we do with that cash over the last couple of years? From 2021 to 2024, we produced around $4.4 billion of operating cash. What did we do with that? We deployed over 60% of that with share repurchases and dividends. That's what we did with it. We also have a reinvestment, and what Justin talks about, making sure that we're staying strong. It's just under 25% of our investment has gone towards CapEx.
Projects that we want to currently develop, projects that we keep developing and, you know, so there's about 25%... A little less than 25% of it went to that. So what does that mean for the future? Is the future gonna be different? Is essentially why you're here. There's gonna be a couple things that are different. One is laser-focused on cash generation. Laser-focused on cash generation. Cash is king. Cash is what's going to help us to deliver the future, and that's something that we're looking at expanding and trying to grow that cash. Major focus there. Major focus on capital expenditures, on high ROIC or high return on invested capital projects, that's gonna be a major focus for us. We're gonna commit to a 50% of our free cash flow is gonna be spent between dividends and share repurchases, okay? Minimum 50%.
You can see what we've done so far this year. We're seeing that already. Pretty excited about that. And then on acquisitions, Justin talked about tuck-ins. Heard in the hallway a little bit about, "Well, I know, but you guys said tuck-in before, and now you have a large tuck-in, and maybe it wasn't a tuck..." Here's what I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna show you a picture right here. Let's put some dollars to it, okay? Let's put some dollars to it. What we're looking at is we're looking at $3.4 billion-$4.6 billion in operating cash over the next three years. How are we going to use that cash? 60% of that, we are gonna put back to our stakeholders, capital return back to our stakeholders.
40% of that's gonna be used for investment for growth. Where are we gonna grow? The vast majority of that is gonna be in capital expenditures. So all of you math whizzes that are sitting in the room can understand what we're earmarking for acquisitions, tuck-in acquisitions, is 10% of that number, essentially $400 million over three years, roughly. That's the number that we're targeting. That doesn't mean that's one acquisition, that's many acquisitions of smaller sizes that we're looking at something like a $10 million, $15 million, $20 million acquisition on things that are very highly accretive, where we've taken the, the expectation on returns down to a three-year period and up on the overall hurdle rate. What we're also gonna do is we're gonna maintain our dividend and grow it on a per-share basis.
We'll grow our dividend on a per-share basis, but we're gonna return about 35% between our share repurchases and our debt payments. That's the plan right now. So why do I get excited about LKQ? I can tell you the number one I get excited about LKQ is our people. Our people make the difference. That is really what is the secret sauce behind LKQ. We have great assets, but our great assets are run by amazing people. That's the difference. We are in amazing, really, really solid, non-discretionary markets that we just talked about for our North America Wholesale and our European operations. And, oh, by the way, you happen to be looking at the number one in every one of our segments that we do. We're number one in North America, we're number one in Europe, we're number one in specialty, and we're number one in self-service.
It's hard to come by a company that can say, "Not only do we have the best people, we're also well-positioned." That's what we can do. In addition, what can we do? We are stable through the economic uncertainties. Right now, we're in this volatility that we talked about. John talked a little bit about this volatility up and down. The value proposition that LKQ offers is a value proposition when things get tough, we are a good answer. We are the best answer for consumers. That's the difference, is that we can push this way, push that way. When there's unstable and there's not repairs being done, which is what we've been talking about, those repairs come at some point in time. How do you get them done? Through the lowest cost initiative. Who is that? LKQ. That's how we figured this out.
What are we gonna do? We're gonna grow organically. That's gonna be a laser focus for us. We're gonna focus on our operational excellence. That's gonna drive EBITDA at a faster rate than revenue, and then we're gonna drive free cash flow on a compounding basis faster than we do EBITDA. We're gonna take that free cash flow, we're gonna reinvest it back in the business on things that help us to encourage and grow our earnings per share at a faster rate than our free cash flow. That's the plan. I will also tell you that we are very committed to making sure that we stay, our credit rating stays as an investment grade rating, and we are consistently able to grow the overall earnings over these next few years. So how do I summarize this?
The way I summarize this is I say, Justin laid out a strategy of simplification. We're gonna simplify the business from the portfolio to the operations. How do we do that? Through operational excellence, through a lean initiative that goes across every aspect of what we do, removing the waste from the organization. What will that help us do? That'll help us to drive overall profitable growth, and that's gonna overall enhance margins. We're gonna enhance margins, which is gonna drive free cash flow. So what does that mean for us? Well, that means for us that we believe in the next three years, we're gonna outgrow the market at LKQ's level by 1-2% above market. I'm not gonna tell you what the market's gonna do. With the market volatility right now, I can tell you we have plans to outgrow the market 1-2%.
That's what we'll commit to. The other thing we'll commit to is, with that, we look at 10 to 20 basis points for LKQ of margin expansion that we should see over the next three years. And what does that do on free cash flow? Around $2.4-$3.2 billion of free cash flow delivering over the next several years. It's a lot of work, a lot of time being spent, a lot of focus to be able to deliver these in a volatile market, but this team is the best team to be able to deliver that. So with that, that ends my prepared remarks.
What we're gonna do is we're actually gonna invite up a panel discussion of Justin, John, Andy, and Joe Boutross. Joe will host us for the Q&A. All of you can ask questions here, and you can also ask questions online. What we're gonna do is we're gonna pause the internet feed for a few minutes while we get the stage set up. So thank you for your time, and we'll welcome your questions here in just a minute.
Please welcome our panel, Justin Jude, John Meine, Andy Hamilton, Rick Galloway, moderated by Joseph Boutross.
Hold on. Am I on here? I suspect it's the first investor day that many here have been to, where they have heavy metal playing, so hopefully you're enjoying that experience. I know a few people have asked, where's the slide deck on the site? It is there. If you slide down on the landing page, you'll see it. It says Presentation. You'll click on it. So, Lexi is gonna be walking around with microphones to hand to anybody that wants to ask an on-site question
but some people beat you to the punch. So, first one in: Rick, on the last earnings call, you made reference to the revised guidance being adjusted down due to the expectation of soft volume in the back half of the year. Now that we're more than halfway through the quarter, how is the quarter tracking to that revision, and what's the demand environment relative to the first half of the year?
Thanks for starting me off with a softball. I appreciate the easy question to start off.
I'm just the messenger.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. So, you know, as we looked at what we had done, the biggest driver of the business is the market. The market on the collision space, as well as our European operations, what we saw is we got it to, just to make sure everybody's kind of aligned, was $3.50 up to $3.70, with a midpoint of around $3.60. As we went through July, obviously, July is done. August, we're still working on August. What we saw was the market was down even a little bit further than what we had expected, still within our range. So, I don't think that there's an issue within the range.
What I would say is that we started off a little bit slower than where I had anticipated and where I wanted to be at this point in the game. So I would say still within the range, but probably just shy of where we are at as far as the midpoint goes. So that's where. On free cash flow, free cash flow has been coming in well. I don't anticipate much of a difference for where we're at on free cash flow with the work the team's doing on the balance sheet side.
Got it, and there's a second part to that question, but people on the webcast, as well as people here, obviously, we're here to talk about the long-term vision of LKQ and don't wanna have a guidance discussion for the balance of the day, so I took that question out of courtesy. I can let you choose what you wanna ask, but I'd prefer to steer the conversation towards what we're speaking about today. Most people don't listen to me, but give it a shot, so Justin, great presentation. You got a compliment out of the box, so there you go. If you had to summarize, what's the biggest change we should expect under your leadership, and what gives you the confidence LKQ will deliver more predictable results and no surprises with changes in strategy?
That's a long question. I mean, overall, my overarching responsibilities are to give back to the shareholders first and foremost. I talked a lot about simplification. Simplifying the business, simplifying our portfolio, that is something that is being aggressively looked at, and will continue to be looked at. Driving the operational excellence by standardizing the business, integrating the businesses, will lean towards more cash flow, which we can then turn around and invest back into our shareholder standpoint. So the confidence I have is just looking at the teams, evaluating the teams that we have, making sure that they are aligned.
Rick talked about how do we take that strategy, cascade it all the way through the organization, and make sure everybody is laser-focused? I would say one of the differences with me being an operator, I get I travel a lot to go meet with our operations, meet with our locations, and make sure that they understand what the strategy is, they understand how they can affect the strategy and make sure that we're focusing on the right things. So I would say clearly, just simplification and holding people accountable to drive the results and to have no surprises.
Great. So I will move to the group here, to Brett Jordan of Jefferies.
Hey, thanks for taking the question. You talked about no sacred cows as far as looking at the portfolio. As you look at the possible divestitures, whether it's specialty or self-service, is there a reason you wouldn't think about geographically splitting the businesses North America and Europe? And I guess also within that question, North America, Bumper to Bumper is obviously a small player in a very large competitive market, particularly if you get into the U.S. Is there a real reason to be trying to play in that game, or, you know, is that a potential candidate as well?
I mean, the first piece, I'll talk about on the European. When we look through the portfolio, once again, we look at it aggressively. We look at no sacred cows. We understand the long-term benefits. I kind of outlined on several different slides some of the benefits that we see of North America and Europe combined. Revenue synergies, cost of goods synergies, operational efficiencies, those are real, tangible things that don't require us to go acquire businesses to really leverage and get the benefit out of integrating our operations in Europe, as Andy talked about. We see the value of driving those initiatives, getting the returns for ourselves and our shareholders when we talk about Europe and North America. The other piece of your question was what? Sorry.
Would you think about Bumper to Bumper as a potential candidate for sale? And I guess, follow-up on that question, the timing, if you think about specialty or self-service, I know there's a lot of talk about specialty cyclical business. At what point do you think you can? I mean, obviously, trying to sell it on the cycles of market timing exercise, that never works. You know, when might we see some activity here? And again, would you think about Bumper to Bumper as a candidate for sale as well, just given how competitive that market is?
Yeah, Bumper to Bumper, that came obviously with the Uni-Select acquisition. Leveraging the scale that we have in Europe, there's great value in that. Great value in the cost of goods benefit, great value in, you know, rolling up a fragmented market that exists right now. In Canada, we're the number two player. We're a leader in that position. We see an opportunity to expand the offering of that product line throughout the rest of Canada, even leveraging our distribution centers and our network. So we see good value in that. When it comes to specialty or self-service, quite honestly, any acquisition, I wouldn't really comment up here on a hypothetical, but I will tell you that we are aggressively looking at our full portfolio all around.
I mean, with all fairness, obviously, we've only owned the Bumper to Bumper business for 13 months, and I know it, it seems to be the theme du jour about simplifying the business model from a, you know, diversifying through divestitures. I think a lot of shareholders that are here don't want us running out and having a fire sale. So anything that we divest, I would assume you want us to be methodical and thoughtful, just like anything we buy. So I'm not gonna speak for these guys, but I just need to layer in. You know, I have a few conversations on my own. We've only been doing it for 13 months. Anyways, next question.
Scott Stember from Roth MKM. You talked about on the accounts payable, or just, you know, leveraging off of that, two different areas, if I heard correctly, with your suppliers here in the US and the vendor financing program. If you were talking about just the vendor financing program, how far can you guys go? Some of the guys here in the US have a one-to-one AP to inventory or even higher than that, and they get a free float on their inventory. How far, how aggressive could you be? Just region by region, if you need to.
Yeah. Yeah, so I'll take that one. Thanks, Scott, for the question. I was talking about both. I was talking about overall payable extension, not just through vendor financing. When we're looking at our overall terms, whether it's in North America, whether it's in any of our segments, specifically, Andy was talking about a little bit of the supplier simplification over in Europe, when we're looking at overall SKU reduction and supplier simplification. There's an area there that someone may not play in the vendor financing, but they would play in extended terms because of the size of the organization. So I don't wanna just put blinders on the vendor financing piece. If I look at the vendor financing piece, you're exactly right. We're looking at the same ones that you're looking at.
You're looking at the O'Reillys, the AutoZones, those folks that are at one-to-one or maybe even above that. That's proven that it can be done here in the States. I don't see a systematic reason why it can't be achieved over in Europe. It's just a slower pace over in Europe, okay? So we are, let's say between 50%-75% of where we think that we can get to on our European operations. And then we've got some opportunity, as Justin talked about on the Bumper to Bumper side, we've got some opportunity within Bumper to Bumper to also expand those vendor financing opportunities for us. Yep. She's coming, Craig.
Thanks, Craig Kennison, from Baird. You mentioned an opportunity on the hybrid battery side and just overall in the EV category. I'm curious what assets you have and what assets you may need to be a scale player, and specifically, on recycling materials, do you have any of the assets you need to be a meaningful player there?
Yeah, so when it comes to the remanufacturing piece, we acquired Bumbleb ee and Green Bean Battery several years ago that remanufactured hybrid batteries. Focusing on nickel-metal hydride, that technology then migrated to lithium-ion. We are now remanufacturing lithium-ion batteries, selling them back into the distribution channel or installing them into a customer's hybrid vehicle today. We have the capability to just scale it up with people and CapEx. When it comes into the EV side of remanufacturing, it's a little bit more technical, obviously, different equipment, not very expensive equipment, making sure we have the right knowledge base within our organization. We've added a few resources to make sure we have that expertise on lithium-ion, full EV. EV is a little bit more complex than just a lithium-ion hybrid.
You've got the battery cells themselves, you have a cooling system in there, you've got a battery management system, making sure that we can remanufacture a battery that is gonna get put back in the vehicle and works, and works effectively. When we talk about the recycling piece, you know, there's a lot of players out there that invest a lot of capital into recycling these things, shredding the battery, shredding the components on it. That isn't something that we're looking at investing into ourselves. It's something that we may partner with somebody.
We've got a lot of the logistics and a lot of the scale on getting that battery from the consumer or from the shop, processing it, pulling it out of a vehicle that may be end-of-life vehicle or pulling it out of a vehicle that's been wrecked, then distributing it or handling the logistics to get it back to a shredder. And so we've partnered with some shredders in the past, to make sure that we have, you know, the best benefit and the best relationship there, but it isn't something that we're gonna look at in investing in large recycling centers or shredders of the batteries.
I think maybe just let me add just a little bit. If you think about the value proposition of the battery itself, we've looked at this multiple different ways, and you had mentioned specifically the recycling side of it. When you think about the recycling side of it, we tend to look at that as our lowest value proposition. There's a whole lot of things that we can do to extract value, we believe, at a much more profitable, much more profitably than just the recycling side. So as you can imagine, being the largest recycler of vehicles, we're getting phone calls from all of the candidates that you and I have talked about in the past, right?
That are in that space because they want the core, they want the actual battery, and they would love nothing more than for us to give it to them, sell it to them, to turn it into black mass. If we can take that battery and put that into a remanufactured battery, now all of a sudden, the value proposition is much, much higher, and extracting that value out of the battery is a much bigger proposition for us. It's essentially that, then are there other areas
Maybe not even in vehicles, but is there other storage opportunities that make more sense to extract more value? So we're looking at the entire value chain, Craig, is what I would tell you. It's not just the recycling, but clearly, with what we do in the business of procuring vehicles, we have 750,000 cars that we've bought last year, right? So in that business, we're going to get a lot of cores as that volume increases. The last opportunity for us, we believe, is probably on the recycling side, or on the actual recycling side of it.
If I could ask a follow-up on Europe. How do you manage, if you're going to cut your SKU count by a third, how do you manage not losing any revenue associated with that? And if you could follow up and just address the opportunity of collision in the European market, that'd be great.
Okay, so if we look at the SKU count piece, we've done all the market research in each of the markets, and the two top reasons that the independent workshop will use a distributor is on availability and speed of service. When you get down into number three and number four, then you're looking at quality, relationship, price. Brand is down in the kind of six and sevens. So it's not a brand decision that the workshop's making that ultimate decision. They put a lot of that emphasis behind the relationship, so they'd rather buy from us as the relationship brand rather than the product brand. So we're confident from that perspective, and what we believe is, and what we've proven out in a number of areas already, is actually really working on the application breadth.
By having less brands, but having much wider breadth, and you're really, really focused in on that application coverage per geographical markets, it's not, it's not a single shoe fits all. This is personalized and relevant to each of the geographical markets it's operating. We believe that will more than offset any risk, but actually it's probably further revenue growth. So we're pretty comfortable that that combined gives us a real opportunity. We also believe that this is the kind of right timing for really leveraging our private label capabilities as well. So we can take a lot of those entry and mid-level brand consolidations and move them into our own private label. From a collision side, the collision is quite interesting.
I was involved in the U.K. business right the way through from 2011 through to 2016 and then 2019 onwards. We are the alternative and number one player for collision in the U.K. We have got a full collision product portfolio. We've got all the paints and the wet and dry goods and the tooling, et cetera. By market, we know what we need to operate. Each of the insurance market behaves slightly differently in each of the European markets. The key thing is really, when you're doing it the other way around, the key- to- key time, you're trying to set up a whole logistics capability. We've got the reverse benefit, is that we've already got logistics in place.
This is about just getting the timing and the proposition and getting the product into the, the logistics and distribution, and we can get it out. We've got a mature collision capability in the U.K. We've got a partial maturity within a couple of other markets, but we believe we've got the right understanding to how we can leverage that across more consistently. Collision, as we have been going through the last few years, collision hasn't been the priority from a channel development.
We've been working a lot more on the foundations and the infrastructures in the back end. We believe from a channel development, and especially when we think about the technology shifts, that collision and the salvage will play a critical part as we move forward. It's on the roadmap. We've already got good levels of maturity, and we're number one in some markets, but we know what we need to do moving forward, and expanding that across. But it is different in each of the markets, and it's just then understanding how we get that in.
Oh, we'll let you ask a question, then I'll take this one. We'll alternate.
Hi, thanks. David Shepley at Windacre Partnership. A network question, maybe start with you, John, and then to Andy. John, just on the mega yards, just hoping to learn more about how far you guys can push that. How far do you wanna build out that, geographical footprint standpoint? And then, Andy, maybe you talked about a blueprint map from a location standpoint. You know, what, what does that look like in 2028, 2030 type of, thing? Thank you.
Okay, thanks for the question. So as far as the mega yards, we're built out in Texas. We have one going up outside of St. Louis. We have property already identified in the state of Washington, which will feed the Northwest, also help feed into Canada a little bit. We're looking at securing properties on the east side. If you go up in the northeast and the east, we have a lot of smaller yards there, so there's lots of opportunities there.
So we've been actively working that for two years, but the difficulty of securing a property, getting the permitting, getting the engineering done, has just taken a long time. Years ago, five years ago, we could secure a property and start building in four months and be in that yard in a year and a half. So we're still working, but unfortunately, the pace has taken us two to three years now to build that out. So we've already identified there's probably gonna be typically maybe three yards on the east, and we already got the west on pace.
If I can piggyback on that, I mean, we have geographical coverage, right? So if a customer needs a recycled part for a collision or mechanical, we cover all of the U.S., we cover all North America, all of Canada. Some of the benefits of the mega yards, I know John's talked about it, where we already have salvage operations, maybe two or three, and we can go to a larger, more efficient one, close those other three, but ultimately, what it does is gives us capacity.
Right now, we're the largest player in that space, but we're still a small player overall in the grand scheme of all the vehicles and all the, and all the volume. I mean, there's over 3,500 registered salvage yards across North America, so there's a lot of volume that we want to go get. We just want to make sure we have the capacity, so we don't have to turn those cars faster and lose margin on it, and that's one of the initiatives is on the mega yards to handle that.
And then from a European perspective. So we've blueprinted each of the markets, and what we see, depending on the market, so you've got some markets that are more rapid fulfillment. So the U.K. is a prime example of that. It's heavily concentrated from an independent workshops, and you need a rapid fulfillment model to supply those markets. Where you've got wider markets with less workshop coverage, then it's a more of a milk run philosophy, and you can do two, three, four times a day, et cetera. So we understand, and we've got the blueprinting for each of the markets we operate, and whether that's a rapid fulfillment or whether that's a timed milk run approach.
So there are several opportunities per market where we can consolidate locations, because we believe in that milk run environment, we can actually do it from less, and we can do it from slightly bigger capabilities. And that also ties into the fact of widening that category management and that brand, also that SKU portfolio and application. On the flip side, we also know that we're not number one in every market, so there's actually white spots now identified in each of the markets.
So whilst there's some consolidation, some simplification, there's also white spot areas that we can. We believe now we've got clear visibility of the number of vehicles and the number of workshops in those locations, where we can add a further investment and put a further reach in. So it's a combination. Net-net, we probably look quite similar, might even slightly creep up, but that will include a number of consolidations as well as new site locations as well.
I'll take this one here, and, it's another Europe question, but Rick, you probably want to jump on this as well. Historically, we had talked about 10% plus EBITDA margins in Europe, up to 12-13% in some cases, and now we're talking about 20-40 basis points a year. What has changed? Can we still get to low double-digit margins in Europe? I'll let you guys swing it out, and then take it from there.
It's budget season, so I'd rather hear what you have to say. So let me. I want to make sure we're clear on the communication, so I'll start off, and then if you want to add to it, you're welcome to add to it. We're all happy to hear that. Look, we're roughly 10%, right? Is where we're at, and what we talked about for this year is, I guided to, let's say, high 9s, with what's going on with the marketplace. What Andy talked about was 20 to 40 basis points a year, right? For the next three years, is what he's looking at. What we've talked about also is that we think that's not the ceiling.
We have some businesses over in Europe that are making 13%, even 14%, in some areas. We've obviously done some things with the portfolio, with getting rid of Poland, Slovenia, Bosnia, and getting rid of some low-margin product, low-margin businesses that we didn't think could get up to that opportunity with the assets that we held. So that hasn't changed. The trajectory hasn't changed. What I would say is that we've got a specific plan attached to the action plan to go deliver what we've been talking about. That's what Andy knows how to do, in a way that we haven't been able to do thus far.
And so for the confidence level of getting there is much, much higher. You know, oftentimes people want to pin us down to, "Okay, well, is it gonna be eleven? Is it twelve? Is it thirteen?" What I would say is that we've got twenty to forty basis points that we're very comfortable with every year for the next three years, and there's more beyond that. The time horizon that we asked them to talk to was the three year. But, did you want to add anything?
Not that it'll be a build on a budget conversation.
Ah.
But anyway,
I tried, guys. I tried.
So we're carrying an awful lot of complexity and legacy from all of the acquisitions we've got. We've got the foundations in place, we've got the proven processes, we've now got the mature applications. We've got less than 10% of the European business on the new ERP backend platform and systems. Within the next three years, that will be over 50%. So we're carrying that burden at the moment, and we've been carrying that burden for the last couple of years, and that's clearly given us headwinds that we'll then release, and we come through. We know by the time we get to 2027, we're beyond the tipping point, where we will have the majority of the business onto a single set of processes, a single set of back-end systems.
But we also know from an inorganic perspective at that level, that we can actually plug and buy businesses and fully integrate in. Both Rick and Justin and John alluded to, obviously, the Uni-Select acquisition. We need that muscle. We need that integration muscle. At the moment, we don't have it because we've been proven out and making sure that platform is ready. It's now ready. We're gonna accelerate that program. But whilst we're accelerating that program, I'm still carrying all the legacy weight that goes with it. We'll pull through that, and we'll be in a much stronger position.
I know Brian had a question back there.
Hey, thank you. This is Brian Butler from Stifel. Just thinking about the North American parts business and its sustainable growth, you're talking 1-2% now, and I think in the past, that was closer to 2-3%, with 10-30 basis point annual margin improvement. So has that business changed, and maybe is parts and collision weaker than expected in that now 1-2% and being offset by more hard parts in some of the remanufactured opportunity?
So I think, let me, maybe I'll take the first stab and then turn it over to the two of you. Let's make sure we're talking about the right time horizon. So what we asked John to talk about was just a three-year time horizon, Brian. We, what Justin talked about was more of an overview of a 10-year time horizon, which goes back to the numbers that we've been saying. That hasn't changed. What we're looking at is the high volatility that we've had over the last, call it 18 months or so, that we're being prudent in making sure that the next three years, we don't overshoot something and talk to some sort of significant growth.
We think that what we've seen is coming to an end as far as the collision, the decreases in collisions, that that'll start coming back. It doesn't have a lag going into 2025. That's something that we're still evaluating, but the long-term view has not changed. That, that's still consistent, and that's what Justin talked about in his presentation of those, you know, call it roughly mid-low to mid single digits in that piece. And I don't know if you guys wanna talk any more about it, but just making sure we're aligned on the time horizon, I think was one of the confusions.
Okay, and then I just had a quick follow-up. When you talked about projects for growth and the return on invested capital and where that is, maybe give a little bit of color, just real quick, where you view your cost of capital for LKQ and maybe where those hurdle rates are, either organically for those opportunities as well as for tuck-ins.
Yeah. So I'll touch on, like, the operational piece and let Rick comment about the, the ROIC. Those different boxes that I talked about, salvage, reman in Europe, collision, expansion of hard parts into the Canadian market or, you know, further in Canada, the EV, all those things were, like, over the next decade. It isn't that next quarter we're gonna go out and start on all four of those initiatives. Those are areas where we can leverage our core strength to grow that, but we're also good stewards of cash and return. So we're gonna make sure that any of those expansions, whether it's mega yards, whether it's adding remanufacturing capabilities, whether it's investing more into the EV front, as Craig talked about, we'll make sure that we hit the returns.
Yeah, and I think, just adding on to that, Brian, a little bit, what I would tell you is not every deal is the exact same. They're all somewhat different. When we're looking at the CapEx spend, when we're looking at the return on invested capital, when we're looking at things like our share price, share price obviously has taken a hit over the last 12 months or so. There's not a whole lot of things that are better to do than buying your shares at eight times, right? And so we're constantly evaluating it to where the highest possible returns are, looking at the overall weighted cost of capital, which is a volatile number, depending on where we're at, the share price and the overall returns that we're, we're expecting.
And so what I would say is that what Justin has indicated to the team is that internally. We haven't talked about it externally, we're not gonna ping a number externally, okay? What we have said is that we're constantly evaluating that, and that number, that expectation, that hurdle rate has been risen, and the overall return has been shortened down to a three-year window. Where before, if you recall, we were looking at a ten-year window, right? We were looking at a ten-year window. We were looking at an average of 10% over a ten-year window for return on invested capital. That time horizon has been squeezed down to a three-year period, and that hurdle rate's been increased.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. George Droulias from EdgePoint. There's two cost out opportunities that you helped show us in the presentation. So first, in the North America side, you talked about $65 million from Uni-Select. Can you maybe just help us understand where we currently are in actually realizing that $65 million?
You wanna handle that one?
Yeah. We're a long way away. No, just kidding. So the interesting thing about Uni-Select, particularly about the FinishMaster side, so what we originally came out with back in February of 2023, was that we said we were gonna deliver $55 million of cost synergies, okay? We broke that out in three different buckets. What John and his team was able to do, and Andy alluded to it, with the integration muscle, is take essentially a $1 billion-dollar FinishMaster business that we thought we would integrate over, let's say, a two, maybe a little over a two-year process, and he did it in nine months. Not only did he do it in nine months, but we only targeted a certain amount of facilities that we were going to close down. He increased that number.
What he ended up doing was taking the overall savings of $55 million. He's increased them another $10 million on top of that to a $65 million number. And all of those items, so I think we put 55% of the $55 million, the numbers happen to be the same, but 55% of the $55 million was roughly FinishMaster. Almost all of that was FinishMaster. That happened in nine months. It's done.
So that stuff has been done, was finished by the end of Q1, which we talked a little bit about Q1 having a little extra cost. It was to get that integration done. The next phase of it, call it roughly $15 million, will happen over the next couple of years, primarily related to procurement. So the next phase is kind of procurement. The cost side, as far as the heads, the locations, the trucks, all that, done. We're done with that piece of it.
Okay, so fifteen million of the original fifty-five still on the come, and then you've upped it-
Still left to go get.
Of the sixty-five.
Of the now sixty-five, right?
Of the sixty-five.
Yep.
Okay, understood. And then the second cost out was back to just the SKU consolidation in Europe. So this 30% SKU commonality, or 30% SKU reduction, that we're looking at achieving, can you maybe just help quantify what the actual, I guess, COGS or procurement savings would be if we actually get to that number in 2027?
So there is the physical transition of delisting and introducing the new product. So just from a transition between those delisted brands and those introductory brands, as long as we maintain the same price positions, we believe there's actually margin benefit in that transitional process outside of any procurement benefits. During that process and that 30% reduction between now and 2027, we will see physical margin enhancement, and some of that's driven from the private label, just as is.
What we then believe is that there is further upside, but obviously from a procurement perspective, because we're now consolidating the number of suppliers we're dealing with, both at the tier one, but also we'll be consolidating some of our private label positions as well. What we've baked into the expectations now is that we know that there is margin enhancement coming through as we transition the SKUs. We believe there's further upside in the procurement, which is yet to be fully materialized through the numbers.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Well, we're getting a little. We had a hard stop at twelve. It doesn't look like there's more questions in the crowd, unless there's one coming, but I guess, I'll end with this. North American wholesale margins peaked in the 19%-20% range. It sounds like there were reasons the business was overearning during that time frame. Can you walk through those reasons and also why your guidance for margins over the next three years have fallen short of, prior peak margins?
Thanks for ending on an easy one, too.
The last part of that question is pretty easy. It was the dilutive impact of Uni-Select, right?
Let me touch on that briefly. North America margins, we finished last year. We talked about this in the Q1 earnings. I think we've—I may get the number slightly off, so I'm sure somebody will correct me. I think without Uni-Select, we were somewhere around 19.6% last year, roughly. Okay? It was either 19.4% or 19.6%, one of those two numbers for sure, okay? That is sustainable margins. The only thing we talked about where we were gonna have some margin compression was on the salvage side of the business, and I've been talking about that for well over 18 months, that the salvage side of the business, what happened during the supply chain crisis is that we were able to expand margins pretty significantly on the salvage side of the business.
Normally, salvage was under, as far as the gross margin of what aftermarket is, and had been. It got to where it was on par, and we felt like it was gonna go back. That's happened. That's something that we have seen happen. What we also talked about is that with Uni-Select in there, for North American margins, the way we get to that is we hit essentially, I think it was 18.2% last year in total EBITDA percentage. That was with, Uni-Select included. We had an additional dilution of 120 basis points. 120 basis points is what got us down to the 17%. So there's nothing different other than the salvage margin compression that we had expected in the North America wholesale business. It's solid. It's rock solid. It's going strong.
The 17% is a number that we had been talking about. We've continually talked about that number, and that's an area that we still are focused on and still looking to expand margins. What John talked about is over the next three years, taking an approach to expand those margins, and what I've been saying for a little while here is that the North American margins with Uni-Select included, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting. So we're at a 17% number, and what you should expect is, call it somewhere around 10-20 basis points, somewhere like that, as we offset inflation and continue to grow overall margins from that new base of 17%. That's kind of how we get there. Nothing significant has changed that way. What we've talked about on long-term ranges is unchanged.
And what John has talked about over the next three years with the high volatility that we've had over the last, call it eighteen months, is an approach to make sure that we're doing what Justin says. He hates surprises. Let's make sure that we're delivering on what we say, and we're coming out to all of you and saying, "This is what we think is possible." So... And I know we're at noon. I don't know if you want to have Justin close us off, and I know we're heading to lunch for the folks that are local.
Yeah, and you can close us off or, you know.
Let's go to lunch. No. In all seriousness, once again, I know we talked about this earlier. I do truly appreciate everybody that was able to take the time out of their day, travel to Nashville. Hopefully, you guys came in early, got to go downtown a little bit, or you're gonna stay tonight, go downtown. I know a few folks like to go downtown. But on behalf of the management team and for the folks that are online, we're gonna share lunch with you guys and break bread.
But once again, thank you for your support of LKQ. Thanks for coming out and showing your appreciation. I know we're truly appreciative of you guys coming out, getting to know more about our business, understanding where we stand on our operational excellence, and also some of the initiatives that we have on a go-forward basis. So, with that, we'll go ahead and break now. Head out to lunch with the folks that are here. But once again, for everybody online, thank you for joining. We truly appreciate it.