Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the O'Reilly Analyst Day. My name is Mark Merz. If everyone could go ahead and find a seat, we're gonna go ahead and get kicked off today. First of all, I'd like to welcome everyone, thank everyone for making the trip. I had a barrage of emails last night on all of the delays in flights, especially out of the Northeast, so we really appreciate everyone making the effort to get here. We'd like to welcome everyone who is listening online to the webcast. So as we get this kicked off today, we're gonna start with our forward-looking statement. So I'm just gonna read a piece of this.
We intend to be covered by, and we claim the protection of, the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as estimate, may, could, will, believe, expect, would, consider, should, anticipate, project, plan, intend, or similar words. Forward-looking statements speak only as to the date they were made, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Okay. Today, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about what you guys can expect for the day. As you could see from our schedule, we just had a meet and greet with management.
Hopefully, everybody had an opportunity to sit down and talk with our team. We'll have about two hours' worth of prepared comments and then a Q&A session. I would ask that during the prepared comment portion of it, which will be about an hour, if everyone would please just jot your questions down and hold them, and then we'll have about an hour of Q&A, and hopefully get to everybody, a couple of questions from everybody during that period of time. Did wanna mention a couple of other things. I know that we've historically had these events every year. We haven't had one since 2019 because of the pandemic, but we're so glad to be able to do it again. Going forward, we are gonna host these events every other year.
We still plan to rotate around our distribution centers, but as you know, we don't provide new information at these events. They're more just an opportunity for you to come in, be able to meet the management team, see the operation, see where the rubber hits the road in our DCs and our stores. We know it's very difficult for you guys to have to travel and schedule these things, so going forward, we're gonna do these events every other year. Before I go any further, I wanna talk about the most important thing there is here at O'Reilly, and that's culture. Here at O'Reilly, everything starts and ends with culture. Our secret sauce is our team and our culture.
A lot of you guys that I've talked to on the phone have asked me what separates O'Reilly from everyone else, and I tell you, it's not fancy, it's not a big secret, it's our team and our culture. Before every meeting that we have as an organization, someone is assigned to do culture. What that means is they have to pick one of our culture values, speak to what that means to them, and then speak to how they've seen that culture exhibited within the company. I'm not gonna do that specifically today, but I do wanna talk about one of our culture values, which is commitment. The last two and a half years or so have been absolutely unprecedented, as you all know. O'Reilly was tremendously successful during that period of time. There's a reason for that.
It was our team and our culture, our team's commitment to making sure we were there to take care of our customers, to making sure our customers had their vehicles to go to work, to go to the doctor, to go to the grocery store. The level of commitment exhibited by our team over the last couple years is unbelievable, and we are so grateful to the efforts that they put in to help us be a successful company. This event today, Charlie and his team did a fantastic job setting it up. The commitment that they provided for us today, we thank them so much. Charlie, we really appreciate what you did for us today. As I mentioned, at these events, we don't provide new information.
It's more of just peeling the onion back a little bit and talking about our operations and getting to hear from our executive team. There will be a couple of things that Brent will talk about today from distribution operations that peel the onion back a little bit, and I think you'll be excited to hear some of those things. With that, let me bring up the management team that's present here today. Our speakers today will be Greg Johnson, our CEO. Brad Beckham, our COO. Jeremy Fletcher, our CFO, and Brent Kirby, our CSCO. We also have multiple other members of our management team here today. Many of them are seated on the back row, and you'll get an opportunity to meet and talk to them today.
Eric Byrd, our director of treasury and investor relations is also here today. Then we also have Tom McFall, our previous CFO, who turned the reins over to Jeremy just a couple of months ago. Tom is here today, and he'll be available to answer any questions afterwards, if you would like. Also wanna call out a couple of Charles, he is our Distribution Center Manager. He has done a fantastic job getting the DC ready. We've got Ernie, we've got Thad, multiple other individuals. We've got Robert sitting here in the back. We've got Doug Bragg, he's our Executive Vice President of Store Operations. Significant level of experience in the automotive aftermarket here today for everyone to get to meet with.
With that, I think I'll turn it over to Greg Johnson and let him get the formal part of the day going.
Thank you everyone.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks everyone again for being here. We know it's it takes an effort and initiative to travel to some of the markets. This is a little easier to get to than Springfield, Missouri, which is why we've tried to take this event on the road and get you in some of our newer facilities to see where we're spending capital, how we're deploying capital across the country. A little bit about this facility. Our Lebanon DC has been open for about two and a half years. We used to operate out of a DC that was about half to 2/3 this size.
The market outgrew it, and we needed more distribution capacity, so we built this building, opened it up and, as I said, in, I guess right during the pandemic in about 2020. This facility is 408,000 sq ft. It's about average for what we're building, maybe a little bit on the larger side. It has the capacity to service between 280 and 300 stores out of this building. We're gonna do a DC tour following a Q&A, and you guys will get an opportunity to walk through the facility and see our facility. For those of you that have seen other distribution facilities, it's similar.
You know, every time we build a DC, we learn something, and try to improve upon that with our next DC. As Mark said, we're gonna disclose a little more, pull the covers back a little bit on DC expansion when Brent speaks here in a few minutes and talk about some of our other exciting DC projects. Wanted to make sure that you guys knew a few things about this facility before I get started. Today, my slides are slides that many of you have seen before. You know, I'm gonna talk about the company performance at a very high level. You guys have read the reports and participated on the calls, most of you.
I'm gonna talk about our industry briefly, and then I'm gonna turn it over to Brad and then Brent, and then Jeremy to wrap up. Clicker. Thank you, Jeremy. My first slide, a little bit about the company. We operate 5,873 stores here in the U.S. and 27 stores in Mexico. This is as of the end of the second quarter. We operate 28 distribution centers here in the U.S., + 6 small DCs in Mexico. I know we've announced a couple of times past couple of quarters our DC expansion in Mexico. Brent will share more about our upcoming DC project there, but to date we have six DCs operating there. We employ a little over 84,000 team members across the country.
Trailing 12-month sales were $13.7 billion as of the end of the second quarter. Our market cap as of July 21 was $45 billion. Our DIY/DIFM mix moves around from quarter to quarter slightly, but stays pretty much in line. As of the end of the year 2021, it was 59% DIY, 41% DIFM. A little bit on our 2022 results. Again, most of you have seen these numbers. Comparable store sales for year to date 4.5%. We talk a lot about two and three-year stacks. I mean, when you think back over what's happened and what's happened in retail and our company performance over the past couple of years, I think when you really start comparing us against our peers, you have to look beyond one year, especially shift retail DIFM year-over-year.
When you look at a two-year stack basis, that comp would be 21%, three year 28.5%. Gross margin year to date 51.6%, operating margin 21.1%, and we've opened 116 net new stores and are on track to meet our projection of 175 stores-185 stores for the year. Diluted earnings per share came in at $15.94. We generated $1.2 billion in free cash flow and repurchased $2.2 billion worth of our stock year to date under the stock repurchase program. Full year guidance. I think everyone saw our guidance with our changes with our earnings release last quarter. I'm not gonna read all these numbers to you. You've seen the numbers.
I do wanna comment a little bit on the elephant in the room, which is comparable store sales. We did lower our comparable store sales guidance after the second quarter. As I said on the call, you know, if we could have looked in a rearview mirror, had a crystal ball, and we had known that there was gonna be war in Europe, broad-based inflation, high fuel prices, and all the things we've experienced year to date, we would have had a different outlook from the beginning of the year. Based on performance in the first half of the year, the pressures we faced, we felt it prudent to revise our guidance .o 3.5%, and we feel good about that expectation for the back end of the year, allowing us to deliver that result.
I'll talk a little more about about the industry in my upcoming slides, but we do remain very bullish and optimistic on our industry. Our industry historically has proven to do well across various economic conditions, including, you know, moderate to below average economies. We feel good, very bullish, not only about the industry, obviously, but about our company's ability to perform in that environment as well. Now I'll shift gears, talk a little bit about the industry. This slide here, two charts on here. The green bars are miles driven and the blue line is average gas prices. As you recall, back during the Great Depression or Great Recession back in 2008 to 2012, we had a long-term raised, elevated gas prices, and miles driven suffered during that time slightly.
Didn't grow at the rate that it had grown leading up to that point. There's been some choppiness, but miles driven has continued to grow since then until 2020. Everybody knows 2020 wasn't a result or have any correlation to fuel prices at that time. It was about stay-at-home orders and the pandemic and people not driving to work and not driving the miles they would normally drive. Again, pandemic related. 2021, miles driven increased, fuel prices increased slightly. Year to date, we've seen spike in fuel prices this year. Luckily, the past few weeks, we've seen fuel prices start to come back down. That's good. During all of this, we've seen a 2.8% increase year to date in miles driven. So we feel very good about that. The consumer still is healthy.
The consumer is still willing to get out and drive their vehicles, and miles driven hasn't suffered as a result of the broad-based inflation and higher fuel prices. More industry drivers. These charts are more specific to the vehicle population itself. The top chart references on the green bars, the vehicle population in millions. The blue chart is light vehicle sales, the SAR there. You'll see just an elevation in vehicle sales through 2016. 2017 had a little hiccup, and then the last couple of years with the chip shortage and supply chain changes, everybody knows that new vehicle sales have softened. There just haven't been as many new vehicles available for purchase. It's driven prices up for used vehicles. The good news is the vehicle population has continued to grow throughout that.
Even though there's fewer new vehicles introduced into the vehicle population, the vehicle population continues to grow. When you align that with the chart below, which shows the age of the light-duty vehicles, you see continued growth through 2022 in the average age. The average age of light-duty vehicles is over 12 years. When you combine all the data on this chart, it's very good for our industry. Vehicles are better engineered. They're lasting longer. You see a vehicle on the road that's 10 years old, it may be on its second or third owner. The paint still looks good. Vehicle still runs good. That's more opportunities for wear and tear, breakage, more maintenance cycles. All these things are good for our industry. My last slide is industry landscape. Many of you have seen this slide before.
Basically, the top right quadrant of this slide shows the top ten auto parts companies in the U.S., the chains based on U.S. store count. AutoZone has the highest store count in the U.S., 6,115, followed by O'Reilly, Advance, and then it drops off because we're only looking at company-owned locations after the top three. The chart to the left shows a couple of things. The green bar shows the total number of parts stores in the U.S., and the bottom light green shows the percentage of ownership of these top ten chains of those number of stores. The interesting thing here is, since really 2017 or so, there hasn't been a lot of movement. It's stayed pretty close to that 37,000 stores in the U.S.
Historically, that number has grown and escalated the ownership, but it also has flattened out to around 53%. There hasn't been a lot of consolidation within the industry. The number of stores, the growth is really, when you look at the top two chains, us and AutoZone, we're opening stores to really make up that growth just within the top two companies there. On the bottom half of this slide, we talk about the size of the aftermarket. The aftermarket as a whole is based on the fact book, the ACA F act book from last year, is $329 billion. Now, we try to extrapolate out of that what our market capacity is, what our addressable market is.
If you look at that slide, the biggest portion of that is professional sales, auto parts professional sales, and then labor component of professional sales, followed by DIY and tire sales. When you back out the labor on the DIFM side, glass and body collision, you back out tires, and you back out margin associated with additional markup on the professional side of the business, and you end up with our component of professional sales from O'Reilly to that customer and DIY, we feel like that number is somewhere between $130 billion and $140 billion. That would be our addressable market. We see that as a very positive because we see that as tremendous opportunity for us to continue to get out there and grow our market share.
With that, I'll turn it over to the guy that's responsible for getting out there and growing our market share. Brad?
Okay. Thanks, Greg. Good morning, everybody. It's great to see everybody in person after the last couple years. I'm excited to have everybody in our Nashville facility and get out and see some stores. Our teams here are very proud of the facility and our stores the same when we get out in the stores. You know, they take great pride in that, not just because of you, no disrespect, but because of our customers who is our VIP each and every day. Wanna start out like Mark talked about with our culture. You know, I started with O'Reilly in the summer of 1996 as a 17-year-old kid, and it's the only job I've ever had is here at O'Reilly. 26 years this year.
Started out sweeping floors and just had the opportunity growing up in Oklahoma after we bought Hi/LO to move down to the Texas market and run my own store and be a district manager and all these things that I had the great fortune of with our massive growth over the last couple decades. Everything at O'Reilly, to Mark's point this morning, starts with our culture. I know in a lot of companies I'm sure there's some type culture that's documented, you know, a banner hanging on the wall. I can tell you over the last 25, 26 years, the week that I went to work for O'Reilly back in the summer of 1996, our culture wasn't even really defined. You know, it wasn't on a piece of paper. It wasn't on a culture card.
It wasn't on the wall. It was all these things behind me here that I felt as a new team member, you know, that we have for every one of our customers and our team. You know, when I think about, you know, pride, not in a selfish way, but pride in our team, pride in our teamwork. You know, when I think about ownership, you know, passion and intense focus on our fundamentals. You know, Greg and Mark already talked about it a little bit. Our business, even though it's not easy, it's really a simple business. You know, it's about, you know, giving great customer service, having professional parts people and all these things that so many of you have heard us talk about. Really, our culture hasn't changed a lot in the last 26 years. A lot's changed, but that hasn't.
I just wanna make sure that everybody remembers that, you know, when you look through the numbers and you look past even like our industry-leading supply chain and the way we run stores, we absolutely work in a people business that the O'Reilly family really founded those foundational things that we ended up documenting is our culture that, again, to Mark's point, we live each and every day. At the heart of our culture is promote from within. You know, somebody like me that didn't even go to college has been very fortunate to grow up with a company that promoted virtually 100% from within, you know, especially in store operations. I had the fortune to grow up in our stores and, you know, run districts and regions.
You know, we're extremely proud that really over the last several decades, we've never had to hire outside the company for our field leadership. You know, our EVP of stores and professional sales that's in the back room, Doug Bragg, you know, he's on his 31st year at O'Reilly. Started out, you know, in the distribution center loading trucks, you know, and then working in stores and selling parts and managing stores and similar story to mine even before me. We roughly have the U.S. broke up into thirds. We have three SVPs of store operations and sales. Robert Dumas that oversees the eastern part of the country is here with us.
Between those four top leaders in store operations, they average, I think, 22 years, not only in the industry, but here at O’Reilly or in a company that we acquired. So that's incredibly important to us when it comes to really understanding what our installers, what our professional shops are going through every day. This isn't a business that somebody can just walk into and retail's retail or business is business. It's really you have to have a good understanding of, you know, what make those shops tick, what really happens on the counter every day. You know, our business is a consulted visit. You know, when you see our stores, we have, you know, several thousand SKUs that are out on the front floor, but the far majority of the parts are in the back room, so to speak, behind that counter.
Even when you move on to the next level leadership here, we have 13 divisions in the United States, and every one of those division vice presidents ran an O'Reilly store. They started out in the stores, every single one of them. They ran a store. They ran a successful district. They ran a successful region. Now they're leading, you know, groups of 500, 600, 700 stores for the company. We're just extremely proud of our promote from within philosophy that we've been able to hold on to, and we feel like that's a somewhat intangible, but something that we really wanna remind you, such an important part of what we do here at O'Reilly. Okay.
You know, moving on past culture and people, you know, the next thing we feel like has kinda been our secret sauce over the decades is our dual market strategy. You know, wanna remind everybody that, you know, really before myself and all of us in the room in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, you know, the O'Reilly family founded the company on a distribution business. You know, delivering and fulfilling for independent parts stores, you know, independent partners. Then over the kind of the 1960's and 1970's grew into the professional installer and it wasn't until the mid-1980's that our company started really in the DIY business. The decision back then was, you know, we have this great professional business. We have these independent partners. We have our business that we service the installers.
You know, we have this great supply chain. We have the right parts, right place, right time. We have professional parts people. Why not open the doors and extend hours and, you know, service the retail business? Back then, before that, if a retail customer wanted to buy a part from O'Reilly, they had to go to an installer and have that, you know, installed on their car to buy from O'Reilly, so to speak. You know, just remind everybody, we came from the professional business and, over time we've evolved into this, you know, 50/50 dual market strategy. We're a little bit heavy, retail, to Greg's point, especially after we acquired CSK on the West Coast. We didn't lose any wholesale business or professional.
We just, you know, had the opportunity to have, you know, all the retail business that CSK did on the West Coast and up in the Great Lakes area. You know, dual market strategy, you know, we see a lot of opportunities. I get asked very often even before this meeting, you know, where do you see the opportunity? We see the opportunity in both. You know, when you look at the addressable market that Greg talked to us about earlier, it's incredible. You know, while we feel, and I know most of you know the professional business most likely over the next decade is probably gonna grow on the macro at a faster rate than the retail business.
We have great retail competitors that do a lot of revenue, and so we still see a lot of opportunity with our big national competitors as well as independents to consolidate the market. Even though the professional business may be growing faster on the whole, we see a tremendous opportunity over this next decade to continue to learn to be a better and better DIY supplier, you know, retail supplier. We continue to be very excited about both sides of our business. To talk about DIY a little bit, Ted Wise, that was our Chief Operating Officer for a long time, that was a 45-year veteran, started as a driver, ended up our Chief Operating Officer that a lot of you knew.
I remember growing up in our stores and moving to expansion markets, and one of Ted's favorite thing to remind us as operators was always, you know, we were pushing for the best location, and obviously location is incredibly important to the DIY customer. Ted always reminded us that you can have an outstanding location in our business and have an average store. Reverse of that, you can have an average location and have an outstanding store. What I mean by that is our business is about, it's about people. It's about that excellent customer service and that top-notch customer service that we always talk about. It's about going the extra mile. These sayings down at the bottom of this slide are actually what we call Charlie-isms.
Charlie O'Reilly was relentless with all of us that grew up in the business about being professional parts people. You know, always being the most professional, friendliest parts store in town and backing that up with never say no, and rolling out the red carpet for our customers and all these things that may seem intangible, but they're so important not only to the professional side but to the DIY business. Again, keep in mind that when you go out in the stores, we want you to look around the back room.
You know, there's, you know, 25%-30% of our SKUs in the front room where a customer would walk in and pick up an air freshener or a, you know, bottle of wax or an oil change, but the far majority of the SKUs in our stores are in the back part of the house, so to speak, behind that counter. It's not like walking in a, you know, a full retail company. You're walking into a store that our DIY customers, they need help. They need advice. They don't know always exactly what they need to diagnose their car, so it's a consulted visit. That's why we stress that, you know, the immediacy of need that Brent will talk about here in a second and having those professional parts people.
Obviously location is critical, but the most important thing is these people that are in these pictures here, having the right team members that are in the local market, that know the community, they live in the community, they match the market, they know the customers, and they're going the extra mile every day to take care of those customers on the DIY side of the business. To talk about professional just a minute. You know, y'all, every one of you here is just worn out. That this business is about relationships. It's about service. You know, Brent's the one I don't have here to not steal Brent's thunder is that availability.
You know, that immediacy of need, all those, you know, million SKUs that we have deployed throughout the country, those 28 distribution centers, all these hub stores in our 5,900 locations. You know, with all the history we have over the last couple decades building that sales history for all those SKUs that are behind that counter, you know, the professional customer, they, if you go out and talk to them, they buy from people that they know and trust. It's not transactional. You know, they're the best installers in the market, the shop that one of you would take your car to, time is money. It's not about where you can get the cheapest installation. It's where you know you can get in and out. It's a quality job.
You're gonna have a warranty when your car rolls out of the bay. It's all about that immediacy of need, and it's about this relationship. You know, this first picture here is one of our territory sales managers working with one of our shops. You know, we also have here, in the middle, as you see out in our stores, we've made a big investment into technology. You know, our ability to get that part from the time that ticket prints in the store, sometimes it's our team members printing that ticket.
A lot of times these days, it's the shop that's buying through our B2B platform, kicking out a pick ticket in the store, and our professional parts people pulling that part and getting it out of the store as quick as possible and getting that part delivered in an obviously safe manner, but an efficient manner to get that car off the rack for that installer. You know, our professional shops, again, time is money. You know, they're employing technicians that are turning the wrenches right out of school, and these guys and gals that are turning wrenches, they get incentivized by how many jobs they do as quick as possible. They get paid what we call flag time.
If a shop is waiting on a part for a day or two, you know, ordering it from somewhere that it can't get there in 15, 20, 30 minutes, their shop is really not gonna be here in five or 10 years because their good technicians are gonna roll their toolbox down the street or to an OE dealer or to another installer because they can't make a living.
You know, our TSMs, our territory sales managers, they're out there always, not just hard selling, but they're out there really consulting with that shop to make sure they're focused on technology, they're focused on service, and they're able to retain great technicians. Kind of to wrap up here on professional, you know, beyond the service and the people, you know, we feel like we have world-class programs for these professional customers. You know, they're not just looking again for a transactional partner. They're looking for somebody that's making investments for them in training, in technology platforms. You know, we get a lot of questions about digital business and B2C business, but sometimes we don't talk enough or we don't get asked enough frankly about our B2B business.
We have built an incredible, B2B business over the decades. You know, when I started in 1996, one of the first people I met out of the corporate office was coming to my hometown in Oklahoma from Springfield to install an old green screen dummy terminal in a shop. That was 1996, and we were connected to our installers back in the mid and late 1990s. We built a really great B2B business. It's very sticky. It's very efficient for not only us, but the productivity of the shop and, you know, we're very proud of that. Same thing with our training. You know, this training you see here in the bottom right is not our team member training. This is our professional installers that we bring into the very room you sit in today.
We bring in our technicians from our shops, and we bring in professionals that we're not selling them product. We're keeping them up on the latest technology. It could be everything from basic drivability things that we're helping our shops train them up from our suppliers that give us help and support from a training aspect. We may be talking about regular undercar, underhood brakes. We may be talking about newer technology. We have classes on ADAS. You know, that's one of the new technologies that's a huge opportunity for us. You know, we train on that. You know, so we're bringing our installers in, and they see a premium to partnering with O'Reilly because of that world-class training we have and what we call real-world training.
That's a huge part of the partnership, and then on the bottom left is just a reminder that, you know, our program for our installers or our professional customers is called Certified Auto Repair. What that would be is our program for an independent shop that may not be a big national or regional account or a OE supplier that has a lot of resources. This is how we partner with our shops, and we help them fund things that they need to do for their shop. If they need a new sign, if they need to improve their parking lot, if they need to improve their lobby or their customer experience, that's how we partner with them to make sure that they have a nationwide warranty to compete against a regional or national type account.
We really feel like those are just the highlights of many programs we have to partner with our installers. Just real quick. What did I do?
Looks like you ejected one off.
Okay, I can wing it while they're bringing it up. Move on real quick, just give an update on our store growth. May just have you look at your deck. I think I hit something. Thank you. Nice job.
Thanks, man.
You bet. No, no big surprises here. You know, we feel like we're projected to land kinda in the midpoint of our guidance of 175-185 net new stores in 2022. We're on track there. Just a little bit of history in the bottom left about our historic acquisitions. You know, a couple years after I started, we acquired Hi/LO. At that time, we had, you know, 200 stores. Hi/LO had roughly 200. We doubled the size of our company, and, you know, that was pretty historic on Hi/LO. Mid-State that was based out of here in Nashville, and all the ones in between that you well know about as well as Mayasa down in Mexico.
You know really where we're growing, most all you know kinda where we still have a gap in footprint, kinda between Washington, D.C. and New York City. Wanna give a quick update. We're very excited about the Mayasa team that we have operating now down in Mexico. You know, we're a couple years into the acquisition of Mayasa. All of us have spent quite a bit of time down there, a little bit less during COVID, but just wanna highlight that we have an incredible leadership team down in Guadalajara. It was a family-run business that we knew from the industry for a long time.
They were a very respected family that ran just an incredible wholesale business out of Guadalajara and had the other five distribution centers, really small distribution centers in other regions of Mexico, but their main facility is in Guadalajara. Brent's gonna give an update on distribution, so I won't talk about that, but really just wanna highlight that we still got a lot of work to do in Mexico. We're still very small. Our business today down there is more of a jobber business. If you think about the United States maybe 20, 30 years ago in terms of we think it's fragmented now. You know, again, when O'Reilly went into the retail business, you think about all the independents that were in the U.S. versus the consolidation that's happened over the last, you know, 20, 30 years.
You know, you kinda go back to those times in the Mexican market. We have a big wholesale business, a big independent business, a big installer business, and really we're just getting started, you know, from a DIY retail standpoint. If you can see the pictures on the left, the prototype store in the top left and the front floor on the bottom left, for those of you that have seen our stores, that may look familiar to you. That's one of our new prototype facilities. ORMA was the Mayasa team's retail store locations, and so we partnered with them. They had very small showrooms in their store. They were, again, majority wholesale. We've partnered with them.
Our team in the U.S. is kinda teaching their team how to fish when it comes to DIY, building planograms, you know, all those type things. We already have a couple prototypes that is gonna be a easy sign change down the road when we feel like that's the right thing to do. Just keep in mind that, you know, we're new to the market. They know the markets. They know the culture, and we're learning as much or more from them as they're learning from us. Over time, we'll figure out what the exact right strategy and the timing of branding. Again, Brent will talk a little bit more about that here in a second. I'm gonna wrap up and hand it over to Brent.
We always start with culture, to Mark's point, and a lot of times we end with humbly saying that our mission statement internally has always been, we'll be the dominant auto parts supplier in all our markets. That's what we focus on every day, is taking care of our customers better than anybody else. With that, I will turn it over to Brent.
Thanks, Brad. Good morning. Thank you guys for making the trip to Nashville today. We appreciate you spending some time with us. Good to be back in person for these kinda things. I'm gonna talk a little bit about best in class inventory availability and how we do that with a consciousness to controlling our dollars and inventory and talk a little bit about life cycle of product. You know, one of the things that's extremely important in our business is early late model coverage, having that faster than the competition, being out there. You know, our merchandising team and our inventory control team do a great job of looking at vehicles and operation data, looking at you know, as parts are coming into the marketplace and into the parts cycle, looking at that data. We look at it regionally.
We have inventory control analysts that look at different regions of the country. We look at those demand triggers, and then we start integrating those parts into our DCs, and we'll talk a little bit about our distribution network here in just a moment. That gives us the ability to see those parts and pull those parts where there's demand across the store base. As those parts get more into the mainstream of the demand cycle, you know, we develop good, better, best offerings. Our teams are constantly, every year we look, we work with Brad and the operations team to look at how do we push parts that are needed into our stores, into the four walls of our stores.
We continually focus on getting those parts as close to the customer as we can as they hit the peak of that demand curve. At the same time, we're also looking at parts as their demand curve is waning, and we start pulling those back, and we utilize our supply chain and our network of distribution nodes to pull those parts back first to hub stores, and then up into DCs, and then ultimately into our national DC as those parts are at the end of their life cycle. This is something that's constantly going on within our merchandising team, our inventory control team. We work very closely with Brad and the operations team. You know, a store manager can call and request parts, if they're getting asked for parts.
We also look at demand signals that are coming from those stores for those parts to make sure that we get the parts best placed within our supply chain to meet that demand while keeping an eye on our inventory investment. Talking a little bit further about that network, what does that network look like? We have an industry-leading, best-in-class supply chain. We have the ability to deliver parts more quickly than many of our competitors and we focus on that every day because speed is really important. When you've got a car that's on a rack, you need a part, it's how quick can I get that part, and that's who gets the sale. We recognize that, and we've continued to invest in our distribution infrastructure. Greg mentioned it earlier. We've got 28 distribution centers domestically in the U.S.
They're located in the populous centers of the country. We have multiple runs that go from those DCs to those stores multiple times a day. Plus, we replenish our stores five days a week. Not many companies have that frequency of replenishment, but we do. Our industry demands it, and we have the capability to do that. We also have a network of hub stores, and we have those hub stores segregated. They have anywhere from 30,000 SKUs up to 95,000 SKUs. Again, depending on the market density and the market demand, that allows us to place pools of inventory closer than even our DCs can place them within the local markets. Those individual hub stores make runs to the stores that they service, their spoke stores, throughout the day.
We can literally, you can walk into a store today and say, "You know, I need an alternator for a 1997 Ford Taurus." Our parts professional can look and say, "I don't have it, but I can have it by 3:00 P.M." That's how important that is to be able to get that sale. We continue to invest in this network, to grow it, to continue to be able to scale these capabilities to serve customers across the distribution nodes. We've referenced this a few times. We're gonna kinda peel the onion back a little bit and give you a preview to the further investments that we're making in our industry-leading supply chain with our next three distribution centers. We're excited about a distribution center that we're gonna be opening on the island of Puerto Rico.
That's gonna begin servicing stores there as we begin to expand on the island in early 2023. That can service up to 50 stores. Tremendous market down there on the island. We're not there yet, but we're excited to be going. Our next distribution project, Brad mentioned this as well, is in Mexico. This facility is currently under construction. It's over 300,000 sq ft, and we're very excited to get it open in the late first half of 2023 as we continue to scale and bring our distribution and parts availability model to our expansion in Mayasa. Pretty exciting.
The last project on here is a relocation of a legacy DC at our home base in Springfield that's actually grown across many buildings, as you can imagine, over time, moving that into a new building and giving us some additional capacity there, especially for direct imports and processing those, as well as replenishment for the stores in that area. We continue to invest to grow our distribution and supply chain capabilities, and these are the next projects that we're very excited to share with you today. We also go to market, you know, product is extremely important in our business and quality of product is extremely important in our business.
Obviously, when a customer makes an investment, you know, in a part, they need the part to work, they need it to get their car back on the road, and they need it to last. You know, we historically have gone to market very strategically with a blend of proprietary brands as well as well-known national brands. We continue to go to market that way. You know, we have over the course of time, our proprietary brands continue to grow and our merchandising team, our sourcing team does a tremendous job with quality, along with feedback from Brad and the operations team. We've been able to grow many of these national brands to scale that we didn't even think was possible, to be honest with you.
Today, over 50% of our revenue is made up of our national brands, our proprietary brands rather. When you go behind the counter to hard parts, that percentage is actually even higher. We continue to see our professional customers and our retail customers, you know, gain affinity for these brands and we continue to grow those. We also maintain and recognize that there are many national brands that still have tremendous affinity with customers, especially in ag and heavy duty and, you know, different specialty segments within the automotive aftermarket. We continue to maintain great relationships with these leading companies and continue to sell their brands as well. You know, focusing on the customer, you heard Brad talk a lot about our continued focus on both the DIY and the professional customer.
You heard Greg talk about the market opportunity that we have out there today. You know, we've continued to really focus on being there and being available to our customers whenever, wherever they choose to connect with us, whether they visit a store, whether they call, or whether they click on one of our websites. We certainly saw, you know, the investments we've made in our retail website continue to pay off coming out of the pandemic. We saw customers going there more than ever before for information on parts, support, and using our curbside pickup, which we launched, you know, during the pandemic as well, just for convenience and again, immediacy of need and delivery of those parts. We continue to invest there.
Brad mentioned our B2B capability with our field professional sales team, as well as our FirstCallOnline.com, our B2B website, which continues to be a preferred method for many of our shops to do business with us because again, it takes friction out, it builds speed, it allows them to get the cars off the rack more quickly and make more money in the course of the day. We've continued to invest, you know, through the pandemic and through the last several years. I know the last time we talked to you guys, it was two years ago, we were talking about some of the investments and changes we were making to improve the content on our website, to improve our search capabilities. You know, those efforts have continued in earnest.
We have teams of folks that work on product descriptions, product spec information, how it searches through the search engines. We've developed video content, how-to content, 360 spin images. We do a lot here to improve, you know, being the first to come up on an organic search when a customer looks for auto parts near me or when they type in a specific auto part. The other thing that we've done is, you know, speed again is critical. When you look at our retail website, as sales have continued to grow, 75% of those sales are picked up in a store. Again, it speaks to the fact that the customer can't wait on that part. They gotta get their car back on the road.
Our supply chain and our ability to give them a time definite promise of when that part will be at that store for them to pick up is critical. We've worked on our backend distribution logic on the website, so it looks across multiple DCs now to deliver the best time definite promise for that part when a customer's looking for that part and ready to make a purchase. Ship to store is another thing. We've talked about the capability within our supply chain, the pools of inventory within our distribution centers and our hub stores. You know, the other thing that customers are really looking for is, "I need the part." Before we made these changes, a customer could only see the parts in that store.
You had to zip into a store, you had to shop the local store, you could see the part selection in that store. We've changed that so that customers can now look and they can see not only what's in the store, but they can see what can be shipped to the store and by what time and what day. That unlocks the capability of our supply chain upstream, and we've seen tremendous adoption of that. 50% of our revenue through the retail website is actually coming from something that was shipped to the store to meet that time definite promise. We're having great success there. We're gonna continue to expand that logic to our B2B website as we move forward.
Today, many times that's a phone call, working with our professional team in the back of the store to get that time definite promise. We're gonna be able to syndicate that across our B2B website, and we think that's gonna be very powerful for our professional customers as well. The other thing that we take very seriously is voice of customer. We have a voice of customer framework that we have stood up to capture survey data from customers, retail and professional, across all of our websites, folks that visit our stores, our loyalty customers. We continually prioritize our user experience enhancements based on their feedback to continue to take friction out of the shopping experience. We've talked a lot about images, you know, 360 spin images and ability to zoom on images.
When you think about shopping an auto part online, you know, does the bolt pattern match up? Does the pulley look like the one I'm trying to replace? Those become very real questions when you're trying to replace that part and trying to find out, you know, where you can get it the quickest. This is something we've grown tremendously in terms of the quality of our content over the last several years. We're continuing to invest in this. We have over 125,000 360-degree spin images where you can spin the image on the website, you can zoom on it, you can actually look at the details on the website. This is work that continues and we're excited about, you know, how the customers are receiving it.
The other thing that we do is we recognize the importance, just like when you walk in our store. It's very important that we've got a professional parts person behind the counter, somebody that really knows parts, knows how to help me get what I need and give me the confidence when I walk out of there and make that purchase that it's gonna work on my vehicle. You know, the other thing when you're shopping online, you need support sometimes with chat, and we do live chat with customers. We have parts professionals that chat through the website, that answer questions, and follow up with customers to try to give them the assurance that they're getting the part that they need. We've taken that chat platform. We're continuing to expand it.
We're actually using it internally for our store team members to be able to contact our customer support team. Before, that was a phone call, now they can do it through our chat platform. We're seeing good receipts there. We also have a technical support team that actually really knows parts, deep knowledge of parts, and if a store needs help with that, they can now chat with that tech team as well versus having to call and wait. We're gonna continue to add speed and credibility to how we support customers whenever and wherever they choose to engage with our brand. Loyalty customers. We have a growing and a vibrant loyalty base, and we've continued to see this base grow and become more active over the last several years.
We continue to work on how we interact with these customers. Our program's very simple. There's not a lot of gimmicks with it. You spend a dollar, you get a point. You get 150 points, you get a $5 reward. You know, we were sending those rewards via email or snail mail, which we got feedback from customers. Snail mail was too slow. They didn't get their points fast enough. You know what? We got rid of it. We enabled text, so now we do text and email. We launched that earlier this year. We've gone to fully electronic delivery, and we're very excited about that. We've got great feedback from our retail customers on that change.
We continue to use this program to actively engage, you know, our most loyal customers and to continue to be their first choice for the parts they need for their vehicles. With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Fletcher.
All right. Thanks, Brent. I just wanna maybe start off by adding to what the rest of the team has said this morning to thank you all for making the trip out here to our distribution facility. It's great to see everybody in person again. I'm gonna spend a few moments and discuss some financial highlights of the company. We are coming up on that hour timeframe and wanna be sure that we leave time for Q&A. We'll be a little bit brief in my comments, and that's by design. You know, the goal of our time today is providing an opportunity for all of you to hear from Brad and Brent and Greg to about the core fundamentals of our business.
A few things that I would highlight for you as we just think about just the financial performance of the company. Other thing I'd tell you is that everything that you're gonna see here today, you can pull all this financial data for yourself. There's nothing really new or fresh on my slides. I think in particular, as we look at just a longer term view of our store and revenue growth, one of the keys, I think one of the key advantages that we provide, one of the important characteristics of our company is the consistency by which we've grown the company over several years. For sure, you see a level step change in the pandemic. We saw our business come on and surge.
I think what this slide reflects both in store growth and in sales, but then also what the next slide looks like when we talk about comparable store sales performance is we've been able to perform consistently financially, grow and continue to provide high level of returns for our customers because of all the things that the guys have talked about already today. Our focus on customer service, our commitment to executing our dual market strategy, the competitive advantages we gained in availability and distribution, and that's really what drives what you see here. For sure, comparable store sales, it's been an exciting few years for us and I think as much as anything, been very pleased with what we've seen in 2022.
Even though we've had to reevaluate our guidance, it's a challenging process to come into this year to set where we would be there. Still feel very favorably about where we're at to be able to comp on top of the comp on top of the comp and to drive year-to-date comparable store sales at a three-year stack up over 28. Moving on to operating profit dollar growth. This is really kind of the lifeblood of how we think about our business financially. Our goal is to drive growth in operating profit dollars. Lots of different factors drive into that.
A significant level step change up in that as we've seen through the pandemic and have been able to sustain that level of profitability as we have thought about an enhanced level of productivity in our stores, being able to produce more per unit against a fixed cost that the teams have managed very effectively has driven us to a level step change in our profitability and the economics of our business. That's been a very positive step and something that we all feel very good about in the sense that we've been able to sustain it. Obviously it translates into EPS. You know, we kinda get caught up in the individual years and thinking about what the next quarter or the next year's gonna look like.
It's always good to step back and look and see that over the course of the last 10 years we've grown EPS at a compounded rate of 23% per year. As much as we've seen that accelerate during the course of the pandemic, the volume that we've seen, this is really a reflection of how we execute our business model, of how we approach our markets and all the things that you've talked about, we've talked about today from a core fundamentals perspective. It's always nice to see the pretty line going up at that level of pace for sure. Moving on. Maybe spend a little bit more time here on just our free cash flow performance. Obviously, all of what I've talked about so far translates into strong free cash flow generation.
We've seen that continue to accelerate, good productivity out of our deployed assets, continue to see net inventory investment drive. You see a little bit less CapEx over the course of the last couple years as we've talked about, a heightened plan this year and still feel very positive about our ability to deploy capital within our business. Really that transitions us into the next slide in how we think about use of capital. So for those of you that have been familiar with our company for a long period of time, there's nothing new and unique about the bullets at the top of this slide. Certainly this has been a more heightened year for share repurchase, but our focus really hasn't changed.
We still see our ability to grow and invest within our existing company by deploying capital along these priorities. It continues to be where we think we provide the best value to our shareholders. We're always gonna invest in our existing store base. We've talked about initiatives today, making sure we've got that inventory availability advantage. We think we continue to have great opportunity to grow within the United States and within Mexico from a greenfield perspective. We continue to be an opportunistic acquirer to consolidate the industry.
You know, those deals, the big deals maybe aren't as prevalent as they were in the past, but we continue to, where we see opportunities to really acquire talent and insight and experience within markets, that continues to be a great use of our capital. To the extent that we generate more cash than we deploy back into that, right? We're breaking records. We wanna be able to return that capital to shareholders. You see a little bit of a snapshot in time here on the graph, the cumulative repurchases since 2014. Really since the beginning of our buyback program in January of 2011, we've returned over $20 billion of capital to our shareholders in the share repurchase program.
For sure, our focus when we think about capital structure is still heavily committed to investment grade. We've talked about our leverage targets there. They've been pretty consistent over the course of time. We think our business operates best at those levels, and we'll continue to work back to those. Really, as we think about our share repurchase program, our focus has been really to be consistent, to always be largely in the market, buying back when we can, to have the success of our business reflected in our ability to continue to deploy capital in that way, and then to be on top of that opportunistic when we think the conditions would support that. That's really what you see in this slide.
Again, the results look a little bit different quarter to quarter, but the strategy I think largely has stayed the same. Okay. Well, I guess with that in mind, we've run up right at. Look at that. Like right on the mark. Mark's gonna be so proud of us. We're right there, so we can start maybe the Q&A. I'll turn it back over to Mark.
Okay. Thanks, guys. That was a fantastic presentation. Just a couple of quick little housekeeping things.
Perfect.
The bathroom is out the door to the right if anyone needs to use the facility. Please help yourself. There's plenty of food and beverages back behind there, so please feel free to get up and grab something to eat or drink if you need to. One little item I did wanna mention, and I know you're gonna be very disappointed in this, I'm not gonna be able to join our second store tour today. That's not the disappointing piece. Greg is also not going to be able to join our second store tour today. As you can imagine, risk is something that we at O'Reilly take very seriously, so we all can't travel together at the same time. Greg and I will be on an earlier leg that is leaving Nashville today.
We will certainly be here for the lunch, we'll be here for the distribution tour, we'll be here for our first store tour, but we'll have to jump out before the second tour. Now, Jeremy and Brent and Brad and the rest of the team will still be here for the second store. We're gonna go ahead and jump into the Q&A section. How we're gonna do this, Eric is gonna start on this side of the room, I'll start on the other side of the room. We're just gonna go back and forth. Just please raise your hand, we'll hand you the mic. Please speak into the mic so those that are listening on the webcast will be able to hear the question.
One of our team up in the front will do it. Now, I've gotta go back and give the first question to Simeon here. I think he's gonna fall out of his chair if I don't do that, so.
That's harsh.
Hey, everyone. Hopefully you can hear me on the webcast. Thanks for the question, Mark. First question is in terms of the inflation that the business is experiencing, I guess the ticket growth, how much of it do you think is structurally tied to labor, supply chain, versus how much is tied to commodity prices? Should I ask my second question now?
Sure.
The follow-up is, you know, looking at this chart of EBIT growth, it's been pretty astounding. I think this year if we filled in the green line, it would be flattish. The question is, will the same level of comp going forward produce the same level of incremental margin going forward, or does the business just go through some type of EBIT digestion period? Thanks.
Jeremy, you wanna take a shot at that?
I can maybe answer the second question first. You know, it's kinda hard to know today what you know where we'll settle at in terms of what the broader inflationary environment's gonna be. I don't know that there's anything fundamental in our business that's changed as we sit here today versus how we would've thought about incremental changes in how we leverage our expenses on a go forward basis. Obviously, you know, still lots of things changing within the cost environment. You know, we're cognizant of what could change there. You know, our expectation is that we've got a lot of pricing power in our business. To the extent we see pressures, we can price them through, and sometimes that affects what you see in the gross numbers.
It which makes it hard to say, "Hey, this is the comp that you lever at," or something along those lines. I think fundamentally, where we're at today, we think is a sustainable level of productivity off of our existing assets and the store sales that we see.
I may jump in there real quick, Simeon, on the second one. When you think about our margins, and you talk to Brent and I and the teams in the back about just staffing and everything that's happened in the last couple years, you know, we found a lot of productivity. You know, we had to figure out, you know, where there was some efficiencies. You know, there was such customer demand and a little bit more turnover than we would like. We found some productivity in some areas. Some tech investments, some just, you know, on the street, you know, figuring out how to do more with less.
At the same time, when you look at the comps to last year, you know, there's many areas of distribution and store ops that we were running even more lean than we should from a customer service standpoint in just DC to store to customer. You know, it's a little bit of both. While we found a lot of productivity, and we do have a little bit more turnover right now, nothing material, but in our DCs and stores, and we're just gonna continue to manage the business for the mid and long term. We're not gonna. There's things we could take out for the short term, but it wouldn't be the right thing to do from a customer service and a long-term perspective.
Simeon, on your first question on inflation and input, we're not gonna, obviously, break out, you know, how much of that's each of those buckets. You hit on the buckets. You know, labor impacts both us and our suppliers, so that's an input cost both to SG&A and to cost of goods from our suppliers. As far as elasticity and commodities, you know, there's not that many categories that we see as being truly elastic in our industry. We're in a nondiscretionary category out there where people don't come in. It's not a want-based purchase, it's a needs-based purchase in our environment. So when you talk about elasticity and commodities, we think about oil, base oil prices going up and down, and our prices and competitor prices always fluctuate up and down quarter to quarter based on indexes.
Same thing with lead float and batteries. You're gonna see that in an inflationary environment or a normal environment. You're gonna see those commodity prices move up and down. The one thing that's a little different in the environment we're in today from a commodity standpoint is some of the packaging. You know, we've seen some input cost with containers, both aluminum and plastics, for some of our products that have driven some price increases up. As always, our merchandise team pushes back on everything, and we negotiate price increases. You know, our expectation is when things normalize, you know, we're gonna try to keep most of that margin. We're not gonna go start reducing prices because some of that that's coming down.
You know, we're very rational in our industry with pricing, and I assume that will be consistent going forward. Barring, you know, someone in our industry doing something crazy with pricing, we would remain very rational as we have and try to maintain the price points that we've built.
Good morning. It's Michael Lasser from UBS. You mentioned the goal is to generate incremental gross operating profit dollars. Over the last several decades, the auto parts retail industry has become significantly more consolidated today than it was a ways back.
At the same time, the competitive intensity is rising, as evidenced by some of the price investments that O'Reilly's made, some of the price investments that AutoZone has made. Now the industry's left with a lot of really big, really strong competitors. Does all of that mean that on the same level of sales, it's just gonna be more difficult, more expensive to drive the same level of operating profit dollar growth?
You want me to, Jeremy?
Yeah, I don't think that that's the conclusion we would come to, Michael. We still think that the industry presents a lot of opportunities for us. We saw it on some of the slides. There's a lot of fragmentation. We think that there are places where we can still execute, enhance how we go to market with all the types of things that we've talked about today and continue to gain share. We think that what we've seen is a level step change up in just how to think about operating profit in our business as we've gained more share during the pandemic. We see that as sustainable and we continue to believe we've got opportunities.
You know, I think it's probably a misnomer to say that as a business has consolidated, it's just automatically become more competitive. When the top ten chains had 40% versus the 53% that they have today, it was still a pretty competitive business. This is a grind-it-out type of industry that we're in. It's both been, I think, something that over the course of time you have to work really hard to get at, but still feel like we have the same competitive advantages in how we go to market in our business model and in our culture and our people to be able to drive good results and gain share.
It's all about execution. I mean, when you get to the nuts and bolts of it's about execution. If you remember my slide, you know, in the addressable market that is still out there for us, you know, we represent 10%-11% market share today. When Brad and I talk to our teams at leadership conference coming up in January, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about opportunity. We're not gonna talk about the market share we have, we're gonna talk about the market share we don't have, and we're gonna do what we always do. Our team's very competitive. They're out there wanting to take market share every day, and we're gonna continue to give them the tools they need to do so and motivate them to do so.
I remember I've told this story many times. I don't know if I've told it to you guys, but Keith Childers, who was Brad's counterpart when he was SVP, got up on the stage and Brad talked about our mission statement being the dominant auto parts supplier in all of our market. Keith gets up there, and Keith's got a heck of a presence when you see Keith up there on stage. He's a big guy, and he's walking around and he's preaching to the team. He said, "What does it mean to be the dominant auto parts supplier in all of our markets? Does it mean 51% of the business? No.
It means if there's a car in one of our competitors' store, there's an opportunity for us to take market share. That's the message we continue to drive to our teams every day. It's all about execution, providing a higher level of service than our competitors, and doing what we've done successfully since 1957.
My follow-up question is, what are the three biggest opportunities to improve gross margin from here, especially now that proprietary brands make up more than 50% of the sales? It does, as part of that, it seems like more of the CapEx dollars for the distribution network are going to retrofit and resize some of the existing DCs. How does that play into the gross margin as well?
Yeah, I'll start that off and then let Jeremy jump in there. I don't know if I'm gonna, we're gonna name three things. You know, Michael, the DCs that we brought up are the DCs that we wanna talk about today. Some of those happen to be, you know, built retrofits. You know, Springfield's moving an existing DC into a larger location. Puerto Rico's obviously expansion. Mexico, you could call it expansion, you could call it retrofit. We are not slowing down our DC growth. Our DCs, as we've said, are pressured over the past two years. You know, we've pushed a lot of volume and a lot of years' planned growth into two years during this.
Our DCs are pressured, and we're having to make sure we're doing everything we can to build them out, to make them more efficient again. You know, when you take a distribution center that's designed to service X stores and you're having to service X plus stores out of that box, it's not gonna be as efficient as if it's in its sweet spot. That's adding some pressure to DC costs, which in turn impacts our gross margin. That's one thing, just getting our DC network built back up to make it more efficient. You talked about national brands versus proprietary brands. We still see opportunity to grow our proprietary brands, both here in the U.S. and in Mexico. The more we can expand those proprietary brands, the more opportunity we have from a margin standpoint to leverage suppliers.
In almost every one of our proprietary brand categories, we have multiple suppliers. That helps us leverage from a pricing or cost standpoint. It also helps with risk mitigation. If supplier A can't build this part for whatever reason, we go to supplier B to build that part. I think it's just things that really impact cost of goods sold is the bigger thing. I think the pricing is gonna be what it is. You know, we're gonna price to market and try to continue to make bigger margins. That's a goal for us to drive operating margin, to Jeremy's prior comment.
The only thing maybe I would add there, Michael, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say this, and I would say stop me if you've heard this before, but we took the microphone away from you. You know, our focus is not on the gross profit percentage. We're gonna drive gross profit dollars. Banks like to accept the dollars. The percentages are harder to deposit. I think to Greg's points, our focus is on how do we best create a good value for our customers? How can we leverage the brands and our ability there? How can we be a better partner to our supplier base, because of all the things that we bring to bear and get advantages there.
You know, the professional pricing initiative is a clear indication that, you know, our focus is on how we drive gross profit dollars over the long term, and that's where our focus will be.
Michael, the other thing I would say operationally is if you ask, you know, the guys on the back row back here, that they would tell you the biggest opportunity we have operationally is do a lot more retail business. I think it's important to remember that, what we talked about earlier, that us coming from the professional side of the business, even though we do a nice DIY business we're proud of, our team's on the street every day. They're adding up. They're sitting across the street from normally two great retail companies, and then, you know, a professional company that still does quite a bit of retail business, and even the independents to some degree. Some of them do some walk-in business.
For lack of a better way of saying it, they're looking at our revenue monthly or annually in that store, and they're thinking of all this retail business that our big competitors are doing on that same street. Even though we all feel like the professional may grow incrementally faster than the retail business, in my lifetime, we have a significant amount of DIY business to make O'Reilly. Y'all can guess the disparity between the margins and the two businesses and I wouldn't want you to forget that either.
Yeah. Michael, maybe just one other one too on.
Sure.
Proprietary brands. Yeah, just back to the proprietary brands. You know, when you looked at that slide, right? Several of those, we've got great, good, better, best offerings within those brands we've developed. But you've got a couple of those brands, Syntec, Murray, Precision, those were national brands years ago, and now they're brands that we own exclusively. So, you know, we've just. Our team's done a fantastic job of that, but we're well-positioned with that portfolio for continued growth.
Hey, guys. Zachary Fadem, Wells Fargo. Sticking with the rule of three here, can you walk through three opportunities from EVs and three threats from EVs?
Well, I can start that. I don't know if I'm gonna get three and three. You guys are being tough. You're quantifying my answers here. EVs. Okay. Here's what I would tell you. We are working very closely with our supplier base on the evolution of EVs, and many of those suppliers are also OE suppliers, so they're there with leading-edge technology they're providing to the OEs to make sure we have components in the aftermarket. I'm not sure I'm gonna get three and three, Zach, but obviously, there's no internal combustion engine in an electric vehicle. We sell a lot of oil changes. What I would tell you is, aside from that type of maintenance, internal engine components is a declining category for us. Engines are built so much better than they were 10 or 15 years ago.
The gasket sets, the pistons, the rebuild components is a declining category anyway. From an internal combustion engine perspective, yes, that component's gone, and there's not gonna be the oil changes. That would be one, the pressure on that. Before I continue on, I'm gonna tell you my opinion on that. I think the pace at which EVs are adapted or adopted is much slower than what a lot of people are expecting or projecting. I mean, when most of the people in this room probably live in larger metro markets that the EVs work pretty well in those markets. When you get out into rural America, out into the Midwest, where people are pulling boats to the lake, people are driving a lot of miles, the EVs are gonna be more challenged in those markets. Back to your question.
On the good side, I mean, there are trade-offs. I could talk about this literally all day long. There are also a lot of additional cooling components to EVs, and we're working very closely with one of our suppliers on that. Even though you don't have the internal combustion engine, now you have multiple electric motors driving that vehicle. Multiple electric motors and a very large battery pack result in a lot of heat generation. You have to have the cooling systems on EVs are gonna be much more elaborate than what they are on internal combustion engine vehicles. That category is good for us. Brake category is kind of up in the air. When you start talking about Tesla and some of the initial EVs that came out, they had single-stage motors.
Some of you may own those vehicles and drive those vehicles. You let off the accelerator, the vehicle naturally slows down, which is a reduction on braking. Some of the higher-end and emerging EVs, especially some of the Europeans, are coming out with multiple stage motors, which is essentially operating kinda like a transmission. So when you get that to where you got multiple stages and as you drive faster, the ratios change. It also changes on the back end. So as you slow down, you don't get that same resistance to slow. So braking could be a wash in that category. I'm trying to think. Brad, you guys have anything to add? I'm not coming up with three and three.
Yeah. I think what I would say, Zach, is, you know, we get a lot of questions on this and, you know, it may not be the best industry answer, but I can give you the O'Reilly answer is, you know, me growing up in our stores, you know, everybody thought the sky was falling when, you know, cars went from carburetors to fuel injection. Same thing with, you know, how many ECUs or computers are on a car today. We sell all those fuel injection parts. We sell all those computers.
You know, what we have to remember is that you know, no matter what comes down the pipe, the way we focus on it is that's a level playing field versus our competitors, meaning no matter what comes down the pipe, we've always been what we feel like, humbly, the best at adapting to those changes. You know, same thing with ADAS, you know, the advanced safety that's now on vehicles. I mean, that's a huge opportunity for us. You know, we're doing training on it. We sell the equipment for ADAS. All these little things that a shop has to have to make sure that all the lane departure and all these different sensors and things like that, we sell those parts, you know. I think our biggest opportunity, to Greg's point, we have to hold our suppliers accountable.
You know, we're all in this together in the aftermarket. You know, we know which suppliers are staying ahead of this. There's some that maybe aren't so much, and we're watching that. I would even go back to the slide I talked about where we help our shops, you know, make sure that they're competing on this level. You know, we have EV classes. We have ADAS classes. I would just answer, I know it's a little bit of a non-answer, but I would say more how are we gonna perform under the existing circumstances that happen as time goes on? I have confidence in our ability to adapt and figure out how to do that in, you know, true O'Reilly fashion.
It's more than just EVs. It's the whole emerging technologies of the vehicle. To Brad's point, it's really nothing new. It's just this step change is a little more dramatic with the EVs. My personal opinion is hybrids are probably gonna be a bigger interim step and a bigger long-term part of the car park than pure EVs. There's a lot of things that drive this. Again, we could talk about this for a long, long time. You know, even if right now EVs are 10%-15% of the car park, if you look at the vehicles that are being sold today, to get up to be a large percentage of the car park, it's gonna take a lot of years to get us there.
My message is, we're taking this very seriously from an emerging technologies perspective and specifically EVs. Brad talked about sensors. These EVs and hybrids have more sensors on them today than cars did five years ago, but so do the gas internal combustion engine vehicles. Those create additional sales opportunities for us, not only the parts for the vehicles themselves, but also all the calibration parts we sell to the professional shops. I mean, if you have a windshield replaced in a vehicle today that's got a lane keeping system on it has to go through a calibration. I mean, all those cameras have to be recalibrated just to have a windshield replaced.
It's getting much more technical and complicated, and we're just doing our best to make sure that not only do we have the parts for those vehicles, but we're training the technicians and giving them the products they need to be able to work on those vehicles.
I think we got three and three in there.
All right. Thanks.
Just a follow-up question on your addressable market. When we sat here in 2019 and we talked about your TAM, you were calling out about $100 billion, and today, $135 billion. The question is, how do you reconcile the 40% step up, 35%-40%, whatever it is? How much is Mexico? How much is DIY versus pro? Any, how much is inflation? Any thoughts there on those buckets?
Yeah. I think it's a combination of all the above, plus just the way we look at it. We dug a little deeper into the makeup of the aftermarket, and we looked at, you know, the aftermarket sales that go back to the dealer, and we just really dug a layer deeper into that. Part of it's inflation, part of it's just growth of the industry, and part of it's we probably didn't allocate enough three years ago to what that number should've been.
Yeah. Thanks. Daniel Imbro from Stephens. Greg, you know, over the last couple years, higher used vehicle prices, you've talked about kind of incentivizing consumers to invest. I mean, you've been through multiple vehicle pricing cycles. As we enter a couple periods of prices moderating, how do you think that impacts your consumer or their willingness to invest in the vehicle? And then how do you reconcile that? Does that matter more? Does the lack of new vehicle production matter more? How do you think about that factor?
I mean, our key customer, our niche customer is not the customer that buys a new vehicle every three years. What this cycle we're going through really does as far as our business is it keeps more vehicles out there on the road. It's more maintenance cycles. It's more breakage, more wear and tear, as I said in my prepared comments. We all know that at some point things are gonna catch up, and new vehicle sales are going to pick back up, and there's a portion of the consumer, while it's not our key customer base, that's gonna start buying new vehicles. I don't see the average age of vehicles deteriorating when that happens. I see it maintaining or maybe even continuing to grow. It's just incredible.
I talked about, just a minute ago to Zach's question, the internal engine component category declining. That used to be a key category for us. We used to build engine kits specific to rebuilding engines and sell a ton of those. Engines are built so much better today, and vehicles are built so much better today, that I think they're gonna continue to be on the road. Not to mention the paints have improved. Everything about the car is improved. I mean, you go, you get second and third owners of vehicles now driving cars that look really good.
That ties into the follow-up. I was gonna ask, as vehicles last longer, you know, your sweet spot's probably getting older and older. I would say, can you quantify how far into a vehicle lifecycle are we? If it used to be 12, 13 years was the end, are we now 15, 16? From a working capital or supply chain standpoint, what does that mean for SKU availability, working capital, DC space? You know, how do you reconcile or manage through that as vehicles last longer? Thanks.
Yeah. Jeremy, I'll let you chime in too. On the lifecycle, it's pretty easy when you look at that quote unquote sweet spot to figure out where it starts. You know, it starts when the vehicle comes out of warranty, whether that's three, five years. That's when it really enters the aftermarket and we really start selling more products for those. As far as the midpoint and where that tails off. That's a moving target. I think it depends on a lot of different things, and really, your first question is what it depends on. What happens with new car sales? How many people have learned during this pandemic, and the unavailability of new cars that, "Hey, I can drive my car for six, seven, eight years, it still looks good. I don't have a car payment.
This works pretty well for me and my family and my budget." How many people adapt that versus trading every three years? There's a lot of unknowns there. Jeremy, I don't know if you have anything to add.
Yeah, I mean, I think the right way. Sometimes we talk about it being a sweet spot. There are a range of years in which the investment in vehicles for us is really good. I think probably what you're seeing is there's some extension of that, for sure, but likely the benefit is also coming from the degree to which people are willing to spend more money later into that existing timeframe. You know, 12-year-old car people would invest in three, four, five years ago. They were built really well at that point in time, too.
Today they're probably willing to invest even more on a more substantial repair or on a higher quality item when it comes time to repair that vehicle, well, 'cause now there's a better expectation not just for whether that vehicle can stay on the road for the next year or a trade or a replacement decision, but even for an extended period of time beyond that. It's not, hey, there's a range of years and people spend on their cars and then they stop. It's really a spectrum of how much people are willing to spend, and I think that's been aided both by the cost of replacement on new vehicles.
Maybe back to the earlier question, what we see is that as people start to make those increased investments, there's a great positive feedback to that. It works well and becomes pretty sticky and vehicles do look well and you don't have a lot of decisions around, "Man, I just spent, you know, $400 on my car. Now I gotta get rid of it 'cause something else has happened." No, it's, "Man, I was able to keep my car on the road and I've missed car payments for six months." That builds on itself. I think that's the positive that we've seen.
We expect to see it kinda in this market environment, but for sure in previous markets that you don't see the average vehicle age pull back after it's pushed back up. That's a sustainable phenomenon.
Daniel, I would probably just add on the supply chain side of it, you know, that product lifecycle slide, just talking about, you know, how we bring products into the lifecycle, how we manage them through the lifecycle. We don't manage them on a vehicle in a year basis. We manage them on a individual part and a demand basis. You know, the alternator for a truck that's 15 years old may fail pretty consistently, and the demand may stay out there. We may keep that part in our supply chain much longer than we would, you know, the axle for that vehicle, just based on failure rate. We're looking at it on a part by part basis throughout the lifecycle.
That's a good thing for our business. It's always been challenging to manage the number of SKUs it takes to be successful in our business. That, you know, every year that gets a little bit more challenging. That's a positive for us because of the advantages that we have to the marketplace from an availability perspective.
Hey, guys. Steven Zaccone from Citi over here. I had a question. Thanks for the time. For the pro-pricing investments, you know, could you talk a bit more about why you took those measures, you know, and why some learnings from it, and then what's the confidence that you don't need to do it again next year?
Sure. I'll start that. Jeremy may add. I know Brad will chime in from his perspective on the stores. You know, our industry continues to evolve and our competitors continue to get better. We continue to get better, our competitors continue to get better. There's more transparency today on the professional side of our business than there ever has been in the history of our company and our industry. You know, our competitors have transparency. They know who has the part. They can look on one screen, tell who has the part, what it costs, how long it's gonna take to get there, and they're making decisions, especially in the pricing environment we've seen over the past year and a half with the inflationary component.
I think the people are looking at pricing a little more than they have. I'm not saying that's the key buying decision because it 100% is not. What we've built our business on from day one has been service and inventory availability. That is more important to the professional installer customer ten times out of ten than price. But when you get into a market where you got four options and they all four have the part and they all four perform well, I think in this environment, some of those customers look at price. Often the other piece of that is they're not only looking for a given part, they're looking for a job.
These shops don't always go to their suppliers and say, "I need this part." It's, "I need these three parts to complete this job, and who has all the parts, and who can get them here to me the quickest?" That's first. Price is secondary. The reason we did this is because in the environment that we're in today, and the fact that our competitors, you know, continue to get stronger, we wanna make sure and keep ourselves in a position of leadership. You know, we looked at this really hard. This started a couple years ago when we went out and we started testing what's the impact to sales, what's the impact to margin if we do make some pricing adjustments very scientifically within certain categories, within certain SKUs within those categories, what's the impact?
We tested it in multiple markets for an extended period of time, and we learned that there is a sales lift associated with that, and there is a margin impact associated with that. We're very transparent about what our expectations were when we made that change. We feel very confident it was the right thing to do. If we had it to do over again, we would've done the same thing again. I'll tell you that our plan is this one-time adjustment. It's not something we plan to do year over year. Although, I'll tell you that since the beginning of time, and more so recently as we've had better tools, we're constantly adjusting prices, both on the retail and DIFM side. We're adjusting them up, and we're adjusting them down.
There's always changes going on to our pricing, depending on buying habits, depending on buying volumes, depending on customer size. There's a lot of decisions that go into how we price products for our customers. I'm not saying there won't be any price changes, but there, we have no plans to make additional significant changes like a program change that we made earlier this year.
Maybe the only thing that I would add to that, I think Greg touched on it. You know, it's been a pretty turbulent couple of years within our industry. Because this is, you know, this has been a strategy of winning first on service and availability. It's been core fundamental to our business and our philosophy from the time our company was founded. So at any given point in time, we could have positioned ourselves a little bit lower on the spectrum of where the market price in the way that we have now, and execute a different strategy.
We think that within an environment where we saw a lot of share moving around, we had opportunities to be in shops that, you know, maybe we weren't in as often before the pandemic because we had supply, because prices were moving quite a bit. We had a lot of focus on it. I think it helps to remove some of those barriers to continuing to grow and to impact that business. When you've got a lot of turbulence and the market is, I think it's shifting around a little bit more, then there's a little bit more of an opportunity, I think, to roll something out like this and see the benefit of what you get because we have been getting more opportunities to prove the value that we have from a service and availability standpoint.
As we have that momentum behind us over the course of the last couple of years, we can take this next step to further capitalize on that and really secure some of those things and maybe take it to the next level past where we've been today.
Steven, the other thing I would say is, you know, when we break down the addressable market and our operations team really looks at that share by market, and what that is and really the quality of the share dollar, you know, this is generally speaking, but if you broke down a Nashville market or an Atlanta or New York or a larger metro market, most likely the independent competitors, not our large public competitors, would probably have over half that business. You probably heard us say that before, that the public just doesn't know that the biggest professional competitors we have in Nashville are not our big three competitors. While they do a great job in so many different ways, those independents really hold a lot of that share.
A big factor in our decision-making with that is we saw some, you know, the best independents, I mean, they're gonna thrive, you know, for the most part in any market. We saw some volatility in the market from maybe how some of the independents were servicing customers the last couple of years. There's always been a big disparity between our price from a three-step, from our supplier to our distribution center to our brick-and-mortar stores that you'll see today. These independents are what we call two-step. You know, they're going from the supplier to a WD-type warehouse, and they're delivering directly to the shop from that WD warehouse in a market like Nashville, for example.
They can, even though they don't have the buying power we do, they can be pretty competitive, even just quite frankly, quite a bit cheaper than us, in a lot of those circumstances. We just saw a mid and long-term, obviously short-term to some degree, but more so a mid to long-term play of a one-time change, to Greg's point, of the framework of our pricing. We'll always have prices that by SKU, by line, move around within that framework. We saw a very strategic mid to long-term play that we thought about for two years. You know, we ran a lot of tests. We used a lot of data, a lot of science. It just so happened it coincided with another change of our biggest retail competitor.
I wouldn't want anybody to think about it, us battling it out with the top three. It's really a play that we see significant share gains on the DIFM side of the business from continuing to consolidate the market with all the fragmentation with the independents.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. The follow-up I had was just on the store growth plans from here. How do you think about M&A versus organic? I think the, you know, the untapped markets in the Northeast, that's kind of been there for some time. How do you think about increasing your store penetration there? Thank you.
Yeah, I can maybe start that question and then others can chime in, you know, as we can. We think that the success of how we've been able to grow organically over the course of time has really been dependent upon our ability not just to find good locations for our stores, but how do we develop the store teams, the infrastructure within the markets, and then the individual store teams that we put in place. We continue to still feel like that's the advantage. We felt just really good about our ability to grow organically. I think there's continued opportunity for us to be able to do that. We are under-penetrated in places like New England and, you know, probably still Southern Florida, in those areas.
You know, we could more heavily concentrate and try to ramp those numbers up more quickly in those markets, but it starts to work against our strategy of making sure that we can grow stores and spread that growth out well enough so that every time we open an O'Reilly store, we've got a great team within that store that's gonna provide excellent service and put us on the right footing in that market. Continue to feel like those opportunities are in front of us. We think that there's capacity within the existing United States to do that. Also, we're always opportunistic from a consolidation perspective as we think about acquisitions.
We like the value that we get when we're in a specific market from the people that are familiar to that market and have got the relationships and have sold parts to the consumers in that market for a long period of time. You know, you can look across the room and in the back, and we all have folks in the senior levels of our company that came to us from an acquisition. We'll continue to focus on those, but those are always going to be things that we have to be opportunistic about. It's the right timeframe in the life cycle of the ownership of that business and where we're at from a market perspective, and still think we have opportunities to fill in pockets there.
That's really domestically Brad talked about. We still think we have got a great platform in Mexico to grow there, and that'll be part of our strategy as we move forward. Maybe a pause there and see if anybody else wants to jump in.
Yeah. I think, Steven, if the acquisition opportunity with Mayasa had not come up, you might have seen us, you know, accelerating into that gap in footprint that you're talking about there. You know, quite frankly, being transparent, when the Mayasa opportunity came up, it was a perfect opportunity for us. One thing that we didn't wanna do with that opportunity is we were very cautious with our team in Springfield, our leadership team, that though Mayasa's kind of a standalone company that had an incredible leadership team down there, we didn't wanna take our eye off the ball of anything we had going on in the States here. We, you know, focused really our resources and time on the distribution things that Brent Kirby talked about earlier.
Obviously, we're very excited about those markets that you're talking about. Great markets. One thing that we probably don't talk about enough is even though you may not see the headline of a big acquisition, we buy single stores almost every month, you know, that we're acquiring and picking up great teams, local teams and great partnerships on that front. Those markets, you know, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore City, New York City are incredible opportunities for us, and we're, you know, excited to tackle those down the road.
Yeah, the only thing I might add is I think there's a better opportunity probably for M&A outside the U.S. as we expand further into Mexico and potentially other countries. That's the way we prefer to enter areas where we have unfamiliarity. Not to say there won't be additional, you know, mergers within the U.S. You know, to Brad's point, we buy stores throughout the year, and some of them are single stores, some of them are three, four, five store chains. We have someone dedicated and focused on developing those targets here in the U.S., and we have someone focused on international as well. Don't plan on slowing our growth.
Great. Thanks. Hi. Liz Suzuki, Bank of America. Brent, you had talked about the rewards program earlier. Can you just give some detail on how long the current program has been in place, what you've learned about customers with the segmentation that you've built out, and then, you know, which marketing strategies have been working versus which might not be working?
Yeah. The program predates me, Liz, so I think it was around 2012.
14.
14. 12, 14, so somewhere in that range, so maybe a little less than 10 years or so. Again, we have the segmentation. What we see there is on the retail side, again, we feel like our program's very simple. We did that by design and we continue to see, you know, good adoption by customers. They like the simplicity of it. You know, we obviously look at trips and ticket within the segmentation. We've seen, you know, trips grow and ticket grow. You know, over the past several years, that's accelerated somewhat. I think more than anything, it's really about engaging your most loyal customers in a way that's meaningful to them that they get value from. Listen, loyalty programs are a dime a dozen.
A lot of, you know, companies have them. Our goal is really to constantly get feedback from those customers and to make sure that we're evolving the program in a way that adds value for them. That, you know, that's kind of how we've gone about it and probably even more in earnest over the last several years, and we feel like we're getting a good result from it.
Just as a follow-up about, you know, the anecdotes and surveys we may have all seen about people delaying maintenance as, you know, inflation has put more pressure on their wallets. How are you fighting against that with, you know, marketing efforts and with trying to stay connected with your customers who you now have more data on?
Yeah. We do look at the data, and to your point, we've gotten more effective and efficient on using our customer data over the last several years, and we're continuing to work to have kind of a golden customer record, you know, for every touch point they have with our brand. You know, what we've seen is certainly lower-end consumer. Especially during the first half of this year, we've seen some pressure there, we've adjusted our value messaging accordingly. You know, customers are looking for value. They still have to maintain their vehicle. They still have to change the oil. They still need filters. We adjust our messaging accordingly when we go through those kind of cycles. We also continue to see strength with. You know, it's interesting.
Everybody always tries to compare this downturn to the last downturn or the last three downturns. The reality is this one's a little bit different because of COVID, some of the stimulus that's out there, different things that are at play. What we see is the shops are still doing well. We have customers that still have money, and they're doing very well. They're still investing to maintain their cars. We've seen the strength on the professional side of the business. We have seen some recent pressure on that lower-end consumer. We're adjusting our messaging to adapt to that. Quite honestly, our product offering lends itself to those cycles. I mean, we've been through those before.
You know, we have good, better, best offerings for anybody that's on a budget that has to maintain their car, and we also have an offering for somebody that, you know, has a little bit more means to put more money into it.
I have one. It's Sam Harvey with Harvey Investment Company. I assume when you do build either a greenfield or refurbish a distribution center, there's a calculated return on that based on the store build-out and the profitability per store. You have a level of confidence or certainty, maybe even about the return you're gonna get on that. The return on the DC in Mexico, do you have any different sense of uncertainty about that one than you do to ones that are here in the United States?
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, over the course of the last several years, even prior to our acquisition in that market, but then certainly once we acquired our partner down there and began to learn more and more about our business in Mexico, have felt comfortable that we can invest dollars not just in distribution, but implicitly by building a distribution center is all the stores that are gonna come after it. We felt good about the potential to gain returns. You know, we don't wanna get into the details of how we think about the return profile there versus in the United States. We haven't drilled down to that level. We've made a commitment to that market.
We made it with both the acquisition and then moving forward. Are there unknowns to what we see down there? Yeah, of course. There always are with DCs. We feel that we've been able to get a good enough handle both before the acquisition and what we've seen since and how we've started to open some of these prototype stores to have a high level of confidence that we can successfully deploy capital in Mexico and get returns that we're happy with.
Yeah.
It's a key component of our growth strategy. I mean, we bought that company, they had 20 stores, six small DCs. For us to grow to the scale we wanna grow in Mexico, and we feel like we can operate 600+ stores down there, we have got to have distribution capacity to do so. We work very closely, and I'm not talking about the financial component, more about it's a conduit to growth for us, both here in the States and in Mexico. We went out, we determined how many stores we need to service in that general marketplace in Mexico, and that's a little different scenario than it is here in the States.
We've got algorithms that say, "Okay, we know here in the States, based on traffic patterns, which we have a lot more data on, here's how many miles we can service from that DC, turn our trucks every night, do these nightly delivery models." Down there traffic's a lot different, and that pattern's a little bit smaller than what it would be here in the States. We know how many stores we need to be able to service in that market and size that DC accordingly. That is a key component of our growth strategy in Mexico, is having that DC there to support that number of stores.
Yeah, it's bringing our parts availability model to that market, and there's tremendous market down there. We know that. To Greg's point, we couldn't bring the availability and the replenishment frequency that I've talked about with our distribution strategy to that country and grow that store base without adding that DC.
Just keep in mind too, Mr. Sam, that we acquired an incredible company. You know, even though we're new as O'Reilly in the Mexican market, the family and the leadership team that we acquired has three generations of experience in the market. So they have all this knowledge of the market. They know what to do and what not to do. When you combine that with our backing and their knowledge of the markets, it's just really gonna be a great recipe for success. Even though O'Reilly's new to the market, we have a leadership team down there that has tremendous knowledge, and they've been doing business in the auto parts business down there for just decade after decade.
Hey, everyone. David Bellinger with MKM Partners. You highlight a lot of the technology investments in the back of the store. How much of the professional business is conducted on your B2B platforms? Should that grow higher? Maybe just talk through some of the efficiencies you can tap into if more orders are placed onto your platform directly.
Yeah. Thanks, David. That's a great question. We've never quantified the percentage of the revenue or tickets, but I can tell you it's significant. You know, we've been doing B2B business electronically again since I started with the company in 1996, even though it looked a lot different. It's a tremendous opportunity for us. You know, when you think about pressure on wages, not just on our side of the house with parts people, but with the shops and having technicians and having service writers that were tied up previously on the phones and things like that, it's a tremendous opportunity for us. It's a very sizable piece of our professional business.
You know, we have our what we FirstCallOnline that brent mentioned, that's our basically our free web browser that smaller shops, mid-size shops would use to connect to us. Again, they kick out that pick ticket. We're taking the phone call out of the equation, we're taking work on our side and their side out of the equation. We also have a unique partnership with a company called Mitchell 1 that would be our shop management system. It would be above and beyond the browser that's the shop that we're utilizing our shop management system that they run their shop on, and then that's even FirstCallOnline, so to speak. It's tremendous. We've seen tremendous growth, like Brent talked about in the amount of transactions and the percentage of the business that's done online.
You know, it's still not the majority. You know, there's still a lot of things that happen, you know, as you'll see in our stores today, and I think you have previously. There's still a lot of the trust factor. There's the relationship with the person in the back of the store that you'll see today. It's a huge opportunity for us. It continues to grow. We're excited about it, but there's still that relationship, you know, factor that's incredibly important as well.
Just one other unrelated one on supply chain. I think the last time we talked about this, about 30%-40% of imports were directly from China. Have you rethought that at all, or taken any measures to diversify the business away just to potentially avoid from any, you know, further issues down the road? Thanks.
We have. I'll let Brent take that one.
Yeah. We have talked about that, and obviously, like a lot of companies, we've seen some of the pressure, you know, China specifically. But we've done a lot to diversify that supply chain and that dependency over the last couple of years especially. And we've continued to source products from other countries and even domestically from suppliers that we weren't necessarily buying from before. Yeah, I think we've had certainly a focus on further diversification there, and that percentage actually has gone down as a result.
Yeah, it's right at 30% now.
Yeah
out of China. It's not just changing suppliers that are coming from other countries of origin, but also working closely with our suppliers to diversify their country of origin offering. We've got suppliers that have traditionally manufactured products solely in China, that have plants in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, other places. You know, we continue to press them to diversify country of origin for that very reason.
Thanks. That was actually gonna be my question. Just to expand upon that, are you also focused on holding more inventory locally at all, or is it just the concept of maybe diversifying the total supply chain?
I'll start that. I don't know, Brent, if you wanna chime in. I mean, our strategy with our direct import suppliers, we like, prefer, we don't mandate, but we prefer for our suppliers to have product stateside. It's not us typically. Now, the last two years, this is not working as well as it has historically, but ideally, we're replenished from many of our import suppliers out of a domestic warehouse, and they're replenishing that from China. Some of our fastest moving SKUs, it makes sense to bring those directly into our, either our owned or leased 3PL facilities. It's a combination of direct importing into our larger DCs, direct importing into our operated 3PL facilities and replenishing our DCs, and primarily replenishing into supplier-owned U.S.-based facilities to replenish our domestic DCs.
Great, thanks. I just wanted to touch on, you talked about, expanding into Puerto Rico. You're expanding your Mexico business. You've mentioned this before, but can you just elaborate on your decisions to do that versus maybe what another competitor did by going into Europe?
I'll tell you that we haven't excluded any part of the world from an opportunity standpoint. We've looked at different geographic regions. The reason that we started in let's say North America, looking at primarily Canada and Mexico is a very similar supply base, a very similar car parc. We didn't go into Mexico, to Brad's earlier point, and start opening stores as O'Reilly stores because we just don't know that market. That's why we looked at several companies from an acquisition perspective before we settled on Mayasa. We like that company, we like the family feel of that company, we like the culture of that company. It felt much like our company when it was much smaller. We're leveraging their knowledge and their strength in the marketplace to allow us to grow down there.
I would anticipate as we move into other international markets, we would try to take the same approach.
Thanks. Then just the last question. You talked about the transparency kind of increasing in the B2B over the last, I'll throw out, five years, and maybe that was partially impacted your decision around pricing. The original question maybe five years ago around DIY omni-channel was would it increase pricing transparency? As we've kind of had that discussion over the last five years, what have you learned and, you know, you went over some really impressive changes to your omni-channel techniques. Can you just kind of talk about what you've learned and what you're seeing still there?
Brent, do you wanna take a shot?
Yeah, yeah, sure. What I would tell you is we've learned that price transparency has increased across both, right, DIY as well as professional. A lot of that's just, you know, digitization of the economy, how we all consume information, phones, and what we can get quickly, you know, through a digital interface. That's been the learning. What we've done about that is, you know, we've worked to improve our content, which improves our value proposition and how we show up when customers do come to us for those inquiries, so that we, you know, present our best foot forward with our product and how to purchase the product. I mentioned images, specs, all that stuff's tremendously important in our space because, again, you're solving a problem, and it's usually not discretionary.
You're looking for who has the part the fastest. We've done a lot because of that transparency on content. We've done a lot on search. We've made a lot of IT investments to support the increased traffic and how customers interact and to provide, you know, a really good interface, whether it's mobile or whether it's desktop. You know, our mobile traffic has grown exponentially. As a result, we've invested more in how we optimize our site for mobile and for pads. You know, I would tell you the learning is it's here to stay, and we're gonna compete effectively with that dynamic.
I think the other thing to remember on the transparency part is it's not just price. You know, the investments we've made in our service levels with technology in the back of the store and with the handheld devices that our delivery drivers carry, for example, our shops when they're looking at our FirstCallOnline, they can actually track their parts and see where they're at in the vehicle. I wouldn't just focus on the pricing transparency. A lot of our strategies have been how can we take professional parts people to the next level from a digital standpoint?
They can track those parts, so they can see that maybe they're 30 seconds away from the shop, and they can go ahead and roll that car into the bay, or they may see those parts are 10 minutes out, and they may wanna roll something else in real quick. When it comes to the omni-channel world, especially on the B2B side, it's not just price, it's how can we truly be a better supplier from an omni standpoint, a lot of that service as much as it is price.
Well, to Brad's point, even on the retail side, I would maybe even add to what he said, it really is in our industry, it's about the marriage of the two, the digital interface interaction as well as the interaction with our store and our team members. You know, we rolled out a couple years ago, we rolled out dedicated pickup locations on the front counter of all of our stores so that customers can come in and get their buy online pickup in store order more quickly, more efficiently. That was a big investment. We also rolled out curbside. When COVID hit, we took that out into the parking lot, working with Brad and his team to you know provide a better customer experience for those customers too.
On the retail side, he mentioned the professional, which we've given a lot of transparency there. It really is about how we meld the two together. When it comes to transparency, it's really about. It goes back to the core of our business, which is parts availability, professional parts people, and service.
Okay. Well, fantastic, guys. That's a great way to wrap it up today. Just one quick comment. We didn't specifically have a slide in this deck specific to ESG, and I know this is a very high visibility topic with the investment community. I wanna assure you that this is extremely important to the company as well. I would encourage all of you to visit our website. We've just released our fourth annual sustainability report. In that report, we have an aspirational statement to comply with the conditions of the Paris Agreement and be carbon neutral by 2050. We've also committed to establishing short and long-term scope one, two, and three goals.
We will announce those targets in next year's sustainability report, and then each report after that, we will report on our progress towards those goals. Our corporate governance and nominating committee of our board is the group that is responsible for monitoring the ESG components of our company. They have created a sustainability committee, which I'm proud to be a member of the management of the company. This is an extremely high focus for us. ESG for us has always been part of our culture. Just in the last couple of years, it's gotten an acronym, but it's very much a part of who we are. With that, we're gonna end the webcast for today.
We'd like to thank everybody for joining us here in person, and we would like to thank everyone who has joined the webcast electronically. If anyone has any follow-up questions, please reach out to myself or Eric Byrd, and we're more than happy to answer them. With that, we'll end the webcast portion of today's day.