Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the two thousand and twenty-four O'Reilly Analyst Day. It's great to see so many familiar faces, but it's also great to see a lot of faces that we haven't seen before. So welcome. We would also like to welcome everyone who is listening to the Analyst Day via webcast. So for everyone who doesn't know, my name is Mark Merz. I am the Senior Vice President of Finance here at Team O'Reilly. For many years, I've headed our investor relations functions, but I have a change in my position with the company coming soon. So I'm very pleased to have joining us today Leslie Skorick. Leslie will be taking over as primary point person for investor relations for the company going forward.
Hopefully everybody will have a chance to get to know and meet Leslie in person today. We will go ahead and kick off the day's events. We will start with our forward-looking statement. Everyone who is listening via the webcast should be able to see the forward-looking statement on their screen. By the way, everyone who is listening via webcast, you have the ability to download the full PDF presentation and save it and follow us, or you could follow via the webcast. We do claim the safe harbor protections under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of nineteen ninety-five. I'm not gonna read the entire statement, but just know we do claim those protections today.
All of the information that we will be discussing today will be in relation to our most recent public earnings release, which is for our second quarter, ended June thirtieth. So just like with our past Analyst Days, these events aren't days where we provide new outlook or provide updated guidance or provide new information. These are just simply a day where we have a chance to get up and talk to the investment community about the business and give the investment community opportunities to ask the management team questions. The events for today, we'll have roughly an hour of prepared comments where our team will present, then we'll have roughly an hour of Q&A. So right about 10:30 A.M., the webcast portion of the event will end.
Then following that, for the live participants, we'll do a distribution center tour, and then we'll come back here into this room and we'll have a light lunch and have a chance to sit down and talk to management. Then we will go see the store that's attached to the distribution center, and then we will go visit one other store, and then the shuttles will head to the airport. So with that, again, it's my very great pleasure to introduce Leslie Skorick, and Leslie is going to talk about the thing that is the most important thing for the company, and that is culture. Our team, our culture, and our promote from within are what makes O'Reilly special.
It's what's made us different than every other company in the world for sixty years, and it's what's going to make us different from every other company for the next sixty years, and you'll hear that theme very consistently from our team today. So with that, I'll turn it over to Leslie to provide our culture statement.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. As Mark said, my name is Leslie Skorick. I've had the privilege of being with Team O'Reilly for just under 10 years. Most of that has been in the tax function. Prior to that, I worked in public accounting and at a couple of other large, publicly traded companies. I'm excited about this new opportunity and appreciate the promote from within philosophy that O'Reilly has as part of our culture to enable me to take this next step in my career. So today I'm gonna talk a little bit more about our culture and our excellent customer service. That begins with our field team, providing the best customer service in the industry to all of our customers, no matter what the circumstances are.
As you'll see today, that is backed up by our tremendous DC teams, providing the right part at the right time. Then our corporate office rounds that out with our comprehensive one-call-does-it-all approach to supporting the field and the DC teams. O'Reilly remains unwavering in our commitment to customer service, which allows us to maintain our competitive edge. You will see today the opportunity that we uphold our customer service throughout our company and has been the cornerstone of our history. Thank you. I'm gonna turn it over to Brad now.
All right.
All right, welcome, everybody. Great job, Leslie. Thank you so much. So I want to kick off, you know, we talked about culture already, which, you know, a lot of companies talk about culture, but, you know, in my twenty-eight years with the company, I literally grew up here with the company since I was seventeen years old, and culture, even before it was really documented, was such a huge part of my upbringing and who we are as a company today. But not very far behind culture, I think sometimes it's missed. When we do an event like this, we wanna highlight the team first and foremost. We'll do a distribution center tour.
We're gonna see a couple stores, but I think sometimes because it seems a little bit intangible or like, you know, every company out there has a management team, they have field management, they have people running store operations, sales, distribution operations, I think it's missed sometimes that what we want to highlight the most today is our amazing team and the amount of tenure we have within our company, not just industry experience, but true O'Reilly experience. Of all these years represented on this slide here, this is 99% of this is actually O'Reilly time. We could almost really say, instead of saying industry experience, we could really say O'Reilly experience. A few of our field folks started out maybe with a competitor, but they've been with us for a very long time.
So I'm not gonna talk about the executive team as much. You all know us. For the most part, you know the finance team. So really, what I want to do is highlight the team in the back of the room. Some of you had the opportunity to meet as you came in and saw everybody. But I wanna do some individual introductions because these are the folks that have the real work in our company, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You know, we talk a lot at O'Reilly about the fact that if it's not for these team members, these leaders in the back of the room, guys like us are sitting up here don't have jobs. That's the way we look at our field leadership.
We run our company from the bottom up, not the top down, and that's extremely important to mention. So I wanna start out and Ramon, if you would, have Ramon Odums stand up. So Ramon Odums is our Senior Vice President of Store Operations and Sales for the Northeast part of the country. So Ramon covers basically everything from the Great Lakes here up through New England and the upper Midwest. Ramon and I actually go back to really till 1998, when I was a very young man, a couple of years after I'd started with the company, and relocated down to the Texas market when we acquired Hi-LO Auto, Auto Supply out of Houston, Texas.
You know, back then, we had doubled the size of our company from roughly two hundred stores to four hundred stores, and Ramon had been with Hi-LO since 1993, and we had the fortune of acquiring, you know, the most important part, the most strategic part of acquiring Hi-LO, like a lot of the companies that we've acquired, is the people. It's not the assets, it's absolutely the people that are on the front line with customer relationships, taking care of the customers. And Ramon did everything from stocking to learning to be a parts specialist, to be a store manager, and then Ramon and I became district managers pretty close to the same amount of time, and Ramon's basically held every position in store operations, from district manager to regional manager, division vice president. Now he's our Senior Vice President of Store Operations and Sales.
So thanks, Ramon. I wanna talk next about Jeff Lofman. Jeff is our Senior Vice President of Distribution Operations. So, if Eric would get out of the way back there. Jeff Lofman joined our company just last year, so we talk a lot about promote from within at O'Reilly, and, you know, 90% of our leadership team, it comes from within and is proven performers within our company. But there is times that as O'Reilly, we don't know what we don't know, and there's areas of specialty within our company that we need somebody that has been there and done that at scale in a different way than we've been as a company. And so we had the great fortune here last year to bring Jeff Lofman on as our Senior Vice President of Distribution Operations.
And, Jeff came from a couple of decades at Walmart in distribution operations, everything from, you know, being an operations manager, DC manager, regional DC manager at Walmart, all the way up to basically a division vice president. And Jeff, we had the great fortune of finding somebody that had a lot of logistics experience, a lot of distribution experience, but most importantly, had our culture. He just wasn't working for us yet. And so we had the great fortune of bringing Jeff on last year. So thanks, Jeff. Okay, next is Chris Mancini. Some of you may have met Chris Mancini over the years. Chris Mancini's been with us for a long time. Like Ramon, Chris and I go back to running stores and districts and regions in the eastern part of the country.
Chris has done everything from ISS, the person that stands in the back of the store, taking care of our professional customers, store manager, district manager, regional manager, Division Vice President, Senior Vice President of store operations and sales in the field. And then, Chris most recently relocated to Springfield to run the central part of the company, and then we've actually asked Chris to come in the office. We needed a fresh set of eyes, basically running store operations and sales from a corporate standpoint, store operations support, retail systems, and all the teams that help support and build basically continuous improvement for all our stores and our professional sales team. Chris has a long tenure with the company, and we're very proud of him. Next is Jose Ramirez. Jose is standing up now.
Jose actually grew up in Houston, Texas. As you can see, Jose has a long time with the company. Jose has done everything from basically stocking, parts specialist, store manager, district manager, regional manager, and is one of our newest division vice presidents. So when Ramon stepped up this year and took responsibility of the senior vice president role, we had the great fortune of Jose and his family being able to relocate from the Texas market up to the Windy City here. So we're very thankful to have Jose up here being our division vice president. Thanks, Jose. Next is Dave Linhardt. So Dave, Dave's standing up now. Dave has been with our company for almost thirty years.
Dave, Dave is a guy, when I got my start back in 1996 in Oklahoma, Dave was basically running a store for us in Oklahoma City. Dave had came from a two-store independent that we had acquired in the Oklahoma City market, and basically a parts guy, store manager, ended up being a district manager. I learned a lot from Dave and the teams he worked around when I started with the company in Oklahoma. And back then, you know, we had an opportunity to instill some store operations background into our distribution operations, and we had the fortune of Dave stepping up and taking responsibility of our Oklahoma City distribution center back then.
And so Dave's actually a store guy that we had the fortune of getting on the distribution operations side to make sure that our DCs always remember, you know, where the customer is and who we're actually servicing on a day-to-day basis. And Dave's basically done everything in distribution operations from DC manager, regional DC manager, and now division vice president. He runs everything from kind of the center part of the country, east, from a distribution standpoint. So thanks, Dave. Okay, next, I'm gonna have you three stand up at the same time. Robert, Jose, Marino, I'm gonna have you guys all stand up, so I don't get too far behind. But this is Jose Palacios, Marino Arreola, and Robert Vega. So these guys run our local market here. We have basically two operational regions in the Chicago market.
So, Jose takes care of kind of our suburbs up to Milwaukee and kinda wraps around the metro, and then Marino has responsibility for the city and the South Side, and then Robert Vega is our director of sales. He's their partner in crime when it comes to running our professional business, making sure our territory sales managers that are out calling on the customers every day are doing what they're supposed to be doing. We're out there taking market share and doing what we do. I'm very proud of these three men because really what we've done in store operations here at O'Reilly, myself included, is we've all grown up together here. These guys grew up in the parts business. They grew up in the parts business in Chicago. They're just three hard-nosed guys from kinda the inner city of Chicago.
Pretty tough upbringings, but humble beginnings, and have basically grinded it out year after year for us, running, you know, being parts people, running stores, districts, and now regions, and in Robert's case, a full division of sales performance. We're very proud of every one of these guys, and I look forward to you having a chance to get to know them. Last but certainly not least, Wade Rowley, I'll have you and Scott stand up. This is our local distribution operations team. Wade Rowley's been with our company, as you can see, for 17 years. He started out as a material handler.
You talk about promote from within, started out as a material handler in our Indianapolis DC, and Wade has held every role of supervisor, operations manager, DC manager, and now is our regional distribution center manager, overseeing many of our DCs in this part of the country. And so Wade's an amazing promote from within story. And then Scott Johnson is our DC manager. He'll be the one taking us on our distribution center tour. Scott has done an unbelievable job running this box that we're attached to here, especially through the pandemic. This is a market from a human capital standpoint and a challenging standpoint that could have been a very tough box for us to run. And Scott and his team, we couldn't be more proud of them.
They have done a tremendous job all the way through the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic. We never missed a beat. They were able to retain their team, keep everybody motivated, and keep everybody focused on picking, packing, and shipping, inbound, outbound, making sure that we are taking care of our stores and our end customers. So thanks, guys, very much. I'm gonna figure out how to run this thing one of these days. And less important is the executive team. You know, the men and women in the back of the store and in this facility you'll see today are the ones that make it happen every day. But I really think from an executive standpoint, I think everybody in the room and on our webcast knows that, you know, there...
At O'Reilly, even though there's been a leadership change, there's really no revolution needed. You know, at O'Reilly, we're gonna always continue to evolve. As you all know, David O'Reilly was our first CEO public company CEO. He became our CEO as we went public in nineteen ninety-three, and he was our CEO up until two thousand and five, when Greg Henslee took the helm. You know, both those guys, literally, as you can see, forty and fifty-two years respectively, running our company in the industry, but all with O'Reilly. As you all know, Greg Johnson was our next CEO after Greg Henslee, and now myself, Brent, Jeremy, Jason, and the leadership team, you know, we have the great fortune of you know, really running our company and leading our company into the next generation.
One of the biggest questions I get, again, is, you know, "Hey, Brad, you've been in the seat now for, you know, four, five, six months. You know, what's different? Well, you know, how are you looking at things different?" Again, at O'Reilly, we work in a pretty boring industry and a pretty boring company in terms of it's very solid, and it's basic, fundamental execution, and it's basic leadership of people. Again, no revolution needed. But that said, we're always gonna evolve. I promise you, you know, Greg and Greg and David, our board, and most importantly, our 90,000 team members, they didn't give me this opportunity to sit still. We're absolutely gonna get better. We're gonna absolutely evolve.
We have plenty of ways that you'll hear from the team that we can get better at how we staff our stores, how we take market share, how we get better at, at digital, how we get better at search. We always have opportunities to continue to get better. What's not gonna change is our culture, our promote from within culture, our culture of hard work, focus on excellent customer service, those basic, again, kind of boring fundamentals. The culture's not gonna change, promote from within is not gonna change, but we are gonna continue to evolve and get better. But we're very, very, very blessed to have this leadership team at the helm. Company overview, you all know this. We're up to almost 6,200 stores and will be by year-end.
As everybody knows, that's in 48 U.S. states, and then we now have 69 stores in Mexico and 23 stores in Canada, so very much an international company now. Brent's gonna give an international update here in a little bit. With the addition of two distribution centers with Vast- Auto in Canada, one in Montreal, one in Toronto, that brings our distribution count up to 32. 90,000-plus team members across North America, $16.3 billion in revenue, the trailing twelve months, $66 billion in market cap, and then, as everybody knows, to end last year, we were roughly 53% DIY and 47% DIFM. Year-to-date results, nothing new here. We've obviously had a little bit of a challenging year, especially when it comes to O'Reilly expectations.
Like I think we mentioned on our Q2 earnings call, we're never happy with this tight comparable store sales number at O'Reilly. But what I am proud of is even with the macro pressures and everything going on in the U.S. right now, our team in the back room and our team out in our 6,200 stores, they have absolutely worked very hard this year to make sure that we were less focused on things that we can't control. You know, our store teams, none of us, all the way up to me, can control what's going on with the election, what's going on with the economy, pressure to the consumer, all the things that we don't make excuses for.
What we can control is that we have a lot of market share that we can still take in every one of our markets, and we have opportunities to do that every day. And so that's absolutely what we're focused on. Full-year guide, a lot stayed the same. We did revise some of our guidance, as everybody knows, here in the room and on the call today. Two to 4% comparable store guide, revised for this year. And, you know, you know, really, everybody knows what those are. So I wanna talk about, you know, how we see the industry drivers, and I know this isn't new, but this is something that I think is, is really important.
When I think over my twenty-eight-year history with the company, and I think about any years we've had that there was broader macroeconomic pressures, and I really, what I think about is I think about miles driven, and I think about the resiliency of the automotive aftermarket, and especially resiliency of O'Reilly. But when you think about miles driven, the thing that's really encouraging on this slide is the fact that we're now back to pre-pandemic levels of total miles driven. So when you think about three point two five trillion miles being driven in the U.S. this year, that's a really encouraging number, and again, really encouraging that we're back to pre-pandemic levels.
But also, when I think back again across my career, and you think about two thousand and eight, maybe twenty twelve to some extent, or what happened during the pandemic, I think it's always important to remember that even though we may have a little bit challenging year, in a year like twenty-four, everything that's going on this year, overall in the macro, you think about something that was happening back in twenty twelve, for sure two thousand and eight, our industry's always seen, you know, some short-term kinda, you know, shocks to what's going on, but we've always came out of it.
Miles driven come back, the industry comes back, and, no matter if that's, a little bit of a soft spot or a strong spot, the main thing is we always use times like that to make sure we're focused on taking market share. But really very encouraged with miles driven and, you know, all backed up by a, a pretty solid employment backdrop and overall population growth. You know, the other thing when I think about the light-duty vehicle fleet in the U.S., another thing that's really encouraging that backs up miles driven is, or it really supports miles driven, is the fact that the U.S. vehicle population continues to grow. You know, it's steady, but it's growth.
285 million light-duty vehicles, so this is car and light truck, 285 million vehicles on the road in the US, and they continue to age. So when you think about, you know, really that growth at the bottom of the slide, you know, 12.5, 12.5 years average age of vehicle, you know, that's really good news for us and our industry and especially for O'Reilly. Especially when you think about the amount of vehicles that are even with new car sales, that are entering what we consider kind of our sweet spot, and you think about you know, really, the quality of vehicles, you know, is continuing to get better and better.
Even the better vehicles, it puts more vehicles in that sweet spot for us that need maintenance and overall repairs over time. Again, really good news here. Lastly for me, and I'm gonna turn it over to Brent, is really just how we think about the overall U.S. market. You know, really, since I've been with the company, you know, going all the way back to the 1990s and 2000s, the amount of parts stores in the United States really hasn't changed. You know, it's always kinda been in that, you know, mid, you know, 34, 35 thousand outlets in the U.S. We're up to 39 thousand outlets in the U.S. now.
But I think the thing to remember when you think about consolidation, but more importantly, when you think about how fragmented our market really still is, you look back, you know, really over the last ten years, and you look at the top ten auto parts chains in the U.S., since 2014 to 2024, our ownership, being in the top ten ownership in the U.S., has only gone from 48% to 53%. So we still work and sell parts in a very highly fragmented market, especially on the DIFM side. You know, when you think about the amount of independents that are still successful, you know, some have struggled. You know, when you look at the independents and the WDs and the two-step type competitors you all hear us talk about, you know, there's really solid competitors out there.
There's some that have struggled the last few years, but there's always consolidation opportunities, whether it be just greenfield expansion for us, whether it's acquisitions, or whether it's just taking share every day, and that's the biggest opportunity we have. You can kinda see the size of the U.S. automotive aftermarket down in the bottom left-hand corner. I would just tell you, you know, we use the Auto Care Fact Book that all of us in the industry have inputs to. That's a really solid data source for us, but I would just tell you not to get too caught up in where those lines are drawn. It can get a little bit gray. I think the key for us is what we extract out of the data on the bottom left.
What's really important to us at O'Reilly is we feel like, and, and fairly conservatively feel like, that we have a $150-$160 billion opportunity. So when you talk to the team in the back of the room, and you hear from Jason here in a little bit, and you hear anybody in our company talk, we're, we're not thinking about us being a $16 billion company. We're always talking about the business we're not doing. We're talking about the remainder and the delta between those two numbers. And so, you know, really, for my lifetime, for our lifetime, you know, no matter what happens in the industry, we have a lot of share we can take. We gotta continue to get better. We gotta continue to get better at the way we operate.
We gotta change, adapt to, changing circumstances, but we have more opportunity than we ever have. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our Company President, Mr. Brent Kirby.
Great. Thanks, Brad. Morning, everybody. I'm gonna jump in and start with product lifecycle and thinking about the dynamics of the automotive aftermarket that Brad was just talking about, you think about our industry. Winning in our industry really requires really being able to manage the product lifecycle very well, and it starts with late model coverage. You know, as vehicles come out of warranty, parts begin to fail, and being able to have the parts that the customer needs when they need them is critical in our industry. Our team does a fantastic job managing that product lifecycle.
From getting late model coverage into our stores, we use demand signals, both from stores, from our customers, from our suppliers, to make sure that we have those parts as they begin to fail in the marketplace, so the customers will have the solutions they need when they come to our stores. The fact that we have a tiered distribution infrastructure, and we'll talk about that a little bit more here in a minute, but our regional DCs, our DCs, our hub store network, down to our spoke stores, gives us the ability to manage that lifecycle very effectively and very efficiently. So as those parts begin to come into more demand, we place those parts in stores, in hubs, in DCs, based on those demand signals.
One thing that's really interesting, when you think about over 6,000 stores, none of our 6,000 stores has the exact same SKU footprint because our teams work diligently to make sure that the... whatever we're stocking in the local store, the hub store that serves it or the DC that serves it, is driven based on vehicles and operation data and demand signals for that particular region of the country. So as those parts become more in demand, we're able to bring those into the full lifecycle and deploy them farther down into our supply chain. And as we do that, we also develop good, better, best across our product line offering to ensure that customers have value where they need it and premium products where they need it for their vehicle.
As those particular application parts continue to age through that lifecycle, we also have the ability, as we see that demand wane, we have that ability to begin to pull those parts up in our tiered supply chain distribution network, into hubs, into regionals, and then ultimately into a national DC, and then even special order through our suppliers. But our goal is always gonna be to meet that customer's need for that part that they need for their specific application when they have a failure and get them back on the road. So our team does a fantastic job of managing this. If you think about this over literally hundreds of thousands of SKUs, and you think about that demand lifecycle that can last, you know, fifteen years in some vehicles and some parts. So our team does a fantastic job with that.
We're committed to continue to do that. We talk about our distribution network. You'll get to visit the DC here with Scott and the team later on today, but really just thinking about the power of that distribution infrastructure that we've developed here at O'Reilly over many generations, going back to the O'Reilly family, you know, as the company got into central distribution and knowing that, you know, he who has the part wins in our industry. Whether that's a professional customer, whether that's a retail customer, it's about who can get the part the fastest that's needed for that particular application. We have 29 DCs domestically, including Puerto Rico. As Brad mentioned, we have, you know, two in Canada and one in Mexico also in addition to that.
Average SKU count in a regional DC is 175,000 SKUs, so that is a lot of inventory ready to serve the stores that it's serving. You know, average DC is serving about 250 stores. Five-night-per-week delivery, we're the only one in our industry that does that consistently across every location. 95% of our stores also get intra-day service from either a servicing hub store or from a DC city counter. They're getting multiple runs a day. So we can give the customer that time-definite promise for that part that they need to get their vehicle back on the road.
100% of our distribution nodes has reverse logistics capability, again, giving us the ability to effectively manage that product lifecycle that I talked about just a minute ago, tiering up and tiering down as demand dictates. And 385 hub stores, and again, we, we don't talk specifically about hubs, but our hub stores go from 50,000 SKUs to over 110,000 SKUs. So we are always optimizing that hub network to ensure that we are the industry leader in that market, wherever that market is, in terms of parts availability. In terms of strategic investment, you know, Brad talked a little bit, talked about the market, talked about our opportunity.
You know, with the growth we've encountered over several years, we still see ourselves, and we say it internally all the time, you know, we're getting about 10% of the total addressable market. We've still got so much opportunity to win and to gain share in this industry, and we're committed to making strategic investments to do that because we feel like we have a winning model, we have a winning team, we have a winning culture, and we feel like there's a whole lot more share for us to go get out there. Really, when you think about our investment priorities, it's really about expansion, industry consolidation. That expansion includes new store growth in existing markets, expansion in international markets, we'll talk about that here in more in a minute, and continued industry consolidation.
When you think about the commitment to industry-leading inventory availability, I just talked about some of that a minute ago. We'll talk about some of our capital investments in DC projects here in just a few minutes. Customer experience, store and digital. That continues. No matter where the customer is, we wanna be able to connect and meet them, whether they wanna visit us on a website, whether they wanna visit a store. We continue to invest to enhance that experience. We'll talk a little bit more about that here in a few minutes. And then our Professional Parts People, our team. We're totally invested in the power of our team. We've invested in improvements in 401(k) and paid time off. We implemented a human capital management system, again, to make our employee experience much better for our team members.
So we're committed to investing back in our team because we know they're committed to delivering great results for us. So when you add all that up, for 2024, we're on target to spend $900 million-$1 billion in terms of CapEx, going back into the business, investing to continue to win and gain share. Obviously, there's OpEx associated with a lot of the commitments here too, but that's our capital commitment for 2024. So building on that, just thinking about distribution and continuing to invest in that parts availability that I just talked about.
And one project that's not on this slide that I'll go ahead and give a quick update on, that was on the slide, I think, when we did this, two years ago, was the relocation of our Springfield, DC in our hometown of Springfield, Missouri. We are about to bring that DC online. We took it from an old three buildings that it evolved to over time, to a new facility that's gonna serve more stores, gonna be more automated, more efficient, more effective. That DC's coming online next month. We're very excited about that. Fast follow to that, we've got the relocation of our Atlanta, Georgia, distribution center.
We're replacing a DC there that we have had for many, many years that just doesn't have the capacity to continue to meet our growth in the Southeast. So we have been in the process of relocating, taking our capacity there from 250 stores to 350 stores. This DC will come online later this year, and it will be our largest and most automated and advanced DC yet when we bring it online, so we're super excited to get that online. Stafford, Virginia, is a brand-new greenfield project for us in the Mid-Atlantic. Super excited about this project as well, 350 store capacity.
This really unlocks, you know, a lot of opportunity for us to continue to penetrate some of those Mid-Atlantic markets, very populated markets where we still have a lot of room to grow our store count. And then, an expansion of our Lakeland, Florida, facility. We continue to grow in markets in Florida, and we have opportunity here to expand this building, taking the capacity from 275 stores to 350 stores, and we expect that to come online late in 2025. We are super excited about all of these projects that will continue to advance our inventory availability in the market. If you look at store growth over the last several years, you can see it charted out here on this slide.
We're still on track to open 195 new stores in 2024. You can see, again, states by store population. You can also see the states where we're still under-penetrated. I talked about a minute ago, Mid-Atlantic are a lot of those markets, so again, having the distribution capacity to better serve those markets, we're pretty excited about that opportunity. We've been consistent industry consolidators over the last many, many years. You've got a few highlights there at the bottom of the slide, including, you know, our recent acquisitions internationally in both 2019 and 2024. So for some international updates, our Mexico team, you know, again, acquired the business in 2019.
With some of the challenges of COVID, we got our DC open down there in July of 2023, servicing, with the ability to service 250 stores, in Guadalajara. Super excited about this facility and having it online. This is gonna continue to propel our store growth in Mexico. We have a very engaged team there that's growing our brand. We're up to 69 stores. We opened seven stores in the first half of 2024. We're projecting 15-20 in the back half. So really being able to accelerate our growth in Mexico is super exciting for us. Still a very young store base and still very early innings, you know, respectively.
If you think about the average age of a store right now for us in Mexico is still under two years, so we still have a lot of new growth there and a lot of runway. We feel like this is gonna be a fantastic market for us, and really excited about the team we have there. Canada, again, we're a little over six months in, so very early innings here. But the acquisition of Groupe Del vasto that was completed back in January of this year, just a fantastic team in Montreal that knows the industry, grew up in the industry. We just couldn't be more excited to have Mauro and his team as a part of Team O'Reilly. The acquisition there, you know, two distribution centers Brad talked about a moment ago.
We have 23 stores across eastern Canada. We see a lot of opportunity to grow here. You know, one thing in Mexico, we did not change over the names on the stores in Mexico until December of last year, till we felt like we really had our O'Reilly model up and running and could provide an O'Reilly parts availability and service experience to our customers there. We're gonna take the same approach in Canada. We're still running there. We're not running under the O'Reilly name. We're still running under Vast-Auto, and so we will do that as we feel like we're able to bring that experience to our customers in Canada. So more to come on that in the future, but just very excited.
Our teams are working very closely together in Canada, looking at near-term, mid-term, and long-term strategies there. So we'll obviously be sharing more with that with you guys as that comes together.... Talk a little bit about brand. You know, product is vitally important. I talked about that product life cycle a little bit earlier. I wanna talk about how we go to market in terms of our branding. You know, we go to market very specifically with a mix of national and proprietary brands. We feel like that is what the customers expect and from us. The main thing there is national brands that really you know carry some consumer interest and reputation. We wanna have those as a part of our brand portfolio.
What we've really been excited about over the last several years is the accelerated growth of our proprietary brands. You think about our proprietary brands, and we've got some of them here on the slide. You know, BrakeBest Select and SuperStart being two of our biggest when you think about brakes and batteries. We continue to grow there. Proprietary brand penetration now is exceeds 50% of our sales. It's even higher in the backroom, so we continue to see opportunity there. That's opportunity for us in several ways, in terms of margin, in terms of ability to diversify our supply chain and supply base, to give us more resiliency in terms of inventory availability. So super excited about the growth here.
One thing I'll point out, too, you know, the ones with the green stars beside them, Murray, Precision, Syntec, those at one time were national brands that we have now acquired, and you can only get them at O'Reilly. And as an example, our fastest-growing proprietary brand right now is Syntec Motor Oil, which is a synthetic motor oil brand that was owned by Castrol for many years. So many customers recognize that brand. Today, the only place you can buy Syntec oil is at O'Reilly. So much has been said about emerging technologies and the evolution of the vehicles. So wanted to provide a quick update on how we look at that, how we're thinking about that here. And vehicles are gonna continue to evolve. They have since their inception, and we expect them to continue to.
You know, the great news is a lot of that evolution is good news for our industry and good news for the future for us. Start-stop technology, which is on many vehicles, I'm sure many of you drive a vehicle that has a start-stop, you know, capability to it. Over 50% of the vehicles that were sold new in 2023 had start-stop technology on them. The thing about start-stop technology is it's additive parts. It's added sensors, it's beefed up alternators and electrical components that you know have the ability to measure the charge of your battery and shut the car off and restart the car. While those things are engineered to a heavier standard, the failure rates on them are exactly the same as the old models, at least what we're seeing so far in the industry.
This is additive business for us. It's a higher ticket, and it's not an improved failure rate, so it's continued business for us for many, many years. This is a tailwind for our industry and for our opportunity for the future. ADAS is another one, Advanced Driver Assist Systems. You know, think about the sensors and that are in your car today, and a lot of this goes back to even 2005 is really when the first ABS brake sensors were put on cars. 74% of the car parc that's in the U.S. right now has some form of ADAS on it. And again, this is additive. This is not taking any parts away. This is additive and making those parts more expensive.
So we see this as a continued tailwind as it continues to penetrate the car parc, and those parts continue to fail with the age of the vehicle. When you think about hybrid and EV, again, a lot of talk about that in the industry. You know, you think about a hybrid vehicle, again, it's additive. You've got all the ICE components that you had, and then you've got a hybrid battery-driven system as well, so it's additive. There's more expense there, more points of failure. We see that as an opportunity for our industry long term. EVs, yeah, the powertrain is driven by battery, but if you think about all the other components of the car, nothing's taken away. We think about brakes, suspension.
You think about heating, cooling, electrical, all those other components of the vehicle, they're all there, and as a matter of fact, in EVs, most of those are under more stress due to the weight of the vehicles and the heat that's generated from the battery. So we see higher failure rates in many cases of those basic components in EV vehicles than we do in ICE vehicles, and our suppliers are very quick to begin to bring those to market, as we learn more about those. So we see the evolution of the car and the vehicle as an opportunity and a tailwind for our industry, if you think about it long term. Wow! Okay, omnichannel. I had a couple questions, just talking to a couple of you before we started here, about some things we're doing with digital, online.
A couple things I'll say, you know, when we think about our omnichannel strategy here, our goal is to meet the customer where they are, whether that's in one of our 6,000 stores, whether that's on a website, whether that's on a call or on a chat with one of our professional parts people. We wanna meet them where they are. We do that through. You know, the store is always gonna be the center of our omnichannel ecosystem because availability and time-definite delivery of those parts is king. Everything we can do around that to supplement that, it only improves that experience and gives us the ability to gain more share. So several things that we've done recently that we wanted to provide some updates on, continuing to expand product availability.
You know, we brought forward time-definite availability on our retail website a couple years ago, and saw tremendous results when we did that. What that did was it gave that customer visibility not only to the twenty or twenty-four thousand SKUs that were in that individual store, which is where we were before, it gave them a time-definite promise of when they could get the part they were looking for from the servicing hub or the DC network, which opened up a whole new opportunity for us to sell that customer the part that they needed. We just launched that earlier this year and rolled it out in the first half of this year on our professional website.
Before, for our professional customers, that was a phone call, and we have very capable parts professionals in the back of the store that were handling those calls. We now are syndicating that time-definite availability on our professional website, and already getting really good feedback from our customers on that. So ship to store for the professional website, super excited about that. Same day, next day, you know, we rolled out DoorDash to every store location. Late last year, we completed that rollout, so every store location now has same-day availability through DoorDash if you want it same day. Or we can ship to 98% of the zips in the U.S. with one of our shipping nodes with standard two-day shipping. So we've done everything we can to narrow that gap.
The exciting thing about our business is when you look at our retail website, you know, 75% of that is picked up in store. So even getting it same day within hours or next day isn't always soon enough when you have a vehicle that is not working. And that speaks volumes to the dynamic of our industry and the need-driven urgency of the part when you need a part to get your car back on the road. So super excited about some of the changes there. We've also added additional payment methods, so we now have Google Pay, Apple Pay in our stores on our retail website. We also rolled out Klarna buy now, pay later options earlier this spring on our retail website, so super excited about that.
Again, higher ticket for that customer that may be constrained, helping them get the part that they need and getting it quickly, getting them back on the road. We're also implemented some tools to improve our personalization for our loyalty and rewards customers, as well as our professional customers, based on purchase history and buying activity, and continued, you know, user enhancements to both platforms. In terms of search and content, we've upgraded our search, modernized our search technology to improve our search experience across both our retail and professional websites, as well as our internal catalog selling system. So we're seeing some benefit from that. Our content continues to improve.
When you look at our content over the on the parts that we've sold over the last 12 months, over 90% of those have high quality, high resolution, 360-degree spin images. We continue to develop our DIY and how-to videos. Many of those are application specific. That number continues to grow. Our team does a great job with that. We continue to monitor and really drive our enhancement roadmap for both our professional website and our retail website from over 20 retail touch points that we have with our Voice of Customer network, constantly gathering customer feedback for an improved experience. And lastly, I'll wrap up here with our loyalty program. O'Rewards is something that continues to grow. We have a very engaged loyalty base in our stores.
We continue to work on personalization and how to best activate them. If you think about our most loyal customers, they trip us over 14 times a year. You think about that medium bucket, they trip us over 10 times a year. So we have a very loyal customer base that continues to grow. We just rolled out some new personalization tools here to better target them based and have a more personalized experience for them, based on, again, their buying experience and their preferences. So, super excited about the growth here. And with that, I'm gonna wrap it up and turn it over to Mr. Jason Tarrant. Thank you.
Good morning, and welcome. I get the privilege and honor to talk about what Mark opened up this morning, saying is the most important thing, our culture and our team members, and I thought no better way to introduce myself to most of you that I haven't had the pleasure in the past to get to know some, than to tell my O'Reilly story. I started in two thousand and one. I was a full-time technician. I ran the AM swing shift for my local bus barn for public transportation. I've been a car nut my entire life. I built my first engine when I was fourteen and fifteen years old. So this is what I've done.
This is what I love, and like so many of us here at O'Reilly, it's not just about selling parts, it's serving customers, but we really love the industry that we serve. So I started night and weekends, and it was six, seven, eight months later, I had the opportunity to come on full time, at the time in Northern California, in my hometown, which at the time was CSK. And you know, fast-forward then to just for sake of time, you know, a year, a year and a half later, I got my first store opportunity, and I take that, and I never thought I'd be here twenty-three years later, I can assure you of that.
I was looking for extra income and a discount for parts 'cause I was an enthusiast for cars, and I fell in love, and I let go of my prior passion, which was repair, and made this my home, and twenty-three years later, as I've ran stores, I moved to the Pacific Northwest in two thousand and six. I moved my young family up there, had the opportunity to run my first district with CSK, and then about a year, year and a half later, in the summer of 2008, my life got better yet again as we were acquired by O'Reilly Auto Parts, and that's when I started to understand what culture and teamwork and the value of our teams was. You know, CSK had a culture. Every company has their version of a culture.
I'd like to believe that here at O'Reilly, we live our culture by how we act and how we conduct ourselves every single day with our customers and our team members, and my first impression of that was with some folks, if you followed our company since then, these names, Ted Wise and Jeff Shaw, who I still think of every single day as I'm out working with our teams, and some of their quotes are here on the slide behind me, 'cause it... You know, as Brad said, while things evolve and we're always iterating and trying to continuously improve as a company, you know, the core fundamentals of how we go to market and how we treat our team members and our customers will never change.
Fast forward there, shortly thereafter, I had the chance to run my first region up there in the Pacific Northwest, and I did that for a few years, and I had the chance to come back home to Northern California. Continued running a larger region for a few more years, continued to learn and grow and challenge myself and our teams and learn the business from all aspects. Then, when my boss at the time retired, I had the opportunity to take on the Northwest division as a vice president, where I covered really all of California, except for south of the Grapevine, and Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and such... in parts of Idaho. Just for sake of time, I'll kind of speed up. Then in 2017, Keith Childers, if you were around back then, was out west.
He followed after Jeff and Ted and helped really just impose and live the culture and show those of us with CSK what the O'Reilly culture was all about. Also, as well as learning and really understanding the core principles of our business model and our core fundamentals. So when he retired in 2017, and really until the back half of this year and the first part of 2024, I was a senior vice president from the south tip of Texas, all the way up around to North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, and so that's what I've been doing the last seven years, and it's all I've ever done for the majority of my working professional career. I love it. I hope to show you my enthusiasm in my few minutes with you this morning.
For me, pride comes from my story. We all have our stories. We truly believe that those prior to us, who invested in us and gave us all their passion, their energy, their culture, and their knowledge and shared it with us, it's our job and my responsibility until I hang it up in ten, fifteen, twenty years or more, who knows, to do that for my teams out there in the stores and field operations and sales teams. Ownership is very simple for me in the stores, and we try to keep things very simple. While competition, we have, you know, thirty-nine thousand competitors out there every single day, or thirty-three thousand, I guess, competitors today in the States. It's very simple.
It's bottoms up, and at O'Reilly, it's all about our team members and our store managers' ownership, and that's where it starts. Every single month, if you've never heard this, our store team members set their own individual sales goals for themselves every single month that we go into that next month. That's where we start. It's a bottoms-up mentality. Our store managers set their goals for their stores. They work with their district managers, and because of our promote from within philosophy and that commitment that we've had since nineteen fifty-seven, when you build things from the bottom up, there's just a higher level of ownership, and that passion, that desire to win, comes from our promote from within. All of us that ran districts and stores and regions and now areas, like Ramon in the back of the room, we've done this.
We've seen most things. So peer to peer and team to team, as long as the, you know, my team on this next slide, which I'll cover in a second here, has over 430 years of experience in just our 19 field leaders that run our divisions and our area vice presidents and myself. That's over 22 years of experience in the industry, and as Brad said in his opening, the far majority of that is with O'Reilly Auto Parts. So I think back to what Ted and Jeff did for me and our teams out west in 2008, and what we've done for our teams since, and what we intend to do and commit to do for our teams going forward. Just to back to one quick thing. I referenced it just briefly.
You know, our business model, while it might seem complex when you think about all the technologies and all the competition and the way the world has evolved the last, you know, twenty years, at the end of the day, the customers still have a very basic need. They need the right part at the right place, at the right time to take care of their needs so that their families can move forward, or if you're on the professional side, so that they can take care of those consumers and customers that they intend to serve and run the best business that they can.
So really, in the store operations themselves, while there's lots of things that I have to, my team and myself have to be aware of, and, and we are, and we're always, you know, a high level of respect for every competitor that we compete with in every market, at the end of the day, we focus on what we control, and that's what I hope to aim to, to highlight these, these next few minutes with you. So again, the one thing that I think is really hard for me to express, and I'm extremely proud to be the one that gets to talk about this on behalf of seventy thousand team members out there in the stores, that right now are taking care of customers as they walk into our stores, call our stores, or they might engage online.
The one thing that Brent didn't say, that I wanna really add, we obviously have to have the technology required to meet the customers where they expect us to be, whether it be online, tablets, chat, whatsoever. The part that I'm most proud of, that 75% or more of that buy online, pickup in store, while I know the technology is where we met them, the reason I think a lot of our customers choose to come into the stores on their own time to pick up the part, is they value the Professional Parts People in our stores. They need that consulted experience. They need the experience of our team members that have grown up in our company, those managers that are this is what they're passionate about. This is what they do. That, to me, is something we talk about a lot.
One of the things that I'm most excited about when I think about our store experience, inside our stores, you'll see it here in this store and also the second store that you go visit this morning, is above our parts counter. If you've never seen it, every single O'Reilly store says it, "Professional Parts People." That's our commitment to our customer, and that's a big, tall ask. It's very challenging to ensure that in retail, as you know, turnover and all the things that challenge us, especially the last four or five years. You know, our teams work diligently. They're so experienced. Ramon and so many other of our regional managers, our district managers that have ran stores successfully because they were the proven performers that we promote. They know how to compete in markets.
They know to hire the right people with diversity, that have the passion to serve customers, but also have a passion for our industry. That commitment to be professional for our retail and professional customers is something that we'll never let die here at O'Reilly Auto Parts, and you have my commitment with that. One thing I do wanna talk about on top-notch customer service, and really, this is ingrained in us because, again, starting from the bottom up and that promote from within, and the way we aim to always, you know, select and mentor and develop our proven performers, is that part right here on the right-hand side of the slide, which is out-hustle and out-service the competition. This is what we focus on.
In times like this, in twenty twenty-four, when there's so many factors that might be out of our control, while we have to, you know, recognize them as a, a senior leadership team, when we're working with our teams in our stores, which I'll highlight here in a second even more, the things we focus on are things inside our four walls or in our markets. The way we hire, the way we train, the way we carry ourself and inside the store, but most importantly, the level of customer service we offer to both sides of our business. I know that's so simple when you think about what we do in retail, but that passion, that experience, that promote from within, that promoting proven performers, it's really hard to express in a room like this.
I hope you get to see that in these two store visits today, but when we get ownership right, and we have a tenured team, and we have the leadership, our store manager leadership is engaged, and they own everything that happens inside those four walls, what we do at O'Reilly is just a little bit better, I think, in most markets, and I think our results for years have proven that. I'm very proud to say that our teams put a lot of work and pride into being the most professional, hardest working parts stores in every market we operate in. On the professional side, again, I could talk for a long time on just this one slide alone.
But to keep it simple, we have a highly engaged and experienced outside sales team that supports the efforts of our store teams to build relationships and to call on those customers day in, day out, five days a week or more when needed, just to build those relationships. 'Cause while having the right part at the right place at the right time is paramount, obviously, we're trying to turn the bays of our customers. I think if you were to go make sales calls with our sales teams today, if we had time, it'd be great to see you guys do that.
But if you were to read the surveys and just listen to what our professional customers tell us, the most important thing, besides having a relationship, is helping them get the right part, obviously, and get that part on the rack or that car on the rack and get that car off the rack. That's how they make their living, that's how they please their customers, that's how they make their profits. And so it's really important in our store visits, as our leaders engage with our teams every single day, that this is what we focus on. We are obsessed with the small details that are extremely boring if you were to read them on a piece of paper.
If I had them on a slide, you'd think, "That can't be your secret sauce." But the truth is, what we do in the stores is really, really important to us. And every little detail that our experienced leaders, our district managers, our regional managers, and myself included, when we're in stores, these are the things that we're looking for, we're addressing, we're coaching, we're training, and we're improving on. Because we know what matters most to our professional customers, and that's having a relationship with our store manager, our back counter team, which is our ISS, and getting those parts to them in the most timely fashion that we can.
One thing that I wanna again, expand on, on the professional side, is that while our teams and our culture and having the right part in the right places is obviously the most important thing to most of our professional customers, there's also other expectations. We have a very competitive, fragmented industry, obviously, that we talk about every time we have the opportunity to discuss our marketplaces. But there's also some support programs, whether it's our world-class real-world training, where we train thousands of technicians, mostly in-house, whether it be in a facility that's ours, or we, you know, we'll rent a space outside to bring technicians in.
And it's not only a place, an opportunity for us to train those technicians, to help them be better. It helps those shop owners, those shop managers, those fleet managers to have better retention 'cause their technicians are more well-trained. They do better work for their customers as well, 'cause they're obviously more well-trained. But it gives our opportunity, with our highly engaged district managers and store managers who participate in those events, to further build their relationship. Those are just the small things, where our managers and district managers partner with our sales teams and our professional customers to spend that extra time on night and weekends when they've already put in 10, 12 or more hours running their store and leading their teams and serving the customers. We go participate in the evenings with the technicians to try to build that relationship.
It's something I really wanted to highlight, 'cause it's all those small details that we make time for, 'cause we see the value in the relationship and the execution in our stores, and those things really make a difference to, to keep the, the professional customers loyal to us, but more importantly than even that, provide them value and help them run a better business themselves. Obviously, I'm extremely proud, Brent and all of us up here and our entire team back in Springfield that helped stand up what we feel is best-in-class, our B2B platform, First Call Online, and we're continuously iterating and evolving and improving on that platform. It's, it's been amazing to see the results over the last decade or more, and how much of our business that we serve through that one platform.
Again, I could talk for too long on that, but it's rich full of so many value adders for our professional customers, besides just parts availability and pricing. That's the core basic that any B2B has to have, obviously. But there's so many other value adders that our professional customers engage with and value, that keeps them in that ecosystem, that keeps us loyal to us, and it obviously improves the productivity and efficiency and the ability of our store teams to, again, ratchet up the level of customer service we offer our customers.
Just lastly here, briefly, you know, if you think about the majority of the professional base out there, our repair shops that we all serve every single day, the far majority, while the biggest ones that get the most press are the big national, regional, and dealership players, and while they... they're our customers as well, a lot of the smaller, independent repair shops, as they're getting started, become very loyal and attached to our store teams, our stores, and O'Reilly Auto Parts because of how we help them grow and scale their business. Certified Auto Repair is just one piece of that puzzle. To compete in today's marketplace, you need a national warranty program and all the other things that come along with that, to offer their customers the things that they expect as well.
To feel like as they travel their families up and down the interstates, that if they have an issue, they know that their part's gonna be taken care of in a timely manner, no matter where they are, with our 6,100-plus stores here domestically. So I'm very proud of the programs and the teams that I'm now responsible for leading in my time here in Springfield and headquarters. But again, just to stress our commitment to what's most important, which is our teams in the stores that serve our customers, the guys in the back of the room, and the guys and gals out there that lead our teams every single day. We spend 75%-80% of our time in stores.
Last week, I spent six days personally in the field, leading teams out west in the market I hadn't been, and we had some great experiences and opportunities and some takeaways, and this is where our passion is. That's the difference between so many maybe of our competitors that maybe hire outside. When you grow up and you love the industry you're in, and you love serving customers, and you love our space, where you wanna be is in front of customers and our teams. So with that, I'll leave you with our mission statement. Obviously, if you've never seen this, your first reaction might be what some people when we recruit and engage in the markets and talk to customers and-
... even folks at the competition, sometimes this is a very bold statement. While it is bold, I don't know in my lifetime we'll achieve this at O'Reilly Auto Parts, but every single day, the thing that we're, our store managers, our district managers, our sales teams, our ISSs are taking one step forward, one customer at a time, and we value every single opportunity we get to earn retail and professional customers' business. It's always our vision, it's our dream, it's our mission every single day. It keeps us humbled, it keeps us remembering about how much business we don't have. It keeps us hungry, and that's really the DNA of here in our leadership and store operations and sales. So thank you.
All right. Thanks, Jason. Good morning, everyone. I get the bat cleanup today with the goal of getting us to Q&A as quickly as humanly possible. So we're gonna flip through these slides, and we're not gonna slide by slide. You've got them in your deck. They're available on the website. Really, the story behind any of what we've provided is just the consistency and long-term nature of our business. You guys can pull all this data for yourselves, but the point was made earlier that we operate in a very strong and resilient industry, and continue to feel very positive about the long-term opportunities we've got. So I won't camp on any of these slides in particular. We'll spend a little bit of time on use of capital, and may have some questions within the Q&A.
Brent did a great job of talking about our mindset and our mentality towards investments, and in particular, some of the initiatives we've had over the last few years as we've thought about our process to invest back in our business. But really, that falls in line with how we think about capital and our stewardship of capital and how we wanna focus on achieving the best possible results as we invest capital.
And that strategy has been true, really for well over a decade now, where our priority continues to be to invest in our business, to grow, to gain market share, to be able to expand, be a consolidator of the industry, and to be a company that can, through all the things we've talked about today, generate high returns on the capital that we invest. And then obviously, as we think about how we balance the mix of how we fund the business, to utilize the share repurchase program in a very consistent and reliable manner, to be able to return capital, but also to think about what our balance is in terms of how we fund the business.
So what you see there is no different than what we've had before, but did wanna have a few minutes on that. But really, frankly, I know it's probably time to move to Q&A. We told Michael he could ask the first question. It's just been burning in his head for an hour what he was gonna ask. So we won't camp on this any longer, and we'll go ahead and get started. And, Leslie, you can probably give everybody instructions on how we'll handle the Q&A.
As we prepare for Q&A, if you need another snack or coffee in the back, Scott can direct you to the restrooms. When you're ready for a question, flag Craig or I down. Please state your name and your company so everybody on the webcast can know who, where you're from. And wait until we get you the mic, of course, to do that and ask your question.
Go ahead and get the mic to Michael.
Thank you.
Go ahead, Michael.
Thank you very much. It's Michael Lasser from UBS, and good morning. Number one, Brad, in your opening remarks, you showed the slide that talked about the vehicle population over time. There was a reduction in vehicle sales in 2020, 2021. When that happened in the late 2000s, that ushered in a slower period in the mid-2000s for the auto aftermarket. Would you expect the same dynamic in the next couple of years, given what's happened? And if not, why? And then I have one more follow-up.
Yeah. Thanks, Michael. I guess I'm turned on here. So yeah, I think that's a great question, Michael. I think the... You know, we had a lot of moving pieces. When you look back at 2008, 2009, 2010, even though there was some macro challenges, I think when you look at our performance those years, we didn't see, you know, we had a short period of time that we saw a little bit of a lull, but, you know, we took a lot of share in that period. And so, you know, as we always say, it's a little bit hard for us to predict the future. I think, we all know why there's pressure on the consumer this year.
I don't necessarily see anything that points to us having, you know, anything tough the next couple years. I think I would compare the next few years, the best I can tell, to really any time that there's been pressure, you know? I think back to all the times I pointed out, and all those years, we controlled our own destiny extremely well. And so, you know, it's very hard to predict the future, but I think overall, I think we have a lot of things in place. And I think there's enough competitive dynamics that there's still gonna be plenty of opportunities for us to continue to consolidate the market, to lead the industry in comparable store sales, share gains, and, you know, turn that into profitability like we always have.
Yeah, and maybe, Michael, just to add on to that, you know, a little bit different dynamic than what we saw in that kind of 2009, 2010 timeframe. Not quite the same pressure to those cohorts. The other thing that I think continues to be true is that as that average vehicle ages increase, and not just increase, but the reliability of vehicles allowing people to invest and to get good value out of their vehicle much later in the life, means more miles are being driven over a much broader and extended period of vehicle lives. It mitigates the impact of any one or two years' worth of cohorts. You know, hard to say. You know, for sure, there's some amount of pressure.
Don't know even today that, you know, you'll be able to measure it very well. It was a challenge to measure it, candidly, in the period of time that you talked about. We probably felt like we saw the height of that in 2017. But broadly speaking, we think that the large vehicle population, the dynamics around it, continue to be very supportive of a pretty resilient demand for us moving forward.
My follow-up question is, if we go back and look at the 2010s for O'Reilly, there were so many good drivers of your profitability: integrating CSK, ramping up the private label penetration, growing the distribution center network. Understanding that you're looking to add incremental profit dollars, do you look at the next period for O'Reilly as any less fruitful on the percentage or the rate? Meaning, O'Reilly's just at a time where it's trying to hold its percentage constant, and that would be sufficient, or are there opportunities to still grow the percentage, and how would you rank those opportunities? Thank you.
Yeah, Michael, you knew what our response was gonna be because you put it in your question. Yeah, our focus is on operating profit dollars, and it continues to be. You're right, the 2010s were, I think, a period of very strong and solid growth, just the dynamic and the nature of how our income statement changed over that course of time.
I would tell you that as we entered this decade, you know, our answer that you'll get today was pretty similar to what it would've been at the beginning of the decade that we're in, and then we found out that there was even more opportunity for us, as during the course of the pandemic, that profile has expanded, and we're able to drive the percentages even beyond what we were at that point. But we've also proven over the course of the last few years, that where we see opportunities to invest in our business and drive operating profit dollar growth, that we're gonna do that.
So when we say that you know, the focus is not as much on the percentages as they are on the dollar growth, that's really true, and it's backed up by some of the decisions that we've made around how we manage the business. Do we think there continues to be opportunities to drive additional leverage out of our business? Absolutely. That's our goal is to take share, to operate every single one of those 6,200-plus stores that we've talked about more effectively, to enhance service for our customers and to be more efficient in doing that, because we're able to take shares out of our existing boxes. So we think that there's an opportunity to move forward from that.
But frankly, our goal is to grow the profit dollars.
Hi, Brian Nagel from Oppenheimer. Thanks for the presentation. My first question, it may be similar to what Michael asked, just maybe asked a different way, but if I listen to the presentation today, I mean, what you're saying is that, you know, the underpinnings of your sector are remain very healthy. But we look at, you know, the sales growth that's been softer or sub-algo for O'Reilly. So if you look, what have been, in your mind now, what have been the kind of missing pieces? What's not there to keep your sales growth where it should be, and how should we think about getting those pieces back, and what timeframe?
Yeah, well, that's a great question, Brian. I'll start out and let the guys jump in. You know, I don't know. You know, we're asked a lot about, you know, what would be a catalyst, and we just really don't, you know, look at it that way. I mean, what we're seeing right now is what we've seen... I've seen it, you know, every four years for, you know, twenty-eight years, is anytime you're in an election year, people start to pull back a little bit. You know, we've had a lot of years stacked up of inflation, you know, all the things that you all know very well, as well as we do, and I think we're just in a pretty short time period.
I mean, I don't know that there's any one catalyst, you know, in terms of what's gonna drive the industry. But quite, quite frankly, one thing that's probably missed sometimes is we kind of like when there's pressure on the overall, because what we see, not exactly to your question, Brian, but what we see a lot of times when there's a macro pressure on the entire industry, on all of retail, we see some of the smaller players and potentially some of our larger competitors that maybe don't manage that as well as we do. You know, they can swing the wrong direction with staffing and inventory levels and things like that.
And so, you know, if you heard Jason talk about it, he kind of likes when things are a little bit tough because, you know, good times can create bad habits, and tough times can create good habits operationally. And, you know, we learned a lot about ourselves during COVID, where some cracks were, whether it be in store operations, whether it be in supply chain, and we got better from that. And so, when we take a year like this, we just don't spend as much time trying to figure out what the catalyst is for the industry, as much as we do, you know, what's gonna be the catalyst for O'Reilly, and that's, you know, we control every bit of that, you know, from all the things we talked about earlier.
Thanks.
Hi, it's Greg Melich with Evercore. I want to start with the top line. I think in the past, you guys have talked a lot about, you know, maybe one to three points of growth just from AUR, the complexity of vehicles and the cost of the parts and nominal dollars is just more. And I'm wondering, given the period of inflation we've just had, do you think that we just need to have a couple of years where we settle out at maybe 1% before we go back to that historic 3%? Or I sort of saw through the whole presentation, the added complexity and the technology, and some of these things are breaking faster. Could we enter a period where we just have higher-...
AUR increases across what you sell for the next three, four, or five years from a technology standpoint? Does that make sense?
I wouldn't point to it, Greg, as being something that would dramatically change from the trend in that shorter window of time. You know, one of the things that I think both drives that kind of industry-wide benefit consistently over time, but also means that it is at a very you know measured pace, is the size of the vehicle parc. It's so large, and incremental changes to the demand triggers there happen slowly and over the course of time, so we would think, you know, that increasing complexity and the degree to which that supports the selling price of new product applications remains pretty consistent over the course of time.
I don't know that the shape of that line curve changes. I think where our increasing conviction has been is, as we look further out in terms of periods of time, we still believe that the arc is towards a higher level of complexity and a more expensive part.
It, it's gonna gradually move just because you can't change the car parc dramatically in any short window of time, but, but, you know, if you, if you measure where we're at today versus where we think it'll be in 10 or 15 or 20 years, we're probably more confident than ever now that you're gonna see a high cost of parts there because of technology, because of evolutions in how vehicles are built, and also because of just the cost of vehicles and the investment that's going into them.
Yeah, and Greg, I would add to that maybe a little additional color on top of what Jeremy said. You know, some of the examples I gave on the evolution of the vehicle, when you think about even on that start/stop example, you know, over 50% of the new vehicles last year had that as, you know, on them. It's still only 16% penetration in the car parc. When you go back and look at that ADAS that I talked about, if you go back to 2005, that's when ABS brake sensors went into play, but then there was some staggering of that, and it only intensified really around the 2015, 2016 timeframe when you got into dynamic cruise controls and those kind of things, the proliferation of those sensors.
So to Jeremy's point, we really feel like that's gonna be more of a phased-in dynamic over time versus a, you know, a particular bell curve or a hump to get through in the next few years. It's gonna be phased in over time with the life of the vehicle.
Sounds like this, this year, the comp being two to four, and in the lower part of that, it's really just there's no inflation this year or very little compared to normal. Was that-
That's probably a better way to think about it.
Okay.
Yeah.
My follow-up was a bit related. Could you just update us on where you are on direct import parts? How much you foreign direct import? I know you listed Import Direct as one of the key, you know, private proprietary brands.
Sure.
So just give us where we are there and what happened with tariffs?
E-
a few years ago, and how you guys played that out.
Yeah. No, great, great question. Yeah, and just, just for clarity on Import Direct, I mean, that, that's our, you know, OE comparable replacement for European models, and, and that's where the name comes from, so it's less, less about specifically that part being imported. But with that said, when you think about imports, especially from China, I know that's where a lot of the tariff focus has been, but, you know, we've actually, through... You know, Brad talked a minute ago about hard times create good habits, and, and they did for us in terms of the supply chain, you know, during COVID. You know, we, we recognized, in, in some cases to our detriment, the, the overdependence we had in some cases there.
Now, with that said, so we've been able to reduce in a pretty meaningful way some of our dependency on China specifically. We've moved more sourcing to India, to Mexico. There's been some countries that have been beneficiaries of the migration out of China. With that said, there's still some suspension components and different things that are, you know, by and large, only manufactured there. So we do still have some, you know, some of that, but we have less of that than we had over the last several years.
When you go back to the tariffs, when they were enacted in the 2017, 2018 timeframe, when we did encounter that, we were able to really directly, our whole industry was able to directly pass that through pretty immediately in selling cost and really didn't see any adverse effect per se from that because of the, you know, again, the need and occasion-based, you know, demand for those parts, so feel like we'd see the same similar dynamic if we encounter a tariff, you know, specifically from China. Again, we've got to believe that's the only thing we can point to at this point, was the experience there, but we felt pretty good about how we handled that and how the industry handled it.
Is there a number, like China's now 20%, it used to be 30% or something?
We don't share that number, but I can tell you it's been reduced by a considerable amount. I can't share an exact number with you.
Thank you.
Yep.
Simeon.
Hi, Simeon Gutman, Morgan Stanley. Another version of the growth versus investment question. The last few years, we had PPI, so there were some pricing investments, and the SG&A per store got elevated, and it looked like you got rewarded for that in the last few years. This year, industry malaise, but how much debate is there about keeping the pedal to the metal? Not just thinking about rate, but just growth and investing and not delivering as much on the bottom line so that you could take advantage of how much share there is in the industry? And I have one follow-up.
... Yeah, great, great question, Simeon. So yeah, we debate about that all the time. You know, we, you know, we spend a lot of time on that. It's a good position to be in, to be able to play from a position of strength when we can, and we've been able to do that for a long time now. I think the key here to the balance point of what you're asking is, you know, I think really our CapEx number continues to show that we're gonna continue to keep the pedal to the metal in terms of investments, both on the cap side and the operating expenses.
You know, what it becomes is, you know, we do feel really good about the returns we've seen out of the SG&A spend specifically, you know, the last couple years. What's always the fine line is when you think about tech investments, or you think about store staffing, or you think about the returns on, you know, upping the level of image and appearance of our store locations, it really becomes as much not just about what the spend is it does, what can we operationally consume, and what can we effectively deploy?
And so when we're talking about it, it's not that we wanna always spend more, spend less. It's as much of a operational excellence and the fine line between, you know, if we're gonna invest in technology, how quick can we deploy applications in a way that we can have good change management and the stores can adapt it. So we've got really solid roadmaps on everything, CapEx and OpEx, but we feel really good about that fine line we're walking between the spend and making sure that we're able to digest it in the field.
Simeon, you identified, you know, the last few years have been not the norm of what we've seen in our business, right? There has been some degree to which, because of the extreme growth and the expansion, you know, we weren't able to have the same type of consistent approach to what Brad just talked about as we would've normally done. So a little bit of just a cadence question that becomes a little bit different as things have normalized since then.
This year is a good example of how we're gonna balance the right timing and the appropriate way operationally to get the best results of how we're gonna invest, understanding that you have to do that within the context of an environment that you know that's more challenging than the last few years have been. So, you know, we don't wanna limit where we think all of those things go, but we're going to be very measured and balanced in how we move it forward, and take advantage of the opportunities we have a lot of conviction around. We can be highly successful at.
I think, Simeon, I'm sorry, last thing I thought about while Jeremy was talking is, you know, we, we were really proud. You know, we don't just look at one quarter, we look at long periods of time, the way we manage store staffing, for example. And, you know, the last few years, as, as you know, quite frankly, we weren't happy at O'Reilly with our turnover and retention numbers in the stores. It was just subpar. I... We, we feel like we held up better than most in retail and our competitor, direct competitors, but we weren't happy internally with our turnover and retention numbers, and, and it took some time for us to overcome that.
And when I think of, you know, really what we, what the teams have done, what Jason and the teams in the back have done this year with store staffing, store payroll, it is really, I think, what we're seeing. It's not like all of a sudden we're not spending this year. I think we're continuing to invest in the right strategic initiatives, but we have seen fruits from slowing down that turnover, getting back to O'Reilly standards on store turnover, retention, DC turnover and retention. And so we're seeing some payoff in those things that Brent talked about earlier with what we did with PTO, what we did with our store manager work schedule. We made their work schedule a little more conducive to work-life balance while still doing the job they need to do.
So, you know, really managing the expense well, but continuing to invest.
You talked a lot about market share and the $150-$160 billion TAM. Can you talk about the market share you're taking, or growth, in mature, penetrated markets? Because we know you're not in a couple of key regions, so some of that dollar amount is not accessible to you. So give us a better sense of the growth that you're getting in mature, and can you keep taking the level of market share by staying in these existing places, or do you have to go to these densely populated markets that you're not in, in order-
Yeah
... to grow faster?
No, it would probably surprise most, Simeon, you know, when I look at the most mature markets in our company, the Central Midwest, around Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, when we look at Texas, it's not like we have 3% or 4% share in Florida, and we have 50 or 60 in those mature markets.
Right.
You look at markets that we're maybe 15 or 20 in the most mature markets in the country. Maybe the most dominant stores, where there's only one or two other parts stores, maybe 30. And so, you know, when we look at it, it's not what you think, that we have 70-80% of the business. It's just not that. It's more the difference in a three or four share and a, you know, 10 to 20. And so, we still see a lot of opportunities. I mean, when we're doing what we need to be doing in our most mature markets, there's still plenty of share to take.
Yeah, I would just add one thing to that. When we talk about maturity of markets for us here at O'Reilly, as far as the store base, it's relative to O'Reilly. It's not relative to how much share we have relative to the market entitlement, that we call it. So it's not, it's not that we're mature as in we're almost done being the dominant supplier, like my last slide. It's, it's maturity relative to when we started, and where we started, and how long we've been O'Reilly Auto Parts in those markets, if that adds any color, too.
Yeah.
Seth Basham with Wedbush here. Brad, you mentioned that miles driven are now back to pre-pandemic levels. But, that's a CAGR of-
... you know, flattish over that last four-year period, compared to a TIGR of about 1.5% for the prior four years. And that's despite the fact that during those past four years, we saw really strong sales for the industry. So do you think there may have been a pull forward of demand during that pandemic period that we're unwinding now? Or how do you think about it?
Yeah, great. Great question, Seth. Well, I think there's a little bit of that. I don't know that there's a lot when it comes to more of the non-discretionary side of our business. I think, you know, really what we saw from a category standpoint, Seth, you know, when we were in the height of the pandemic, yeah, I mean, you know, our average customer, as you all know, had time on their hands and money in their pocket, and in some cases, spent some money. I think more on projects and paint and body and restoring an old car, and, you know, we saw categories like spark plugs that was kinda normal in the way it used to grow, and it spiked, and some of that has reduced.
And so I think from some of the project stuff and things like that, I think we've seen some of that be less here this year. But when we look at our non-discretionary categories, when we look at maintenance and true replacement parts, you know, we're really not seeing a lot of that. There could have been a little bit from the maintenance side, but the actual failure side, that, you know, failure is what it is. I think maintenance there could be a little bit of that that you know was pulled forward, but we're just not seeing that materially.
Got it. Now, my follow-up question is just on international growth. As you expand internationally, can you give us some perspective on how fast you can open stores in Mexico and Canada, and what kind of return on capital profile we can expect out of those stores relative to greenfield stores in the U.S.?
Yep, yep. Thanks, Seth. I'll take the first part of that and then have Jeremy talk about the last. So, we couldn't be more excited about our international markets. You know, obviously, North America, building out North America made a lot of sense for us, contiguous to the U.S., and we've had extreme success in the markets that border Mexico, and quite frankly, our largest public competitor has done an unbelievably good job in Mexico now since the late 1990s, and they, they've kinda paved the way. You know, they, they've done a phenomenal job down there. The average age of a vehicle is sixteen and a half years in the Mexican market. Not good roads, and it's really a great parts market, even more fragmented than the U.S. by far.
It really almost, when you go down there, you know, it feels like going back in the U.S. in our industry to the almost the sixties or seventies, and so tremendous opportunity. Seth, we're not... when we look back through the pandemic, we would've wanted to get more done in Mexico than we have gotten done, quite frankly. You know, we acquired an amazing family business in Mayasa. You know, they had roughly 20 stores, and they had a bunch of small distribution centers, and they were a WD supplier, but what was most important to us with the acquisition of Mayasa was we needed the right people platform.
We wanted to go down there with somebody that had teams, that understood the market, that had customer relationships, and that had, you know, distribution and systems to a lesser degree, and we have an unbelievable leadership team down in Mexico. The pandemic hit, and we felt like we lost some time, quite frankly. So, you know, I think O'Reilly as we've kinda caught up from not being down there as much as we wanted to be down there in the pandemic, the catalyst for us is, as you well know, getting that DC open, that we opened last year, last summer in Guadalajara.
You know, I think we can continue to ramp to, at some point, open maybe 30, 40, 50 stores a year potentially. We haven't laid that out in that manner, but that's just kinda directionally where we feel like we can head. That may increase, that may decrease, but what's most important to us in Mexico is just making sure that we have our foundation right from a people standpoint. We now have our distribution up and running. Brent and our IT teams are working very hard on our systems integration and working on the right system platforms to be able to enable that type of growth.
You know, we feel really good about our ability to, you know, to get after that and have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of stores down in Mexico. On Canada, and then I'll turn it over to Jeremy from the kind of economics. Canada is very similar, obviously to a lesser degree than Mexico, in terms of the TAM. You know, Canada is, as everybody knows, you know, the population sits on the U.S. border, and so there's still a lot to learn about what exactly our distribution network is gonna look like. But, very similar to Mayasa, is we wanted the right people platform in the Canadian market. It's a decent DIY market. It's a phenomenal DIFM market.
And we wanted, again, the right people platform, not only that understood the Canadian market, but specifically understood the Quebec market in French Canada, and we absolutely have that in Mauro Ciafelli and the team that's running that business for us. We've known them for a long time. They're kind of a industry icon as a family and as a team. They're a great company. They're with Groupe Del vasto. And so we still. It's still a little bit early to say exactly what our plans are gonna be in Canada, but they had distribution capabilities both in Montreal and Toronto, as well as kinda what we consider hub stores they had as well. And so we have a lot of capabilities in place.
We're gonna be working on those plans the next year to really figure out what that store ramp needs to look like and what it'll look like in terms of actually being branded O'Reilly. So more to come on that.
Yeah, and in terms of just how we think about returns and capital, you know, Canada, pretty similar to the U.S. We're still early stages, so we'll, you know, we'll tweak how we think about, you know, what the growth looks like there, and, but, you know, we'll tell you that that marketplace, in many ways, is similar to the U.S. You know, Mexico also.
... you know, a good opportunity for us. We feel highly confident in being able to invest capital down there. A little bit different economics just because of the, you know, the market conditions are a little bit different. And we're still early stages there in more of an investment cycle, opening a lot of stores into a few right now. But from a long-term perspective, we, you know, we similarly think that we'll be able to earn a strong return on capital for new store growth, you know, in similar ways to where we've invested in the US for a long period of time.
We'll see where that balances out, but there's nothing that we've seen so far, in our experience there that has shied us away from what we think the long-term potential is.
Thank you. Steve Forbes, Guggenheim. Brad, I wanted to revisit higher level, that industry slide, in the United States, 'cause it looks like you had... You guys are noting about 2,000 net new stores since 2019 over the past five years, which I think the prior 2,000 net new stores took about 15-18 years to see within the industry. So any way to sort of frame, like, what's sort of supporting that growth? And/or how do you think about, right, attrition risk, cannibalization risk into the future? And/or has there been a sort of emergence of a new competitor that you guys are seeing?
Yeah.
It just seems very stark, right?
Yeah
-in sort of difference versus-
Yeah, we actually talked about that this morning. That's a great question, Steven. So the thing I would tell you, when you really break that down, the difference in kinda what looked like thirty-five, thirty-six for a very long period of time, ramping up to thirty-seven, then thirty-nine, just the way you laid it out, I... Honestly, I think when you take us and our largest competitor that puts in about as many stores as we do, I think we would comprise a good portion of that, like we always have. I think the difference, quite frankly, is there was a lot of small mom-and-pop type independents that got a really good shot in the arm during the pandemic, like we all did.
I think we controlled our own destiny better than anybody, but everybody did pretty well, maybe better than what they were actually operating during the pandemic. And so it's not so much anything new in terms of new competition. I think what's missing is the fallout in previous years from a consolidation standpoint. It was kind of a step change in lack of store closures, maybe from some of the weaker independents, which is actually a good opportunity as we move forward the next couple years.
And then just a quick follow-up for Jason. You talked about the First Call commitment, and I can't remember your exact words, but you sort of made it seem like First Call Online platform, we'd be surprised by the amount of sales that are sort of going through that platform. Any way to sort of frame up for us, like, you know, sort of how that penetration has changed or, you know, just how successful that First Call Online platform has been?
I wouldn't say that you'd be surprised about how much we do. You may be, but that's not what I was trying to, I guess, lay out. We're very pleased with the growth and the trajectory of that platform and how we continue to bring in more customers to that ecosystem that creates that loyalty through the efficiencies that the professional customer sees, as well as what our store team sees. It's really just been an ongoing just evolution, a snowball effect, where our customers continue to find value in that platform, and our teams support it, and we go out and promote that platform to provide value for our professional customers.
And shops continue to evolve too, in terms of technology.
Yes
... and their adoption of technology. There's a dynamic of that going on, as well as a lot of the great work that the teams are doing to enhance the platform continuously to meet those needs, as well as the feet on the street behind the platform.
But for sure, our growth in professional sales through the platform has exceeded our overall professional sales growth, gosh, for as long as I can remember-
Long time
... even during the last several years when our professional growth has been very strong.
Yeah, the part that might be surprising is that as the base has grown over years, that growth and outperformance of through the platform versus not through the platform continues to lead the way. That's what's been so impressive to us, is as the base grows, the outperformance hasn't changed.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. Anna Bagdasarian from First Manhattan. I would love if you could just discuss the CapEx spend. It has doubled in the last few years, while the store openings has, has kind of ranged in the 190 to 200. So I'd love if you could discuss, like, where it's being spent on, what are the kind of longer term plans, and how you think it's enhancing your competitive position in an environment where at least one of your public competitors is pulling back on CapEx. Thank you.
Yeah, no, great, great question there, Anna, and I'll start, and the other guys might chime in. You know, for sure, in the time period that you outlined with those endpoints, it's been pretty stark. You know, some of those comparisons are to that 2021, 2022 timeframe, where, you know, we had, at the beginning of those years, we had set a guidance target that was, that ended up being well in excess of what we spent, 'cause we just couldn't get into stores, couldn't get the development through. So some of what we've seen is a normalization, above a higher, a little bit higher bar there, where we were in the $650 million-$700 million range for some of the years pre-pandemic.
You know, I would tell you that, especially this year, one of the bigger changing components to that is the composition of the stores that you talked about, lean a little bit even heavier to own stores. And to the degree to where we lease, you know, a little bit more of a lean towards leasing existing buildings, where we're going to go in and do a more substantial amount of work. You know, as our economics have continued to improve, and we've seen opportunities from a brick-and-mortar standpoint over the course of really the last couple years to enhance that level, we've been pleased with how we've thought about the return profile of that business. And that's always been-...
I think to a certain degree a bias and a focus of ours. We've had more balance there historically, just because of the availability of properties within markets. But we've had an opportunity, especially within the current year, to own more of those new sites than we've leased. You know, in addition to that, we have had some initiatives, some of the just the normal things that we would focus on the quality of our plant, the image and appearance of our stores, some of the what we see as value-added initiatives that we've caught up on over the course of the last few years that have heightened that spend.
Obviously, a lot of the technology things that we've seen, we continue to incrementally add as we think about capital for those items moving forward. Really, the biggest delta, if you look back on an existing store population, is we're a heavier owned mix at this point.
Yeah, I think, too, Anna, maybe just to highlight a couple of things we have going on is, Brent, Brent talked about our DC projects. You know, we're going to continue, as I think everybody knows, you know, we're the one in our industry that actually has these regional distribution centers that we spend a lot more money putting them in the cities, versus a lot in retail and a lot are in our industry have their distribution setting out where you can get free land and tax breaks, and it's surely a replenishment play.
As you'll see here in the Chicago market, you know, here in Naperville, this location, you know, for example, of what we're going to do in Stafford, Virginia, for the Mid-Atlantic, what we're doing with the relocation in Atlanta, those type things, having that inventory and making sure that we're keeping our inventory advantage an advantage, we're going to continue to lean into that, from distribution capabilities, hub store capabilities, and, you know, parts proliferation and having the right part at the right place at the right time. We all talk about that, but we're going to make sure that continues to be a competitive advantage. And so obviously, those projects are expensive projects. And then, you know, when we think about technology, you know, we have a lot of opportunities to get better with tech.
And, you know, we actually have a new CIO with our company. He's not here with us today, Scott Ross, that joined our company at the end of last year. He reports directly into Brent, and, you know, we're really excited about some things we're doing internally with technology when it comes to taking friction out, not only for the customer at the store, with Omnichannel digital capabilities, e-commerce, but also things we're doing to simplify the store manager's job, things we're doing to simplify the store team's job, to make sure they're totally focused on taking care of our customers. And so, you know, we're going to continue to invest in technology as well, because we have a lot of opportunities there.
Yeah, and just one add or a little bit on the comments Brad made about the DCs, too, in regard to your question on timing. So if you think about the... I mentioned the Springfield DC that's coming online next month. This is 2024. Prior to this, the last new DC project we had was 2019. So some of that time frame you're referencing, we were kind of dark on DC projects as well, just COVID and everything else going on. So we've gotten back to that cadence, like Brad talked about.
Hey, guys. David Bellinger with Mizuho. Maybe just to follow up on that last one, you mentioned some automation in the new DCs. Can you talk about what level of automation is in, you know, those facilities across the chain? Is there a potential to go back and maybe retrofit some of those to get more productivity out of those, those boxes?
Yeah, so great question, David. We, throughout the history of O'Reilly, again, distribution's been a core competency of ours from the very beginning, and we're always looking at automation, and that can be conveyance, it can be, you know, pallet flow, carton flow, you know, all kinds of different MHE that we've looked at over the years, and we're always looking for a return on those investments when we make them. You know, the last several years has yielded some benefit there from some automation around goods to person and those kind of things. So we've evaluated some of those technologies, and we'll be implementing, you know, some of those technologies to see how they perform. You know, we'll see how that works.
In our business, we feel like, though, that we're not leading edge or bleeding edge. It's very proven, and we've done some time and motion studies, so we feel very assured in the investments we're making in some of those new facilities.
And just the second one, in terms of any potential expense pullbacks, if we are in a slower spending environment, is there any parts of the business where you would, I guess, pull back to some degree while still trying to take market share? And specifically, on store replenishment, you know, 95% of stores getting daily replenishment, is that something that could ever go back, or is that really the leading edge of you continuing to gain share and just something that's sort of off the table at this point?
Yeah. Thanks, David. Maybe on the expense side first, and we can talk a little bit about nightly replenishment. So on the expense side, you know, as you've heard us say for a long time, David, you know, we're very careful to make sure we don't overreact. We absolutely have to react, and we've invested a lot the last few years, and so I think this year's been a proof point that Jason and the team have done one heck of a job managing our store SG&A under the pressured top line, and we've continued to hone in on investments and not pull back too far. Really, when we get in a cycle like this, you know, obviously, we have a lot of fixed costs. You know, we micromanage every little penny.
You know, expense culture is something every one of us we're founded on, and we micromanage every single penny we spend each and every day, no matter if it's good times or bad times. But obviously, a year like this, we look at everything, and, you know, when you think about something like store staffing you know, we're managing that dynamically, one store at a time, one team member at a time. And so yeah, that's under extreme scrutiny right now, stopping short of making sure that we are continuing to give the service we need to give on both sides of the business. Really, the only area that we...
You know, we look at everything, but you know, the biggest area we make sure that we're, you know, pulling back or making sure we're adjusting is just, you know, headquarters expense. You know, every one of us, you know, that sits up here and most of the team that's here from Springfield this week, we're an expense. You know, these men and women in the back of the room are out there ringing the cash register every day, and in times like this, we make sure we're not spending one penny that we shouldn't, whether it be on headquarters staffing, whether it be on projects. We look at every process in the office, is a process that somebody's doing each and every day that they've done for three years, is that still relevant?
Do we need to stop doing that? Do we need to start doing something different? Do we need to utilize technology or better processes? So, you know, we just continue to micromanage, you know, every single expense every day.
Yeah, but to your specific point, David, around you know 95%+ of our stores get multiple intraday deliveries from a city counter of a DC or a hub store. Or do we look at those types of things and change delivery schedules or look at that model and dial it in differently? For that, I mean, we would tell you absolutely not. You know, the reality is we're not pleased with the growth of what we've seen so far this year. It's you know shaping up to be one of those types of years in the industry, but the large majority of our business is still there and does not accept or understand any change in the service levels.
I think Brad mentioned it earlier, you know, candidly, these types of environments can at times excite us because look, we're very ready for a competitor that does that type of thing and puts us in a position we think that we can take advantage of it, so that's why as much focus and scrutiny as we take to controlling expenses and our ability to do that because we have so many of these units that have people within those stores that do treat it like it's their own business, gives us a lot of flexibility to do that, but it is limited, because we're never gonna sacrifice certain service components of our business.
And David, on your other part of the question, I... Sorry, Brad.
Go ahead.
I wanna make sure that we all understand, actually, 100% of our stores get five-night-a-week replenishment. So forget special orders or what we call must-haves, those hard-to-find parts. We replenish our stores five nights a week, every store in the chain. So I wanna make sure we understand that. So a part that any store in the company, a part they sell on Wednesday is pick, pack, and ship from this facility on Thursday, and it shows up to the store in the middle of the night, Thursday night, and is put back on the shelf Friday morning. That's 100% of our stores from a replenishment standpoint. What we talked about, 95%, is what I mentioned earlier with Anna's question on CapEx and how that ties into our distribution strategy.
What you'll see when you go through this facility here is 95% of our stores actually get multi-times a day, or at least one time a day, beyond their replenishment truck in the middle of the night on a small truck for special orders. So the way that we have these 32 regional distribution centers across North America, you know, they're... Every one of them, I think this facility, Scott will correct me if I'm wrong, but he services 302 stores from a nightly replenishment standpoint.
Right.
Mid-twos, you know, well over 200 of them actually can pull from this 175,000 SKUs multiple times a day through small trucks. So I just wanna make sure that we get that right, you know, and on the replenishment front, you know, we've played around with. Is five nights a week too much? You know, should we go to four? Could we go to three? Could we modify our service? And there's been a few of those opportunities show up in some kinda tertiary markets.
But honestly, having the part in stock and us having our stores, even though it's a little bit more expensive to do, having our stores put up a little bit of freight every day and knowing that they're 100% in stock, we've just found that to be a competitive advantage versus some of our competitors that are just getting one or two trucks a week.
Yeah, Brad said what I was gonna say. The only thing I would add to it in addition on your question is, when we talk about those multiple times a day beyond that nightly replenishment, and we'll, and Scott will show it to you when we go out here and tour the DC, there's a customer attached to that order.
It's sold.
It's sold, and so to stop doing that would be to give up opportunity for us. Just-
That's what I said.
Yeah.
Thanks. Steve Zaccone from Citi. Thanks for the time today. I wanted to follow up on some of the conversation around market share in DIFM. Could you talk about, you know, who the share donors are going forward? Has that changed versus maybe previously? And when you think about the tactics to gain market share, Brad, you talked about, you know, trying to evolve some strategies there. No revolutionary needed, but still opportunities to get better.
Yeah.
Could you talk about what that is?
Yeah. Specifically on the DIFM side, Steve? Yeah, so, as most of you know, the way we look at the quality of the share dollar on the DIFM professional side of our business, we roughly still see almost 50% of that share or those sales being accomplished through the independents. And so, you know, when you talk about highly fragmented, you look at us and our other big three competitors, you know, we all have 10 or less, roughly, even on the professional side. And so it still continues to be highly fragmented. I think what we've seen is, you know, when I started in this business, you know, it was very common to see, you know, most every market had a couple of stores that were independently owned, just one-store owners.
I think what's evolved over time is you have more owners that have three, four, or five stores. They could be, you know, a NAPA store, they could be Bumper to Bumper, they could be part of another buying group. But I think what's changed, even though that independent is still 50% of the revenue done on the DIFM side, the way we look at the share available in the US, you know, the weak have gone away, the mediocre have kinda been in the middle, and we've been able to take share even though they still exist, and some of the strong have gotten even stronger. You know, when you look at the Parts Authority, the XLs, the FMPs, all the WD-type competitors, you know, they, they've grown pretty well too over the last many years.
And, you know, they're solid, independent operators. They do a fantastic job. So I think the opportunity's the same, to continue to take share from the independents. It's just the mix a little bit of ownership has been the biggest change. And then obviously, as always, you know, as we always say, of our big three competitors, you know, we have a tremendous amount of respect for those guys. I mean, they do a lot right. They're well-run companies, you know, some better than others, and we've had some opportunities. And I think our opportunities will continue to be, you know, to take. You know, when Jason and his team talk about share, they're not just talking about one competitor.
They're talking about the total market, and they're focused on, even though we talk a lot about market share and competitors, you know, our biggest competitor operationally, these guys say it all the time, is in the mirror, meaning that when we're executing to a T, we normally take a lot of share. When we're not doing exactly what we're supposed to be doing, which can happen sometimes, unfortunately, even with our company, with 6,000 stores, our opportunity normally is for us to get better and run our playbook better, but I think we see equal opportunities, generally speaking, to continue to take share from the independents, the small operators, as well as the big public competitors.
And then I think, you know, I'm asked all the time about, you know, pure-play e-tailers, you know, or maybe big box, or what's happened, you know, what's happened on that front. You know, what I try to remind everybody when they talk about, you know, e-tailers and their fulfillment and things like that, the way I look at it is we have 6,200 fulfillment centers. 'Cause if you think about our stores, we view them as fulfillment centers. They all have that average of 22,000 SKUs, and the far majority of those SKUs are behind the counter. It's a consulted visit. It's these non-discretionary failure and maintenance parts.
So when I think about that, another opportunity we have is to continue to get better. Brent talked about it at making sure that we have the best websites possible. You know, that you know, omnichannel for us is always gonna start in the store, but professional parts people means that we must have the most professional parts people staying in the store. It also says that we better have the most professional website in the industry. You know, O'ReillyAuto.com on the retail side, First Call Online on the professional side.
And so I also think we have incremental opportunities to continue to get better at digital e-commerce, displaying that inventory exactly the way we wanna display it, in the aisle, working with our suppliers to make sure that we're displaying all the inventory availability that we have, not only in our network with our suppliers, and continue to get better at the way we really exploit our inventory advantage.
Okay, great. Just a brief follow-up then to Jeremy. Your leverage ratio from a debt perspective has been below that target-
Yeah
... for I guess, like, two analyst days now. So just, should we expect this to be the new kinda run rate? And, if it's not, and you can get back to that level, how would you think about some of the priorities if you had some extra capital to spend?
Yeah, so no, we wouldn't say that we've re-established a new target. You know, it's probably been more than two analyst days that we've been below our level, candidly. You know, our focus there is the same as it's been over the better part of thirteen, fourteen years that we've been under this capital policy. We wanna be prudent and consistent about how we might move to that target over the course of time. You know, we constantly reevaluate that, but we still think that's the right mix for our business. You know, I think I had a question maybe before we started today, just as we were milling about, you know, how do we think about what our capacity is to be able to invest?
We feel very comfortable, you know, where we're at today and at our leverage target, that we've got a balance sheet that allows us to take advantage of any strategic opportunities that we would see, and feel very comfortable, you know, over the course of time, as we gravitate towards that level, that will remain true.
Hey, good morning, Max Rakh lenko, TD Cowen. So first, can you speak to the Mid-Atlantic opportunity? How long could it take to build out the infrastructure, including hubs and stores, to really be able to compete with the top WDs in the region? And then, how are you thinking strategically about the unlocks to potentially selectively go after some of those national accounts? Potentially incremental, but at a lower margin.
Yeah. Thanks, Max. Well, we're really excited about the Mid-Atlantic. You know, we've kinda snuck up on it for a long time here now. You know, we've had the Greensboro DC, you know, for a long time, and then we normally wouldn't have jumped over the Mid-Atlantic to go to New England. We only did that, as a lot of you remember, because we had the opportunity to buy the parts side of VIP Auto up in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, and then a few years later, in 2016, had the opportunity to acquire Bond Auto out of Vermont. And so really, it was just those opportunistic acquisitions that got us to the point of opening our distribution center there in Boston that a lot of you have visited.
And so, again, we've had this dynamic where we've kinda had this really gap in footprint that we have, that depending on where you draw the lines, you can almost say is a third of the population of the United States. And so we're extremely excited about the markets. When you look at Northern Virginia, when you look at Washington, D.C., when you look at Baltimore, when you look at Philadelphia and on up through New York City and Jersey, there's a tremendous opportunity. You know, directly to answer your question, in terms of time, it's gonna take some time. You know, Stafford, we had already snuck up kinda on that Northern Virginia market.
We have some big hubs up in that market, and then from the north, we've done the same down through Connecticut, and then, you know, obviously Stafford is gonna be the catalyst to really get that big box inventory like we have here attached to this facility, you know, in that Northern Virginia market and on that I-95 corridor, where we can really get after that stuff. But I would say, generally speaking, that it's still gonna take us, and that's good news. It'll take us time, but that's when we do our best work. You know, we could acquire a couple companies and be in those markets overnight, but we really wouldn't have the growth story and the ability to grow into those markets. So we're gonna be very disciplined. We'll do that over the next decade or so.
Generally speaking, you know, we'll focus. When our site acquisition folks go out, and they start working a new market, you know, they're working from that distribution center out, and so we're not gonna immediately jump to, you know, Philadelphia and New Jersey. What we'll do is, in a disciplined way, we'll continue to acquire sites, look for acquisition opportunities in Northern Virginia, DC, you know, kinda start working that Baltimore market in a very disciplined way, over the next few years. You know, we're already working some of those markets from a site selection standpoint, but, you know, great question on the competitive landscape. They're competitive markets. I mean, there's a tremendous amount of market share in all those metro areas, but there's tough competitors.
You know, we know a lot of those independents that operate in those markets, plus we'll be the last, you know, in terms of the Big Four, to enter those markets. But we couldn't be more pleased, quite frankly, with our store openings already in... When we look at our new store cohort, kinda in that Northern Virginia market, and you look at our new store cohort coming the other direction from New England, and the stores we've opened in Rhode Island and Connecticut and upstate New York, those stores are coming off incredibly strong.
And as you can probably imagine, they are. There's not a big material difference in the cash charge mix in those stores, but there, there's great DIY opportunity, but there's even better DIFM opportunity when you get in those inner-city markets of, you know, obviously New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. And so we're really excited about those markets, but we take them. We don't take the competitive nature for granted. We're gonna be very careful and be disciplined in the way we build out the teams there.
Okay, great. And then, can you just speak to the price environment? How stable is it? Some of your bigger peers are making some changes. And then, just bigger picture, if the environment remains soft for, you know, maybe a more extended period of time, and WDs do get a little more desperate, how do you think that could play out?
Yeah. Absolutely. I'll start it, and more of the other guys may wanna jump in. But, you know, as we always say, we continue to see the market really rational. You know, we have disciplined competitors on both the public side and the independent side. As you all know, when we decided to make that strategic investment in ProPrice initiative here a couple, two and a half years ago now, I guess, or at least a year and a half ago, get my years mixed up. It's been two years.
Yeah, two plus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we purposely did not necessarily go down to be cheaper or even exactly the same as some of those two-step model-type competitors, but we wanted to get more in the game, so to speak, in certain categories, and that's, you know, paid off extremely well, not because of pricing actions alone, but because our teams in the back room have gone out there with a sharper price and been the best in the market with availability and service and relationship that backs up that pricing. So that's key. But we see the market extremely rational. We feel good about the way we feel like price increases are being passed through.
And, you know, really what we've seen here of late is just a competitor that was way out of the game, on both sides of the business here a year or two ago, or maybe over the last couple years, for sure last year. And, you know, what we're seeing there is just a little bit more competitive, but nothing to worry us in terms of anything erratic whatsoever.
Okay. Well, I think that gets us to time for our Q&A session. I'd like to thank our team for coming up and answering the questions. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us here in person today. I'd also like to thank everyone who is on the webcast for joining us today. Everyone in the room, if you could just stay seated for a few minutes while we end the webcast portion of the call, and we'll give some instructions, but before we finish up, everything at O'Reilly, everything at O'Reilly starts and ends with culture, period. That's who we are. That's what we do. That's what makes us different. Hopefully, you saw the team exhibit it today, how many times they referred to the back of the room, the operators in the back of the room.
That's where the rubber hits the road. That's where the depth of experience exists. That's what makes O'Reilly special. So I'd like to thank everybody for the privilege and opportunity I've had to work so closely and get to know many of you over the years as I transition into my new role. I know most of you have probably heard my shtick. Whenever you call me, one of the first things I say is, "Living the dream." So ahora está viviendo el sueño. So that concludes the webcast portion of the call for today. Everybody who's online can now disconnect.