Happy to have The Manitowoc Company here, trades in New York on the NYSE. They've been a client of ours for about a year and a half, maybe two years now, and really enjoyed working with them. You know, this is a name that we think it's an opportune time to be looking at. You know, the crane cycle has been really rough this last decade or so. We think we're either at or near the bottom of the cycle, and the stock's trading 25%-30% below tangible book. It's a good time to be looking at it. I'll turn it over to Aaron to talk about the story.
Super. Thank you very much, Dave, and thank you to the Three Part Advisors for inviting us today. Starting with our safe harbor statement, of course, if anyone has any questions, please reach out to Ion Warner. He'd be happy to walk you through that. Why are we here today? So why invest in Manitowoc? When we meet with investors, there's really two conversations that we have. One is really around the crane cycle and trying to time the crane cycle, which I'll touch on those points today. I think that the summary there is always difficult to time that market and try to predict when it goes up and down, especially ever since the bust in 2009. Fortunately, though, I think we have a much better story to tell relative to our valuation and where we're trying to move the company long term.
We've been transforming the business from a product company into a much more customer-oriented business that's focused on the aftermarket. Today we'll walk you through how we plan to grow our revenue from $2.2 billion to $3 billion. Some of that will be organic growth, some of it will be M&A, and of course some of it will be supported by growth in the market. The major component of that, and probably the largest component in terms of driving our EBITDA and our ROIC, is growing our non-new machine sales. That's our aftermarket business. When we started this initiative, we were around $376 million, and today we're around $650 million on a trailing 12-month basis. We've made good progress, but we still have a long way to go to get to our billion-dollar goal. So Manitowoc, who is Manitowoc? We were founded in 1902.
We started building cranes in the 1920s. It really kicked off, I'd say, in the early 2000s when we bought the Poton business and Grove business. This is when we became a full-line provider of cranes, the products. Of course, we had our aftermarket through our dealerships, which was primarily parts. Really, the focus of the business has been around the machines themselves, the big red machines that you see on Project Sun, on bridges around the United States. The two major takeaways that I'd ask you to note here on this slide is that first, if you look back over the last 20 years, we've put over 100,000 machines into the market. Lots of opportunity for aftermarket, whether it be parts or service or even used and rebuilds.
A big portion of that, of course, came during that boom in the 2006, 2007, 2008 period, which means there's a lot of older machines out there that required a lot of support. The other point I'd point you to is our number of field service techs. Today we have more than 460 field service techs. That's a dramatic change from the way that Manitowoc was organized historically with our dealership. We've been going more and more direct, and that's really been a critical part of us getting closer to our customers. Moving quickly, just a quick history, short-term history since 2016. In 2016, we spun off our food service business. At that point, it was a real battle to become a sustainable standalone crane company. We spent the next four or five years really focused on repositioning our manufacturing footprint and our cost position.
We removed well more than $100 million during that time. In 2020, which happened to coincide with COVID, is when we really started to turn the corner, become aftermarket focused, and launched our Cranes Plus 50 strategy, which has been to double our non-new machine sales, starting that low $400 million. Since then, we've reestablished a target of $1 billion, given our quick gains on that. Before I jump into really the revenue bridge, which is the main portion of the presentation, I want to talk a little bit about the foundation of Manitowoc, really going back to 2016 when we implemented the Manitowoc Way. As you can imagine, this was a critical element of us really driving our optimization out on the shop floor, doing Kaizens through the Manitowoc Way.
This has been a much bigger story for us than anything that we go to improve, and we're very focused on continuous improvement every single day. To me, I look at it like sort of losing weight. If you don't get on the scale every day and you don't exercise every day, you can't expect to lose any weight. This is the very exact same thing in terms of continuous improvement. We use these tools, of course, on the shop floor, but also in the back offices. It's been instrumental in our improvements in terms of safety. We're below one in terms of RIR, and I think right now we're on track to set a new record for us and knock on wood that things continue to go as they are.
A lot of effort was put into our SLAM process, safety observations, and a lot of that's been driven just by continuous improvement. We've also used it around our environmental initiatives, which has been a great opportunity for us to find more cost savings. Of course, we used it in new product development, and today we use it in our aftermarket, not only to set up new service centers, but also how we bring machines in and out for service and other opportunities we see as we start to implement and use AI. This slide here really walks you through our blueprint for long-term growth. You can see there's really four main drivers to push us from $2.2 billion to $3 billion. First, of course, is secular growth and all the infrastructure spending that we're seeing around the world today.
Second, we'll take you through the cyclical recovery, one, the overall just market and what the cycle looks like for us. We'll dig into the European tower crane market, which has been on a cyclical downturn for the last couple of years. We've started to see that turn, and we'll walk you through that. We've also done some acquisitions that have had not just non-new machine sales, but also in terms of our overall revenue. Lastly, we'll spend a lot of time on our organic growth initiatives. Starting with our secular growth, I'm sure everyone has read lots of print on all the data centers that are going up. That's great business for us. That's all built by cranes. I think the bigger opportunity that we see is just the need for more electricity in the United States.
We all know the issues, whether it be in the power stations or in the actual development of power. We're agnostic, quite frankly, whether it be solar, wind, nuclear, coal, pick your poison. That's going to require a lot of cranes. I would say, of course, we lean towards nuclear because I think it's the most efficient in driving the amount of electricity that's going to be required, whether it be data centers or EV. That's also very good for the crane business because those are long-term projects that use a lot of cranes. We see those as a huge opportunity. There's the CHIPS Act and continuation of trying to localize semiconductor factories. If you have the opportunity to pull up any of the pictures of, for instance, the TMC project down in Arizona, you'll see lots of cranes on those projects. All of those initiatives bode well for us.
When we look at Europe, there's a huge need for housing. We've seen initiatives not only in the U.K., but also even bigger in Germany, where they need 300,000 flats per year for several years to catch up. Europe is way behind in housing. That's excellent for our tower crane business and one of the things we see sort of driving the business, which I'll get into in a couple of slides. Lastly, in the Middle East, of course, there's been Saudi Vision 2030, a lot of print on this one. We were probably at the line before anybody back in February of 2023. It's not just the famous NEOM project, but there are projects all over Saudi where they're trying to really revolutionize their communities through these big investments. They've got big activities, whether it be the World Cup in 2034 or some of the Asian Games in 2029.
We've been big beneficiaries of those projects. We've also started to see more projects kick off in the UAE. For one, they want to double or nearly double their population by 2030. There's a need for their new airport, which I think is three or four times bigger than the current airport. That project we would expect maybe to see some action on next year. Recently, there were the big data center projects that were announced by President Trump. We see sort of infrastructure growing, which is a good change for us. Unfortunately, I would say it's a little bit slower coming on than we had hoped, especially on the back of the infrastructure investments in the United States. Huge opportunity. I think this will be a long-term driver for our business. Moving to just the cyclical recovery, the slide shows you our revenue for the last 20 years.
I'm not suggesting this is exact data, but more directional, at least. You can see, obviously, the huge boom in 2007, 2008. Even when you look at 2012 and 2013, and even after inflation, we have not returned to unit volumes that we saw 10, 15 years ago. We still have a long way to go. The other thing that I would add is if you look at the value per machine, it's significantly higher today than it would have been in, say, 2007 or even 2013. People are using much larger cranes, which means they come with higher value. The inflation we saw the last couple of years also plays a role.
If you adjust for those, I would say from a unit volume perspective, from our point of view, we still have a long way to go before we see anything like what we saw even in 2012 or 2013. Digging into this a little bit. The last couple of years, we've been fighting the European tower crane cyclical downturn. That would, and we expected it would have occurred in 2020. With COVID and the stimulus actions that occurred at that point, it rebounded dramatically in late 2020 and early 2021. It wasn't until 2022 or 2023. We've had several quarters, a couple of years where the business had declined. I'd say this is a much more predictable or typical cycle, which is something we haven't seen in my 10 years at Manitowoc. In terms of the tower crane business, in the last four quarters, we've been up year- over- year.
I think it's as simple as we got easy comps, we start to build back. Of course, there's been some good news in Europe, whether it be the housing projects that they're working on in the UK or the German infrastructure fund that was created a few months ago. I think it's GBP 500 million for infrastructure in Germany. They've also pushed through an accelerated depreciation program. All of those things we see as really driving Europe. Germany lifts all boats in Europe. Even in France, which was hit the hardest, we've seen a 20% improvement in terms of permits for residential construction. Overall, we feel really good about where the tower crane business is going in Europe. I think we're well on our way to a recovery, which is great news.
The other thing I'd add is that from sort of peak to trough, the last go around, it probably shaved roughly $50 million of EBITDA from our results. Not that we expect a huge impact this year in terms of EBITDA as it just starts to turn, but really as we get into next year. As a reminder, that's our highest product margin or margin business. We're looking forward to the improvement in that business. Moving into our M&A. We sort of look at M&A in two different buckets. One is your traditional acquisitions of businesses. We did two big deals in 2021. We bought the H&E crane business as well as Aspen Equipment. We bought that for about $180 million. At the time, we'd said $30 million in EBITDA. Since then, we've said we've got over $35 million.
Today, I'm happy to say that we beat all of our models essentially on those deals, growing the aftermarket organically after getting a hold of those businesses. On the back of those, we've found adjacent territories, which are what I call them territory acquisitions. These are instances where folks are interested in giving up the line or the contract that they have for distribution, whether it be that green territory, the Bergen territory, even the yellow territory in the Carolinas and Georgia. Those are areas where we would have basically done an asset deal to take someone's machine. Very creative acquisitions. At the same time, we set up Greenfield locations, typically more locations, more field service folks to really empower the team and grow those businesses. We've made quick progress in terms of the map. We've also done very similar deals in Europe.
Turning our focus to the aftermarket, as I said, our goal is to grow our non-new machine sales to $1 billion. Today, we're around $650 million. When we started, we were around $400 million. This is really critical to our overall strategy because the gross margins are 35%. It's a big change in terms of our mix, but also way less cyclical. As I get into some other slides here, much more stickiness to the customer and our ability to constantly get growth and bring more value to our customers. This is just a quick history of the last five years. You can see we've continued to grow our aftermarket as a percentage of sales. We don't always focus on that, just given the cyclicality of the crane business. In this instance, I think we've been relatively flat in overall revenue. It's a decent metric.
As I say, we're really focused on how do we drive that to $1 billion at 35%. That's $350 million in gross margin. If you look at where we are today, I think in 2014, our total gross profit was $375 million. Again, a big change in terms of our mix, a major driver to our EBITDA growth and our ROIC targets. How do we grow the business once we get a hold of the territories? One, it's all about how do we add and upgrade locations. Two, growing our service tech population. As I said in one of the first slides, that to me is the real glue that drives our business. There's plenty of parts that are on a crane that we don't produce, that we buy somewhere else.
If we're not doing a great job with the customer and helping them, it's easy for those shops to go out and maybe not easy, but it forces them into the option of going and finding those parts elsewhere. It's critical that our service techs and our parts service sales folks are constantly representing us and being in front of those depot managers to support what they need. To me, this is a metric that we constantly track in terms of how many service techs we have and what their utilization is. For one, it's how we continue to grow our profits, but also it's how we drive the rest of the business. Number three is selling more used and rebuilds. It's not unusual for us to do trade-ins, sort of like the automotive industry.
Typically, when we sell those used machines, we would do a trade-in, for instance, in Europe and move that machine to, say, Latin America or the United States. The other opportunity we have for used sales is around our rental fleet. Rental obviously is a small portion of our business. Again, it's how do we support our customers? Sometimes it's pure rental, other times it's RPOs. That's a good factory, let's say, for used machines. That's one of our biggest opportunities in terms of a margin perspective. Number four, we continuously add new products and accessories. At all of our locations, we try to be as entrepreneurial as possible. The quest is really, how do you add more value to the depot managers? How do you make their life easier? My big pitch to all of our branch managers is sort of like the Fastenal pitch.
How do you go in and really support the customers? I grew up in manufacturing 20-some years ago as a supervisor, and we welcomed the Fastenal folks with open hands because they were going to deal with our D items that weren't easy for us to deal with. I see that exact same opportunity for us. How do you really help the depot managers? You imagine those folks have very complicated assets they're trying to manage and deploy every single day for taxi projects on one hand, and of course, you've got crane operators on the other hand. That's their main focus, not broken-down machines or machines that need to be repaired. From my point of view, the better we can do of helping them and making their lives easier, the much easier it is for us to grow our aftermarket.
Lastly, really culminating through all those initiatives is how we grow our parts. You can see from the graph, parts are the largest portion of our aftermarket. We continue to grow that. I do believe us being close in front of the customers, they want to buy our parts from us. It's much easier for them. It's our job to make it easy for them. Just looking at how we're growing our market penetration, in the United States, you see we've added locations in Denver, Aiken, South Carolina, and Kansas City. We upgraded locations in Nashville, Baton Rouge, and Phoenix. It's not just a matter of having the field service techs, but also having the bays to do the work and having places to bring in machines. It's been great that we've added those locations. You can see our headcount growth has been up almost 40%.
I'd say Europe is a little bit further behind in terms of where we want to be in terms of our branches and behavior because those have been traditionally sales codes where, hey, we sell Potain or we sell Grove. We're really in the process of changing our mindset to be servicing the customer, providing all the solutions that we can, making life easier for our customers. There we've added several service techs, but also locations in Madrid. We upgraded our facility in Paris. In the old days, we had a small warehouse just outside Paris. Today, we have a full-blown workshop, which has been great. We added a location in Barnsley, UK, and most recently, we added a location in Poland. There's a lot of opportunity for us to grow organically, regardless of where our balance sheet is.
Adding locations and service techs is something that we've been pushing hard on as we know that our leverage is too high to do acquisitions at this point. We're very focused on how we continue to grow that business. What's not on a map, we had locations in Peru and we upgraded our locations in Australia. This is a very global initiative for us. We're trying to transform the business from being product-oriented to really customer-focused and service-oriented. Just touching on the rental fleet, we get a lot of questions. This gives you a profile in terms of the ROI. Good returns on this business. To me, it's not going to be a huge element of our business just because of the math. If you get 2% on the OEC on a monthly rental rate, it's going to be hard to drive revenue without a huge amount of capital.
We do see opportunities for us to support customers with some rental cranes. This is sort of supplementing their fleets as needed. We do not rent cranes with crane operators. We're bare rental. It's purely to support the crane rental houses. In most instances, it's RPOs. There are several large crane rental houses that would prefer to do an RPO. They'll rent a machine for, say, the first year or two before they actually finance it and take it in as a sale. This has allowed us to get into some new accounts that we hadn't been in historically because we weren't in the rental world. I think a good example of this would be if you look at the tower crane business, someone like Bouygues. Bouygues is a massive multinational construction company out of France.
They have their own rental fleet, but they'll get on projects where they maybe need 25 cranes. Maybe they have models for the first 20, and they're sitting saying, "I don't want to add five more of the same model. It'll just screw up my portfolio of machines. Can I rent them from you?" In the old days, we would say no, and in most cases, we would lose those orders. Today, we're trying to be aggressive and support them as they need the rental units. The other thing I'd add is, it must be five years ago now, we turned one of our service locations in Germany into a brownfield rental location for service and for supporting rental, essentially.
By entering those long-term contracts, like for instance in France or Italy, today we know when those cranes come off of rent, if we don't sell them, then we have a place to put them and we roll them into our German rental fleet. That's been given us a lot more confidence to go after this business. As I say, though, it's very opportunistic and all about supporting our customers. In terms of the next two slides here, EBITDA and ROIC, this has been driven by the strategy. If we execute and we get the revenue growth, the volume growth that we expect, which is not huge, quite frankly, we're going to get much more operating leverage. That's one part of driving our EBITDA. The other element of this is really the mix that we have. Major improvement when we move to more non-new machine sales.
Of course, as I said, the tower crane world, we're at peak to trough. We lost $50 million in EBITDA. We expect that to come back as the volume comes back. Moving to ROIC, very similar story here. It will follow EBITDA, quite frankly. In terms of working capital management, the big opportunity that I see is long-term, as we get scale and building out our distribution or our internal sales organization, we don't require all the inventory that's currently in the United States to our distributors. Just to put that a different way, when we look at our inventory and we add sort of these adjacent territories, in most instances, let's say we buy $10 million of inventory, we'll just turn around and sell that because we don't need that in terms of how we manage our local inventory.
I think long-term, that's going to be a good opportunity for us to drive our ROIC as well as the mix shift. Finally, in terms of capital allocation, as we said at the end of our last earnings call, we're around four times leverage, which is higher than we'd like. We're working hard to get back down to that three before we would really consider stock buybacks or even acquisitions. When you look at the way we've allocated capital the last several years, it's really focused on how we drive the business, whether it's aftermarket or if it's adding to our rental fleet or adding to our branches. In terms of inventory, it's all about investing in the business. We're well positioned to support our customers.
It's unfortunate in terms of where our leverage is because based on where our stock price is, we think it's attractive and we would be buying back shares if we were in a better balance sheet position. Just given the cyclicality of the crane business, we try to lean on the conservative side. I wanted to touch on our four-year guidance that we gave on August 7 . At that earnings call, we guided everyone to the low end of our adjusted EBITDA range, in that 120 range. Since then, there have been more steel derivative tariffs that were announced. Last week, I think there were well over 400 items that were announced and we expect more to come in September and November. Even between those points, I think there's a chance that we'll continue to see. This is something that we are constantly tracking and assessing.
Unfortunately, it's not as straightforward as you'd think. Pouring through all the HTS codes on a machine that's got 6,000 components is quite the task for our team. This is something that I wanted to raise relative to our guidance that wasn't considered on August 7 . We just have to wait and see how some of these play out. In some instances, there'll be some good guys and some instances there'll be bad guys. What I mean by that is there are lots of machines that we make in the United States. If, as imports get tariffed, that would be beneficial to us. Of course, we import a lot of machines from Europe in terms of all terrains and towers , which would be a negative. This is the current environment and the things that we're working through. As I said from the beginning, why invest in Manitowoc ?
Of course, there's always the crane cycle that we want to talk about. We can't control what the cycle is. I feel like I've spent nine years trying to predict or guess when the market's going to turn, and I've been wrong every time. The one thing we can control is in terms of how we grow our business and execute our business. Transforming ourselves from being this product company into something that's customer-oriented and service-focused has already driven great gains for us. Thank God for the acquisitions we made that have been very successful in this period of time of inflation. We feel very strongly about our strategy and moving in the right direction. We've just got to continue to hit singles and doubles in terms of growing our aftermarket. We strongly believe that'll drive our business and our value proposition for our shares.
With that, I'll open up to any questions you may have.
Yeah, you got recently, I think, a handful of electric cranes. Can you see that?
Yeah. The question is around the electrification of cranes. It sort of varies by region. It varies by machines. We've been very focused on hybrids and understanding hybrid technology. We developed a concept hybrid all-terrain crane for the European market. That's where I really see the advantages. Benelux has been very focused on some EVs, Scandinavia, and then interestingly, literally on the other side of the world in the mines down in Australia. Those are the areas where we've seen the most interest. Thus far, I would say that nobody has really done a great job of providing the right machine. The difficulty with a pure EV machine is the fact that you've got counterweights and trying to manage the weights of the machines and the axle loading. That's probably the hardest thing that our engineers fight with in terms of just developing a normal crane.
We see that as a real struggle to go completely battery-driven. We have seen good success and good interest out of our hybrid machines. We had one at Bauma last year, and the feedback was great. We've got the one machine that lasts, let's say, the longest where you can do a complete shift. I think that would be much more opportunistic. I don't think it is a full-scale change in terms of the industry. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much. Hope everyone has a great day.