Alrighty, good morning everybody. Thank you guys for attending the Ideas Conference. Up next, we have The Manitowoc Company, traded under symbol MTW. On behalf of the company, we have Aaron Ravenscroft, CEO.
Good morning, everyone. How are you this morning? Okay, let's start with, here's a quick summary of Manitowoc. We're a $2.2 billion crane company. We offer the broadest line of equipment in the market. As you'll see as we go through this presentation, we've really shifted from being a manufacturing company and really focused on the services we provide. Today we have approaching 50 service locations and almost 500 field service techs. We are definitely in a transition to be much more aftermarket focused, and that's really the core of our presentation today. As you can imagine, we were founded in 1902, so we are still an old line manufacturing company. Why invest in Manitowoc? With our push from manufacturing into services, we're very focused on growing what we call our non-new machine sales.
These are parts, services, rentals, used cranes, and just about anything else we can sell to customers to help support them in their endeavors. The beauty of the non-new machine sales business is it's far less cyclical than our traditional crane business. A good example of that is we recently went through a cycle, or down cycle, in our tower crane business, and through that period where our sales for machines were down 60-70%, our actual non-new machine sales grew during that period. To me, that's a good test case for what we can do in terms of supporting our aftermarket, given the cyclicality of the crane industry historically. When we started this effort, we were below $400 million in non-new machine sales per year. Today, on a trailing 12-month basis, we ended the third quarter at $676 million.
This is sort of our focus day in and day out, is how do we continuously drive more value to our customers in the field, not just selling them new machines. In terms of our revenue, we've got a bridge that we'll walk you through, but a big portion of this is growing our non-new machine sales, whether it be through organic initiatives or acquisitions. Of course, we've cooked in there some sort of tailwinds from the market themselves. In terms of EBITDA, this is pretty straightforward. When you combine the mix improvements, rebounding in our tower crane business, the much higher margins in our non-new machine sales, which is gross margins of 35% roughly, and then the volumes, actually, if you hit the $3 billion in revenue, the EBITDA number falls pretty straightforward.
Everyone's favorite slide in the crane industry, the famous crane cycle. As you can see, it's been quite the challenge since that 2007, 2008 period. Ironically, I would say it probably closely follows oil and gas and mining industries. If you recall, we had big booms in those periods as well as 2012 and 2013. The one thing I would say is when you look at the more recent years, you know, 2022, 2023, 2024, we added over $100 million from acquisitions, as well as there was inflation of, say, 15%-20%, and then more recently with the tariffs. Realistically, when you look at that chart in recent periods, it's not really up on a like-for-like basis. This isn't adjusted for inflation.
Probably the biggest point here is that in the last 10 years, you've had a lot of private equity folks get involved in the crane rental houses. The decision has been pretty straightforward. It's rolling up the channel instead of buying new machines. Now we see ourselves in a situation where most crane rental fleets are as long as 15 years old. I would say the optimum is somewhere in that sort of 7-10, depending on your mix of equipment. For sure, the ages of the fleets are long in the tooth, and at some point, it needs to be addressed. Quite frankly, you reach a certain point when the value of the crane is near scrap value or you're unable to sell it.
From our point of view, we've only seen one major manufacturer, one major crane rental house in the United States who's actively managed down the age of the fleet. Most of the others have let it stretch out. To me, this is, I think, one of the interesting parts of the tariff situation that, as everyone's gone on pause with all the uncertainty, they'll just stretch it out another year. It's not surprising to see why the crane business can be so cyclical when you look at some of the more recent dynamics. This slide here is just to walk through sort of the secular demands that we see that really drive the crane business. I sort of alluded to it earlier. I said higher commodity prices.
I mean, with copper at $5 and what would appear to be some changes in governments down in South America, it's likely that you'll start to see some brownfields, if not greenfields, in the coming years. As you would imagine, with all of the data centers going up, there's a huge shortage, not just for rare earths, but also for copper. Again, if you go back to those periods in sort of 2007, 2008, and even in 2012 and 2013, those were periods where the mining industry was booming. Along those same lines, if you're sticking with sort of the data center comment, it was not that long ago that we talked about this first bullet in terms of just the need for energy around the world.
We said, "Oh, look, if you wanna, if you wanna introduce EV cars, you need to increase the production of electricity by two to three times." Now that's somewhat shifted, and everyone's focused on data centers. If you go and look at the data centers, whether you're opening up an old nuclear plant like in Pennsylvania or you're putting on your own power generation locally, there is a huge need. This isn't just in the United States. If you go to Europe, particularly in Germany, since they shut down all their nuclear power plants, and you have the situation in Russia, there's a real concern, not just in terms of cost, but in terms of production. From our point of view, there's some actions that have to be taken.
In the U.K., they've started a program, they've started one nuclear power plant in Hinkley. There's another nuclear power plant in the works. Likewise, in France, FEI has recently won a project in northern France to do a new power plant. To me, those are fantastic projects because they require hundreds of cranes, and those projects last for 5, 10, or 15 years. I mean, if you look at the Hinkley project alone, it's already been well in the works for five years, and it's probably another five years to go. In terms of the European housing market, we see shortages sort of across the region. There's a lot of dis, you hear a lot of conversation, whether it be in France or in Germany, but believe it or not, even in Spain, which was unbelievable 15 years ago, we have housing shortages.
Throughout Europe, there's this need to address the housing. I think there's 300,000 houses short in Germany they need to add per year and something similar like that in the U.K. That's important to us, not because we're building houses that you see in the United States, but when we say housing in Europe, that's typically flats that go 5 to 10 or 20 stories high, which is perfect for our tower cranes. In terms of U.S. infrastructure, we have not really seen that come alive as we expected when the bill was pushed forward. I'm sure that inflation has eaten into some of the numbers that were distributed a few years back. For sure, with all of the money that's coming to the United States for data centers and to support AI, we see a huge opportunity here.
If I look globally in terms of infrastructure, again, I go back to Germany, which was, you know, I lived in Munich in the early 2010 time. You would've said they have the best train system and the best roads. Today they've got 3,000 bridges that need to be repaired or replaced. What was one time, you know, always well known for being on time, the local Germans today basically laugh at their train system because it's not dependable anymore with all the breakdowns that they've had and they've underinvested, which is totally almost impossible for me to believe, considering I used to do travels throughout Germany and I would use two and three minutes for layovers between trains, and now you can't rely on one train.
The German government has launched a EUR 500 billion infrastructure fund, and slowly but surely, we believe we'll start to see that money being spent starting next year. Lastly, we say Saudi Vision 2030. I would just probably add UAE in on this. I mean, when we started this conversation, it was really around all the things that Saudi was doing to evolve their local economy from being so oil and gas dominated. Their goal is to move tourism to number two and mining to number three. I know that there's lots of print out there regarding the line and NEOM. I was there in February of 2023 when they had just started the project.
While I don't think anyone ever believed that they could hit the dates that were thrown out there, and they have definitely slowed down their investment in that project, they're still investing heavily in Qiddiya and Trojena. I think they have seven stadiums that have to be built in order to do the World Cup in 2034. We still see a lot of money being spent in the region, and projects are still very, very active. I was out in Qiddiya, which is probably an hour outside of Riyadh, about a year ago, maybe 18 months ago. At the time, we were building the world's biggest roller coaster with the tower cranes. That's all that was in the region was one roller coaster. They were to build a Six Flags.
They also have a stadium scheduled that will be a part of World Cup in that location, as well as a Formula One track, all the roads, hotels, and restaurants, and everything else that goes with it. The money will be spent for sure. On the back of that, even though we have seen Saudi sort of slow down from the crazy pace that it was at for the last few years, the UAE has been booming. They will increase their population by almost double by 2030. There's a huge boom in terms of what they're building for residential or skyscraper structures for folks. We've been very active in that space. Most recently, ALEC announced their data center just outside of Abu Dhabi, where we've been participating strongly.
I think sometimes next year we'll probably see the announcement of a new Dubai airport, which will be three times bigger than the current airport. That project alone will take 150-200 cranes. Lots of activity for us in the Middle East. When we look around the globe and we're able to put the tariff situation to the side, there's a lot of positives. Just taking a moment to look at our European tower crane business. If you followed our earnings calls, this business was down the last couple of years. This is our highest margin product. From peak to trough, we lost almost $50 million in EBITDA in this business. The good news is that this quarter was our fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in machine sales.
We're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and business is picking up. We see this as a major contributor to our results in the next couple of years, just the opposite of what they've been the last few years. I think there's a combination of reasons for this. One is our deal on inventory, particularly in Europe, in Germany, is basically at zero. Utilization we see, whether it be our rental fleet or even our partners there in Germany, those numbers have really basically gone to almost 100% or nearly 100%. The only reason they're not is just people waiting for the projects to actually have been let. They've actually, we have contracts on them. I think that's all good signs.
France is still a big challenge for us, but it's coming off such a low bottom that we're starting to see some improvement. The U.K. has been good for us. All in all, I'd say our biggest headwind for the last three years has been our European tower crane business. Now we start to see that be a tailwind for us as we go forward. I always go to the history of the company in the last 10 years, even though we're 120-some years old. Starting in 2016, we spun out our food service business and became a standalone crane business. At the time, I would say we were struggling to figure out how to, to survive as a crane business, a standalone crane business, given the cycle. Today, we're actively pushing how do we thrive in that environment.
You can read the words in the slide, but I always tell our employees, "I always liken the crane business to the restaurant business." For those of us that have worked in the restaurant business, you realize in order to get customers to come in, you have to have an amazing steak or a main course or entrée. If you do not have a great steak, no one's coming to your steakhouse. The reality is nobody's making money off the steak. They make all their money off the drinks, the desserts, and the appetizers. The one thing that always keeps customers coming back to restaurants is the service. To me, the crane business is exactly the same thing. You have to have an amazing entrée. You have to have great products, whether it be crawler cranes or all-terrain cranes or rough terrain cranes.
The cranes themselves are what keep people coming back. I mean, that's sort of the core to your brand. The reality is all the money is not made on the machines. I mean, you guys can do the math based on the data that we've thrown out there. There's not a whole heck of a lot of standard margin made off of the machines themselves. When you look at the aftermarket, the non-new machine sales have been gross margins of 35%. We're making all of our money off of the drinks and the appetizers and the desserts. To me, that's my constant push with our team and why we continuously add more field service techs is, one, how do we service our customer? We spent most of our lives for 100 years focused on the lowest margin and highest cyclical portion of the business.
Going and negotiating actively with crane owners is a very difficult business. They're some of the best negotiators in the world. Where you're winning it really and where you can make money is when you're actually at the depots helping the folks who are running and deploying those cranes. Those service centers are extremely complicated. You've got million-dollar assets, and you have very unique qualifications in terms of crane operators. Most times, folks can't find crane operators. Helping those folks succeed on a daily basis. When they need a part or when they need service, they're not asking for pricing. They're asking how quickly you can get them the part. That's really where we've focused our business. That's not to say that we're not focused on cranes going forward. This is a regular debate that I have with some of our legacy folks at the company.
To me, it's shoulder to shoulder. We have to sell cranes with service. If I go back to 2016, we would've had a lot of conversations about our quality issues. Back in the fourth quarter of 2015, we launched the GMK 2250. It was world-class in terms on paper, features and benefits, greatest 250-ton crane in the market. When we launched it, we also had our new CCS operating system. I'd just ask you to imagine for a second, if I took away your computer that's got Microsoft Office and gave you Linux, how successful you'd be with that without training you. In the fourth quarter of 2015, we sold 35 cranes that had this new CCS software and all these other sexy bells and whistles, but we never really followed. I mean, we sold the cranes to the crane owners.
We didn't follow those cranes to the folks that were actually operating those cranes on a daily basis, whether it be literally the crane operator or the person who's running the service center. You can imagine why we had so many quality issues. There's no crane operator in the world who's going to admit that they can't do their job because they don't know how to run the machine. That's just not the nature of crane operators. Without the training and spending time with those folks, it's pretty hard to expect them to be successful. I would say if I replaced your Microsoft Office computer with the Linux, I think you'd have challenges, and we'd say there's quality problems. That's sort of the scenario that we faced when I first joined Manitowoc.
That is why it is so important for us today that we constantly are focusing on adding new locations and more field service techs so we can be in front of our customers to work with them hand in hand. In the next year, we will launch CCS 2.0, which I was on the cranes last week. The technology is absolutely amazing. The entire focus is not on, you know, having this sexy new tool to sell to the crane owner, but it is about how do we make it easier for crane operators to use our machine? How do we make it easier for them to get off of a Demag, a Tadano, or a Liebherr machine and climb onto our machine? Not all cranes are the same, especially when you look at all the software that is on those today.
To me, that's what Cranes Plus 50 is all about. We need to work shoulder to shoulder with our customers to really provide them superior service and be there to help them execute their jobs. In terms of the Manitowoc way, again, when I joined the company 10 years ago, we were very focused on cleaning up our factories and closing factories, consolidating, improving processes. I'd say that we continue to remain in the same path today. If you look at our safety, I mean, we're in a dangerous business. I mean, the crane business is extreme heights and extreme weights. Today our RIR is below one. Last year it was 1.19. This is an area where we are constantly focused. If you look at the industry, I think the averages are something like three or three and a half. Our goal is zero.
This is where, to me, our culture really lies on how we drive our business. If you talk about employee engagement, I think we've launched a mentorship program five years ago or six years ago. I think at this stage we've put well over 100 folks through that. We've also done supervisory training. My big push as I look to the future is sort of twofold: how do we get better at our service centers? We constantly have best practices at locations as I travel around. We've got to get better at implementing those. To me, that's what the Manitowoc Way is all about: continuous improvement. You would be shocked by the simple tools that some of our field service folks develop.
I was at our Denver branch about three months ago, and the service manager literally used his own personal 3D printer to make a little tool for improving how we do wheel alignment. That's a type of simple improvement that we can share with, you know, 500 field service folks to not just make their job more productive, but to make it easier for them to do their job, as well as to make it safer for them to do their job. Time and time and time we have those sorts of examples. The last point I'd make just in terms of employee engagement, I'm really proud of the fact that earlier this week we were named by the Military Times number 48, up from 142 in terms of our engagement with the military.
In terms of manufacturers in the U.S., I think we ranked number three. We've been pushing very hard. We have well over 150 veterans that work for us. Some of the best field service techs you can find are our former vets. We're pushing hard to constantly recruit with the military and work with them to build our skill set. In terms of new products we've launched, I think over 120 new machines since I joined Manitowoc. We've refreshed virtually all of our major product lines. To me, that's sort of core to what we do, and we do it on a daily basis. Of course, putting that all together, we're very focused on how we can grow our presence in the market and grow our share. Just to talk a little bit about our aftermarket business.
I mean, for sure, as I mentioned earlier, the cyclicality of the crane business is tough, but the non-new machine sales and aftermarket is far less cyclical and higher margin. It makes it easier for us to invest in our business through the cycle when we're able to generate higher, higher levels of non-new machine sales. When we target our return on invested capital above our weighted average cost of capital, a core component of that strategy is how do we drive more non-new machine sales. We view that as integral in terms of us maximizing our return on invested capital, whether it be from a margin standpoint or from a working capital standpoint. You can imagine, given that the machines are multi-million dollars, that, you know, we've got some inventory to manage. That's a big challenge in terms of us driving our ROIC.
When we're able to improve our mix with more aftermarket, the cash cycle is much shorter and improves our ROIC. We've made some acquisitions. I put the site in here for sort of two reasons. One, when we do these deals, they're very creative to our business. We know all of the folks that we're looking to acquire. They're our dealers. We're not trying to push people out of the business. It's simply we have a lot of challenges around succession planning. When folks are ready to leave the business, we want to make sure that we're their best option. That's one sort of acquisition you can see. When we bought H&E and Aspen, it was roughly six times. We were really targeting sort of four or five times for a traditional crane distributor.
In the case, case of Aspen, because they did upfit, there was more value add, and we paid a little bit higher multiple, for that business. You know, we said at the time that we were looking for $30 million in EBITDA. I think we publicly stated we'd done over $35 million about a year later. Yeah, we continue to beat that number. We have been very pleased with the acquisitions we've made. The other point I wanted to make is sometimes in terms of doing these acquisitions, they're not your typical acquisition in terms of how it goes for the cash flow statement. There have been some instances where we've just "bought territory," where we essentially are buying folks, inventory back from them and taking over the dealer contract.
If you look at the area that was in red, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, this is a good example of where we worked with a dealer who's very strong in Florida, but they realized, "Hey, it's probably better just to give up the territory." We bought back some machines, and it would look more like CapEx than an acquisition. Again, those deals are extremely good for us too. Looking more globally in terms of our footprint, it's not just about making these acquisitions. We've done a lot of upgrades and new locations. If you see, we've got new in North America. We got new locations in Denver, Aiken, South Carolina, Kansas City, and Nashville. We recently updated our locations in Baton Rouge and Phoenix. Phoenix is probably our largest service center in the world.
Very successful group, but they didn't have enough space to bring more machines in. We needed to move to a bigger location. Likewise with Baton Rouge, we see a lot of potential in that region. We only had two bays. I think today we have six bays. That's a big element of us, making sure that we have the right resources to actually physically do the work because cranes are large and you need to have space for them. In Europe, we've added new locations in Madrid, Marne. Historically, we had a small warehouse in Paris. We've moved out to Marne where we have space to hold cranes, several bays to bring in tower cranes and mobile cranes to rebuild them. We've also upgraded our facility outside of Nantes, Bouygues here.
Recently, last week, updated our contract with a big dealer in France. It gives us a little more flexibility. I would expect to add a few more locations, more field service techs, do a better job in terms of support in France. Barnsley is in the U.K. Of course, Warsaw, Poland is our newest location. Globally speaking, we upgraded our location in Sydney. Very similar story to the location in Phoenix. We are constantly looking to push in South America to help support the mining industry as we go forward. A big focus of ours is adding locations, sharing all of the knowledge that we have between locations and then constantly bringing in more field service techs. In terms of our rental fleet, when we think of rental, it is sort of a couple versions of rental, particularly in tower cranes.
It's not unusual in Europe for someone to want to buy, rent a crane for two years, and then they buy the machine. That's sort of the math of that you see on this slide here. Very good return on invested capital. The other scenario you often see is that folks will, a good example, like a Bouygues Urban Space. They're a multinational construction company out of France. They have their own rental fleet. Let's say they have 100 machines. They'll get on a project where maybe they need 50 machines, and they can use 40 of theirs. Sometimes they'll want to buy machines, but a lot of times they don't want to get overweighted in a certain model, and they'll ask us to rent the machines. Historically, we never supported that.
When we built our rental fleet in Germany, we now had an outlet that when those machines came off rent, at a minimum, we could just put them into our rental fleet. That was always our fear for taking on rentals with these big multinational construction companies: "Hey, where will the crane go when we're done?" If we can't just flip it and sell it, then we could be sitting there holding assets. With the locations, particularly with the German location, we have a sort of home for these machines no matter what if we're unable to sell it. As I said, I was at our location in Langenfeld a couple weeks ago when our utilization was essentially 100%.
I think 90% was out in, out in the field, but the last 10% of machines was designated for projects that were coming in the next couple weeks. Similar in the United States with rough terrain cranes. We will, we have rough terrain cranes, but we, as well as boom trucks and industrials that we rent. But we only rent those with, as we call, bare rental. They're not rented with an operator because we walk a fine line. We don't want to compete with our crane rental customers. At the same time, they often need, you know, they use this as an outlet when they get on projects. Similar to the example in France, you know, if you're a crane rental house and you've got machines sitting in Ohio and you've got a project down in Louisiana, it's always this mix of portfolios.
Sometimes they need a couple extra machines for the project. It doesn't make any sense cost-wise to ship a crane all the way from Ohio down to Louisiana. They'll just bare rent a couple machines locally for a short-term project. Good rentals for us. Typically we try to keep a very young fleet to sell those used machines, which in terms of our used, that's typically our best margin as we depreciate a little bit off the value of the asset. Again, if you look at our direct cash flow statement, you'll see that we've invested heavily in our rental fleet the last few years. This is why the investments and returns are excellent.
Next couple slides are just sort of a walk how, going back to that original slide in terms of why invest in Manitowoc. So how did we get to the $3 billion in revenue? For sure, M&A will play a role in this. But naturally, as you would expect, there's a big game here in terms of the tailwinds that come from the marketplace when, folks begin to refresh their cranes. At some point, I think we all know in the crane business it's cyclical, and at some point the cycle will move in our favor. When you look at the $3 billion number, considering all the things that we've done to grow our non-new machine sales and compare that to where we were in 2008, I mean, 2008 we were $3.8 billion. That was before a lot of inflation that we see today.
I think this is a pretty reasonable number. If we can get some tailwinds from the market and the market to behave and seem more normalized, we get the tower crane business coming back and some M&A and just organic growth from our non-new machine sales initiative, I think this is a pretty reasonable target. Along those same lines, looking at our EBITDA targets to get to double digits, naturally with the higher volumes, you're going to get much better absorption of our fixed overhead costs. We've lived the opposite of that the last couple years with our tower crane business. As I said, peak to trough, we lost $50 million in EBITDA. That tide has started to turn. We'll contribute to this. Naturally, the 35% gross margins in our aftermarket business, growing that, that mix will help, drive this number.
Of course, we're always working on continuous improvement projects to reduce our costs. Lastly, following the same line in terms of ROIC, the one reason I put this slide up here is really to talk about working capital management. Yes, as we've started to acquire some of our dealers, we also had to invest. I think the next slide I'll show you, we invested some money in our inventory to make sure that we had the right number of assets for the territory we've had. The beauty of this, however, as we go forward and we look at certain acquisitions, we see a big synergy with certain dealers if we were to buy them or just in simple, if we were to take over certain territory where we don't need to add more inventory.
If I added up all of the inventory in North America for Manitowoc, whether it be for our NGX business or our dealers, there's simply more inventory that's required if you were one person managing all your inventory. I actually see as, again, as we grow our aftermarket business, we get more territory and we increase our scale, there will be a significant amount of leverage here for our inventory, which I think will be a big component of driving our ROIC to go hand in hand with all of the other things I mentioned to drive our EBITDA. In terms of capital allocation, yeah, I mean, we've spent a fair amount of money the last few years building out our rental fleet. As we grow more territory, we naturally will need some more rental fleet.
Likewise, I mentioned the adding the branches and more inventory at those locations. I think at this point we're pretty well at scale and have gotten much better at managing our inventory. Strategic acquisitions, we spent $180 million in the last five years. Very good returns, accretive, immediately. The big thing for us right now is getting our net leverage below three. I mean, I think we ended the last quarter at 3.9. Just again, we know that the business is cyclical, so we're pretty conservative in terms of our leverage. We know we'll get down to the bottom of the market, like the current market that we face. We can't get too overlevered in good times. What we've said publicly is that we'd like to do share repurchases in this environment, but only if our leverage is below three.
Just to conclude here in terms of why invest in Manitowoc, yes, for 100 years we've been a cyclical crane business, but we are quietly transforming the business to be much more service-oriented. If you do the math, I think it would suggest that roughly 30% of our, 35% of our business long-term will be aftermarket. When I talk to our team internally, I really challenge them. If we have 500 field service techs, our goal needs to be 1,000 or 1,500. When you think about what our footprint is globally around Europe and the United States, that's very doable. That, to me, is what allows us to thrive through the cycle. I mean, to just ride the cycle is one thing. Yes, at some point that will create a boom and will be great for our business.
In the long term, to thrive through the upturns and the downturns, the key is that we have greater non-new, non-new machine sales in aftermarket. To me, it's even greater than that. It's how our customers view us. It's one thing to just go visit customers when they're ready to go buy big machines and do a $30 million deal. To me, it's we need to be there every single day working with them, servicing our customers, helping them execute their jobs and helping them do a better job, helping them make their lives easier and make more money for themselves. To me, that's a major differentiator from where we stand today versus where we were 10 years ago and where we stand versus our competitors.
Our competitors are playing the game, I would say, exactly the way we did 10 years ago, where everything is entirely focused on the crane owner and selling new machines. Of course, we'll continue to do that. That's easy to get behind. It's awfully fun and exciting to get in some of those projects. Long term, we really see a huge opportunity in terms of supporting the aftermarket and servicing our customers. With that, we'll open it up to questions. Yeah, so that's everyone asked me, what's the timeline? I mean, the difficulty with the crane business, frankly, if we didn't have the tariff situation, I think we'd be blown and going right now. I mean, if you look at the fact that our tower crane business is coming back, that's going to be tailwinds. That was a $50 million headwind a year ago.
Then you look at the U.S. market, it's really hit the wall. This is what's difficult in our business, is trying to guess because it's not a projection. It's a guess as to when this thing turns, and it literally will turn on a dime. Sitting here a year ago, I would have said, "Hey, we'll make a huge dent in those numbers in 2025," because right after the election, we saw orders explode into the first quarter. The business in the U.S. really stalled out in April when the tariffs were announced. This is the difficulty of putting a timeline. I've always just said roughly five years, but from my point of view, I'm 47. We work on a continuum. Another question I have is, you already touched about the credit rate for somehow the impact of the tariff.
Can you touch on the tariffs and can you break it down, international and domestic as far as the sales are concerned? Can you break it down and the service sector, how much percentage of that it was and how much you're projecting the sentences to grow in your five years?
Yeah. In terms of the service business, we just, we focus on the whole group of non-new machine sales. Our target's 5% CAGR. It's not a huge number, especially when you think of price increases and constantly adding field service techs. Your first question was around the tariffs. Yeah. We expected this year that we'd have an impact of $8 million because there's this lag in terms of getting the pricing and other challenges with the tariffs constantly changing. So far we've seen an impact of $2 million.
You take a guess of what we think in terms of the fourth quarter. Going forward, our gross exposure as of today looks like it's around $45 million, and we expect to offset at least 80%-90% of it. It is this game of cat and mouse. There are a lot of pre-tariff machines in the market. There is this constant game as to what is the price in the market as we continue to push out price to offset it. The other issue we have is that the reciprocal tariffs are sitting with the Supreme Court now, and we do not know how that is going to play out. I mean, I think everyone that you go to D.C., they will tell you, even if it gets canceled, then President Trump is probably going to come up with something else.
That is why I say as of today, because it seems like every time I give a number, I get off the stage and then something changes and the number changes. The last one, the breaking down of the domestic in the United States, what you are projecting, the growth, everybody's saying it's critical to the IPM, but what is the biggest or actually stable? The housing sector is very important. Yes, but see, that is the thing, interestingly enough, in Europe is that there is a huge amount of money being spent on infrastructure and military right now. We actually view Europe as we are coming off the bottom because it has been so difficult the last couple of years, especially with the German government now being stronger. I mean, they sort of had a, they did not really have a government there for two years.
I think the next big, we closely watch elections. The next election will be in France. At some point, France has to do something about their debt to GDP. To me, that is the one thing that I watch closely in case it becomes a headwind and not a tailwind. In terms of our breakdown and revenue, I have those numbers and it did.
Roughly half our business is in the U.S., 28% European, Africa, and then the balance being Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific. It's in the slide deck and it's in the first slide, but yeah, that's great. That's a great thing. I think that's a mix. Right. With automation, AI, and technology, how do you see this impacting our industry and both the manufacturing and the service component?
I'll start with that. Yeah.
Questions around just the impact of AI. That's an interesting question. You know, you see, you read so much in all the newspapers. I was at our Marne, France facility a few weeks ago, and there's a big guy named Roman. He's one of our best field service techs. He was joking. He said, you know, you look around the room, the only job AI can't take here is mine, because someone's physically got to go out there and touch that crane. For the crane business, frankly, there's a lot of hands-on work. I don't see AI making a big impact. I did town halls with all of our employees on Monday, and we taught, this was a question of them. From my point of view, I view it just like Kaizen. It's going to be a tool to make us more productive.
I mean, if you, even where we've started to apply it, it's work that is not work that people want to do. I mean, it's super repetitive. We do get excited about it. We think we could be our first how, quote, jobs. We do it differently around the world. I've had folks come to us and say, "Hey, can we use AI to do that?" To me, it's how do we, how does it increase productivity? How does it improve us in terms of service? How does it make us more effective, more so than more efficient? It's hard to eliminate headcount when you start thinking about it. We don't do a whole lot of work that's super repetitive
I'm actually thinking specifically that your goals were to grow from 500 headcount to 1,000 to 1,500 in order to absorb the demand. Yeah.
Is there, you mentioned that you also mentioned looking at acquisition as a form of, kind of growth. Are there ancillary businesses out there that have the automation or, or, AI tools that allow that headcount from? Yep. Three times to, like, say where it is, but you're still growing by.
Yeah, that's a great question. What I get most excited about is we've, we work with a firm called ServiceMax. It's owned by PTC. In the old days when we would track machines, it was basically on Excel sheets. We had a lot of dealers, so we didn't really track machines. We didn't know where they go. We started to implement software called ServiceMax. We track every machine by serial number as it leaves the factory and goes out in the field. These cranes move all over the world.
You can imagine we don't have huge volumes like a Caterpillar on excavators. I mean, on an all-terrain crane, we're making, say, 400 a year. Not huge numbers. The gain that I see in AI, and I get really excited about, this is where ServiceMax has taken their tool, is that a crane or a crane field service tech in France may fix it, let's say a 5250. They fix that model and say it's the water pump. They can go in and type it into the machine in French. The future is that we can go in there and query it using AI in English and find the same problem.
The fact that our field service techs will be able to leverage the knowledge that they have between each other, I see as a huge opportunity for us because whether you're, you know, we, there's actually, we always say there's seven levels of field service techs as we train them. Level seven is the best. Imagine the huge productivity gains we can get on our sort of level two, level three, if they're able to just simply query into the machine and say, "Oh, okay, Francois in France already had that problem. This is how he fixed it." Boom, we can shortcut the whole system. I think there's huge gains to be added there.
In terms of acquisitions of AI tools, there's different things that folks have tried to do, particularly on tower cranes, because they're sort of, you know, they're located, to be able to run more than one at one time and remove the operator. That hasn't, we haven't seen it reach scale yet. I mean, we've seen it successful on sort of onesie, twosies. Mobile cranes are much more difficult because, like an all-terrain crane, they can do two, three projects in one day. They'll do what we call taxi work, where they come to your house and they sit at the HVAC unit. They go down to the local stadium and they set the scoreboard and they try to do multiple projects in a day. It's tough to automate that.
Last question. Can you clarify on the microphone the non-new machine sales trailing 12 months being $667 million?
Oh yeah. The question is around our trailing 12 months, where we stand in non-new machine sales. As of the end of the third quarter, our trailing 12 months non-new machine sales was $676 million. 667. For us, every single quarter, we continue to set new records, but that's why we're pushing so hard to add more field service techs and locations. The next sector is growing fast. Yeah. One last question.
Regarding the assistance service, could you comment just a little further on how that's delivered? You've got techs that are going out in the field somewhat. Do you have courses in-house?
Yes, the question is how do we execute our service? It's sort of all varieties. A lot of these cranes, they're too, you're not going to put them on a road or put them on trucks.
We need, most times we go to the location. We own or at least a lot of trucks that folks are going out to the field. Most of the work that would come into the shop is either planned maintenance, like on a maintenance contract, or it's a boom truck and it's a repair, or we buy a unit from the insurance company and completely rebuild the machine. I would say it's sort of all versions, but most of the work we do is sort of like the railroad. It's out in the field, not at the shop. Okay, thank you very much. Hope you have a great day.