Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 2022 POOLCORP Investor Day. Thank you very much for joining us today. Today's presentation may contain some forward-looking statements that speak only to the date of this presentation and may be subject to change. Actual results may vary and may vary materially due to a variety of factors that affect our business. Those are spelled out in our 2021 annual report, which has been filed with the SEC. Presentation may also contain references to certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined by the SEC. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures and their most directly comparable financial measures calculated and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles can be found in the appendix at the end of this presentation.
The company's most recent earnings release, which was furnished in our current annual report or current Form 8-K report filed with the SEC as well. Just as a little administrative note for everybody here in the room, if you need to leave the room for anything, the door is locked, so there is a pass card out on the table just outside the room that will allow you back in. So just don't wanna lock you out if you have a reason to leave. Again, thank you all for being here. At this point, I would like to introduce Peter Arvan, President and CEO of Pool Corporation.
Thank you, Curt. If I can do this presentation without hitting my head today on those screens, I'll be very happy. Welcome. We're thrilled to have you in a face-to-face meeting. It's been a very long time since we've been able to have a face-to-face meeting. I had my first couple in the last couple of weeks. I've had a few of these bigger face-to-face meetings that were the first ones post-COVID, and I gotta tell you, they're pretty refreshing. We'd like to see everybody's smiling face. The Zoom calls are great. You know, we all learned how to do those well, but I think having everybody face to face is a lot more exciting. Curt covered the forward-looking statement, so I'm not going to do that.
I'm gonna do some brief intros just so I think everybody met everybody, but so you have Donna Williams is to my left here. Donna is our Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. We have Todd Marshall. Todd is our CIO and Vice President. We have Jeff Clay, who is President of Horizon. We have Jean-Louis Albouy in from Europe. He is our General Manager for all of Europe. Then, of course, you all know Melanie, who is our Chief Financial Officer and Vice President. You all got to hear Jim as he toured us around the facility. Jim is President of Porpoise Pool and Patio. Jenn Neil is our Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel. Then, Kenny St. Romain was unable to join us today.
He had a family issue. And then, of course, Luther Willems, who's here in the back. He is our Vice President of Human Resources. Now, after the intro, I'm gonna go over a brief agenda. I will start the presentation off. I'm gonna cover the business outlook, growth initiatives. Donna's gonna follow with some information in the discussion about the market. Todd is gonna walk you through kind of our technology journey and where we're headed on technology and transformation. Jeff is gonna give you a peek inside of Horizon and what's going on and add some color to that exciting business. Jean-Louis is also gonna do the same for Europe.
You know, we in the past haven't talked very much about Europe, but it's a very exciting part of our business, and we love the results that we see there. Then, of course, Melanie is gonna give you a financial recap, and then I'm going to wrap it up. If there's something during the presentation you want to ask, that's fine, but we would prefer, I think, to hold the questions to the end so that we make sure we get through everybody's presentation. With that, I'm happy to start. It's important that we talk about the vision for a quick second, right? Because it is central to what we do every day.
Our goal is to be the best worldwide distributor for outdoor living products, so it's not just the swimming pool. Years ago, most of our business was really, if you think about coping in. Now we've expanded beyond the coping, right? We also have Jeff's business for irrigation and the other products that open up the rest of the backyard, whether that's outdoor lighting or whether that's other automation systems. Our pie is getting bigger, right? That has changed over time. Years ago, if you looked at our building material for us, which is a very nice fast-growing category for us, that has changed over time. Years ago, it was a very small category. It's growing very fast.
If you look at pools, we're gonna show you a couple pictures of how pools have changed in the last several years. The pool is getting bigger. The backyard is becoming a focal point. It's just not a concrete or vinyl lined hole in the ground. It's a whole backyard entertainment area. The POOLCORP overview. Now, fortunately, most of you now are very familiar with the company, right? I think it's important to show you some facts on here that are quite impressive from our perspective. Number one worldwide distributor for pool and related outdoor products. There's $5.3 billion in revenue is what we were able to generate last year. Very proud of that. Biggest year in the company's history. Over 400 locations.
I think we're about 410 locations today. We operate in 12 countries. Multi-category, multi-channel value-add distribution. We'll talk about those. I'm gonna walk you through those and the things we do and the things that differentiate us. Whether it's swimming pool, hardscape, outdoor living, irrigation, landscape products. It's a mix of construction, and it's also a mix of the maintenance and repair. Again, one of the things that differentiates us as a business. Over 60% of our revenue still is derived from the maintenance and repair of the install base of swimming pools. 120,000 professional contractors and retail customers. Over 2,000 market-based sales and customer service folks. We have a technology-enabled B2B and distribution and retail support services. The retail support services are new as a result of our acquisition into Pinch.
We had some capabilities; now we have much more robust capabilities. Over 200,000 products across 50 categories, and we sit between 200 suppliers and 120,000 customers, and an installed base of, you know, in excess of 5.3 million pools-5.4 million pools. Very proud of the CAGR on the growth side. You can see in 2016 we were $2.6 billion, and now after 2021, we closed the year at double that at $5.3 billion. We're very excited about the growth prospects of the company. You can see over time the company continues to grow, and the reason is our focus on organic growth.
In distribution, there are many companies that focus their growth on acquisitions. Acquisitions have always been a part of our company and our growth. Fortunately, acquisitions made up the smallest part of our growth, and that will continue. That's one of the hallmarks of POOLCORP. It's one of the differentiators us as a company, is the fact that we are, at our core, an organic growth company. Our geographic markets, 90% of our business is still in North America, 5% in Europe and 5% in Canada and the rest of the international world. Our product application spend, maintenance and repair of the installed base is still about 60% of our business, right?
60% of our business really has to do with the installed base of pools. Renovations and upgrades are 20%, and new construction is 20%. The new construction piece has grown. If those of you that were here the last time we did this presentation, new construction would have been a slightly smaller piece. Over time, especially with COVID in the last couple of years, that has grown, but it still makes up only 20% of our revenues. Our customer profile, 80% of our customers is the professional builder and maintenance contractor. 12% of the customer base are retailers.
When you think about pool retailers or backyard retailers, think about most of our customers that have a retail store as part of a pool construction business and a pool maintenance business, and they have a retail store as well. Very few. If I rack and stack all of the customers, the minority portion of the retail customers are what we would say, pure retail. Almost all of them have segments that build and also have crews that are doing maintenance. What you see is, in Florida, for instance, you see far more specialization in Florida than you see in the seasonal markets. In the seasonal markets, it's necessary just from a pure cash flow perspective, that you have to do all things.
The further south you come, it allows for more specialization. Our channels to market. Our brands that you would see would be SCP, you would see Superior, that's for the North American pools. You would see SCP is the name we trade under or we sell under, I should say, internationally. In North America, our irrigation business is Horizon. We are very proud to have added Pinch A Penny to the moniker. Remember what you saw with Pinch A Penny. Pinch A Penny is the franchisor. Porpoise Pool and Patio is the holding company, if you will. Pinch A Pennies are independently owned and operated, okay?
Every time you see a Pinch A Penny store, don't ever lose sight of the fact that, you know, with we have a couple of company-owned stores that we have to have for franchise reasons. For the most part, almost every store out there is independently owned and operated. Our operating priorities are a very important part of POOLCORP. When I came to the company, those I put in place, and I've used them for several years in a couple of different companies, because for me, it was important to get everybody rallied around what we were going to do. It keeps everybody on task, keeps us from going off on tangents.
There was times early in my career when I worked for a much larger company, I would find myself doing things, and I'm like: I don't know why we're doing this. How does this fit with what we're supposed to do? In order to align everybody's efforts and kind of put the guardrails up to make it very clear what we're going to work on every day, we came up with these four operating priorities. I dare say, if you ask anybody in POOLCORP, what are the priorities? They could tell you. Safety is the number one thing. It's very important to me because, you know, in our business, we don't run an inherently dangerous business, right? I've been in some very hazardous work conditions.
I've been in steel mills and companies like that that are very hazardous. We don't have a hazardous business. You can get hurt in our facility. It's one of the things that my dad taught me long ago. He's like, look. He says, you know, money we can make, money's great, but I can't make another one of you, so let's not do anything stupid. What was very clear, you know, when I came to POOLCORP was, I needed to be crystal clear with everybody that that's how I felt. There are no exceptions on safety. Every year since I've been with POOLCORP, we've been able to improve our safety rating year over year, and it is embedded in the fiber of the company.
I think aside from the financial performance, I'm probably most proud of the safety culture that we have as a business. Whether it's our own employees, whether it's how we take care of our customers when they're at our facilities, and whether it's just the communities that we live in, we wanna make sure that we're not putting first responders in harm's way either. Growth. For a distribution business, growth is critical, right? Growth is something that we have to grow because if you're not growing, if you have a top line that stops growing, then there's only so many things that you can do to protect your earnings. You can only cut costs for so long.
You know, you can work on margins, but if you're not growing, then the business lacks a sense of being a vibrant, exciting place to be. Make no mistake about it, everybody in POOLCORP knows every day that we have to grow. As good as we did last year, we have to do better in this coming year. We're not going to buy the growth. It's not like we tell people, "Hey, look, we're gonna grow, but don't worry, the company is gonna grow. You don't have to grow because we're gonna go out and buy things, and we're gonna do a bunch of acquisitions." Acquisitions. If you look at our growth model historically, acquisitions have contributed about 1% a year to POOLCORP's growth.
Everybody in our business understands that we have to grow, and we have to grow organically. That's with new locations, that's with taking share, that's with adding new products from the manufacturers and, quite frankly, expanding the backyard. As we dove into building materials, that opened up a whole new world for us. The amount of natural stone and cement pavers that we sell today is tremendous. It's one of the fastest-growing areas. It's also one of the things. It's not just that we are focusing on it. If you look at pool projects today, the amount of decking that's going around a pool has increased significantly.
If you look at a picture of a pool that was built 20 years ago, and some of you may have had those pools when you were younger, there was typically a strip of concrete around the outside of the pool, and that was it. Now, big decks, pergolas, pool structures, you know, water features, fire features, that's all part of the beloved landscape, which makes the pie bigger. Growth is awesome, okay? Growth is great. If you're growing for the sake of growth, but you're not able to create the operating leverage to improve your profitability. You know, every time I go into a branch, and I travel 90%, probably 98%, 99% of my time, and I visit a lot of branches.
When I go into a branch, you know, and I ask them, "How's business going?" Then I ask them, they say, "Oh, we're up 8%, 10%, 12%, 20%," whatever the number is. My very next question is, "How are we doing on operating margin or sales and our profit?" Because for me to say, "Hey, look, we're growing, growing," but if I grow the top line and I'm not creating that operating leverage and the operating margin expansion, then from my perspective, we're just working way too hard. It's not one or the other, it's both. The good news is that too is embedded in the performance culture of POOLCORP. Again, very proud of that. We're very proud to have consistently been able to expand our operating margin. Why? How? Lots of ways, right?
We work on our gross margins. We work on our capacity creation. This is a term that we introduced to you folks probably about four years ago now. The reason that, you know, we build it as capacity creation is because we have a business that grows organically. It wasn't about, "Hey, you know what? There's a bunch of things we could do. We could rip out some costs." It really wasn't about that at all because we have a business that has this organic growth ability and consistently grows over time. Well, you have costs that also creep up, right? Your labor cost typically goes up every year. Rents go up every year. You know, fuel is crazy now, but basically, everything goes up every year, so you have to be able to offset that.
This focus on capacity creation was an attempt to make sure that we could grow the top line and grow the margin dollars faster than we were growing cost dollars. The good news is you need throughput to do that. We talked about a lot of things about how we were going to do that. We talked about POOL360, right? You know, we talked about our focus on the digital interaction with our customers. We talked about speed at the counter. You're gonna see some numbers, probably more granular than we've ever showed you before, about speed at the counter, but there has been some significant improvement in speed at the counter, which is. There's two parts to that. One is, there's not a single thing you can buy from me that you can't buy from somebody else.
Everything you can buy from me, you can buy from somebody else. The question is: how do you provide that product to the customer, and at what cost and what part of value do you bring to the table? Speed is important. 70% of our transactions is due to the nature of our business, right? Because 60% of our business is the maintenance and repair. One of the key parts of that maintenance and repair business is what? It's chemicals. Chemicals are not something that we have 120,000 customers, so we have thousands and thousands and thousands of customers that clean and maintain pools. They don't have warehouses. Many of them are working out of their truck and out of their van. They don't have stockpiles of chemicals.
Nobody would want stockpiles of chemicals at their house because many of them don't have an office. What do they do? Well, liquid bleach. Depending on the market that you're in, some people sanitize their pool with liquid bleach. We have bulk bleach. In Florida, for instance, we have bulk bleach tanks. They come by. We have trailers with, you know, 15, 20, five-gallon jugs on there. They come by and fill it up. And while they're there, they get other products. If I'm making a decision on where I'm gonna buy product from, it's about convenience. Number one, where are you? Are you convenient to me, right? Are you in a part where I can get in and get out fast?
Our focus on speed at the counter was very important because we needed to show the customer that we were concerned about the experience they had, and it wasn't that, "Hey, I'd like you to come and buy my bleach." That's great. I'd like you to come and buy my bleach, but with the bleach comes everything else. With the chemicals comes, you know, nets, brushes, and parts, and all the other things that you need to service your customers. But you need to know that you're gonna get in and out of our place faster than you're gonna get in and out of somebody else's. We can tell. You have a dashboard. I have a dashboard in my office.
I can tell you in the number of minutes and seconds that it's taking us to transact in any one of our facilities per customer. That has paid huge dividends. Huge dividends for us. You're gonna see a slide later on in Donna's deck that, you know, we're well below five minutes. When we started this, we were close to six minutes per customer. When you take that times the thousands of transactions that we do, it's real productivity. Many of you have asked over the last couple of years, "Wow, how have you been able to grow as fast as you have and create that operating margin expansion?
How have you been able to manage the cost increase at a fraction of what the gross margin increase is?" It really has its roots in our focus on capacity creation. Then of course, employer of choice. Again, as I said, there's nothing that I have that's unique. I'm not Apple, so if you wanna buy an iPhone, whether you like Apple or not, you're gonna do business with Apple. There's not a single thing you can buy from me that you can't buy from somebody else. Our employees are the heart and soul of our business, literally. Having the best people that feel that this is a place where they can have a career, not just a job, that they're part of a stable, vibrant, growing company is important. That we develop them.
We have our own education center, we call it The EDGE. Some of you may have seen it on other tours in Dallas. We have a fully staffed education center. We use that for MITs, which are our manager-in-training, which generally are folks that we recruit right out of college to be part of the incoming management development program in our company. We also have what we call PDMITs, which are people that already work for us. You may be a counter person, an inside sales person, and you have expressed the desire to say, "Look, I'd like to grow my career. I'd like to be a branch manager one day. I'd like to be a sales manager. I'd like to be an operations manager or region operations manager or a district operations manager. Right?
I wanna grow my career." Well, we have an obligation to help. We have a fully funded team, which rolls up under Luther, that has our that staffs that facility in Dallas to develop our team. Then of course, we think rewarding our folks for the success is critical. We've had if you look at our compensation system, and you've, those of you that followed us for quite some time realize that our compensation system is very skewed towards variable comp for bonus. If the company does really well, we pay a lot of bonuses. Our bonus compensation, as Melanie reported when we did our full year 2021 results, our bonus compensation was up millions and millions of dollars.
That went to the employees, which we think they view as being rewarded for the hard work. Because $5.3 million worth of business transacted in 2021, we're off to a very good start this year. That doesn't happen by itself. These folks are working really hard, but the important thing is they also get to share in the success of the company. Quite frankly, the money we spend there, that's the highest return on investment on anything that we could do, is really investing in our people. Think about as a branch manager, right? Or sales center manager.
If I spend time developing you, if you become a better leader, or if you're a region manager and you become a better leader, you affect the day and you affect many people that work for you affect their careers, you affect their experience. We can set a culture at the top that says, "Oh, this is what working like is. This is what working at POOLCORP is like." But if we don't do a good job of training the frontline managers to be able to deliver that same culture at the local level, it doesn't work. That's why funding our education programs and this whole spirit of employer of choice is really core and central to our success. Let's talk about near-term business environment. Demand is continuing to be very strong.
I was with a bunch of dealers at an industry meeting last week, and I can tell you that they're all reporting to me that business is brisk. You can look at the permit data. Anything you look at would tell you that demand is very strong. I was in Dallas the end of last week. I met with our region manager in Dallas, and he was telling me that the builders in Dallas have tremendous backlogs, and there's still a lot of demand, not only for new pool construction, but renovation, remodel of the existing installed base, adding on features, right?
Whether it's heaters, which were added last year, which extends the season, whether it's adding automation, which really affects your experience as a pool owner, there is significant demand in the pipeline for 2022. Again, everybody we've spoken to says, you know, they're either booked out well into 2022, some of them are already booked through 2022. So again, very encouraging. Now, we also step back and look at, okay, the product that we're selling, outdoor living, from a pure demographic perspective, that's not going to change, right? Healthy outdoor living is something that is here to stay. That's not a fad that says, "Ah, I don't want a pool." Right? Once you have a pool, by the way, you have to take care of that pool.
There's great demand, and then when you couple that, I'm gonna talk a little bit about demographics and the shift in the population and where people are moving, pools become even more and more desirable. Again, backlogs are good. The other reality is inflation. There's tailwinds and there's headwinds as a result of inflation. Again, those of you that covered our company for many years know that, you know, we used to say, you know, repeatedly, inflation was maybe 1%. In a crazy year, sometimes 2%. Well, we've had a couple of years of significant inflation, and I have a slide that will give you a little more details on it. We've seen price increases have certainly added to our revenue growth.
The supplier cost changes have provided a buy-ahead opportunity, which has helped us from a margin perspective too. That's the good news. On the operating cost, there's headwinds there. Absolutely no doubt. You know, warehouse space right now is at a premium, which is crazy because I've been in the warehousing business or distribution business for this is my 34th year, and I remember what, you know, lease rates were when I first started in my career. Compared to what we're paying now, it's just insane. Every time we renew a lease, somebody thinks that they have, you know, Park Avenue property. It's crazy. Lease rates are going up. That's a reality of the environment that we're in, and we have to deal with it.
Which means that going back to our capacity creation initiative, that's important. We have to make sure that we're getting as much out of every one of those facilities as we possibly can. Why? Because that offsets some of the pressure of having to say, "Well, I need more space. I need to move. Lease costs are going up." Of course, high demand and supply chain backlogs. The good news is you all saw that we ended the year with quite a bit more inventory than we had before, and that's very comforting to me. It's also very comforting to our customer base, right? I would tell you, we're starting the year in a much better position than we started the 2021 season. That's good.
The bad news is that there's still some supply chain issues around certain products. Last year, it was a lot of products. This year it is around a smaller number of products, but there are certainly headwinds and supply chain issues around certain things. You know, no secret what they are. Chemicals are still going to be tight this year because the plant that burned down in Louisiana a couple of years ago still hasn't come back online. I don't think it's coming back online this year. I think it's gonna come back online in the 2023 season. That's the bad news. The good news is that we now have product flowing in from Asia to basically backfill that capacity. Again, when the plant burned down, those supply chains hadn't been established.
We were right in the heart of the beginning of COVID. Nobody knew what to do. Transportation ports were closed. Even though we identified some product in Asia, getting it from Asia, getting it made from Asia and getting it to the U.S. took a little bit. The good news is that we have product going, our chemical situation is much better than it was a year ago. But anything with a microchip in it, we're not exempt from anything else that you guys are reading in the paper or seeing on TV, anything with a microchip in it. Some of the automation, some of the variable speed pumps that have a microchip in it, those are the places that we see pressure from a supply chain perspective.
Again, this didn't just happen, right? The reality is, you know, microchips have been short for a year, right? So there's still not enough. The industry would take more if we could get more, but, you know, we're managing. And again, we have more inventory today to start the season than we had last year. You guys have seen the dollars, so we feel really good about that. Inflation, again, we talked about 1%-2% was normal. Demand coupled with rising input costs has accelerated price increases. Those of you that may be a little bit newer to the industry don't know that in the past, we basically would get one price increase at early buy season, which was in the Q4 of the year.
That price would essentially stick right all the way through till the next fall when the next price increase would be issued and factored into the market. Now we have seen that the industry has experienced multiple price increases, which is atypical, but, you know, we've had it for the last couple of years. I can't tell you that, you know, if I knew for sure, I would tell you, but frankly, nobody knows for sure. Wouldn't surprise me at all if there's continuing based on what's going on with the price of oil and everything else, if there is another round the price increases this year. We haven't been told that, but again, it's one of those things that we have to consider.
If that were to happen, what does that do? It provides some opportunity from an inventory perspective, also provides some additional revenue. 2021, we think inflation was in the 7%-8% range, and our guidance for 2022 was 9%-10% range, and that assumes that we don't get any other significant price increases for the year. If it does, we'll change that. Chemical inflation in 2021 was 20%. 20%. There was additional price that was put into the chemical space in the first part of this year. That number is a little bit higher for this year, but again, it's factored into our overall 9%-10%. Again, one of the beauties of the industry is price inflation has traditionally passed through.
It doesn't get trapped in the channel. It's passing through to us, it's passing through to the consumer. You know, one of the things that if you talk about, you know, chemicals because some people say it's crazy and you know, chemicals are very expensive, you know, the trichlor tablets, which were very hard to get and they're expensive, but when you put it in context of how many of those you use, it's not going to change anybody's behavior. Because if you know, think about a tablet, they're about eight ounces, so about half ounce, about half a pound. Two tablets is about a pound of chemicals.
If pre-COVID, those chemicals were, you know, call it $1.50, $1.60 a pound, and let's say that, you know, today those products are over $3 a pound. You're talking about if I use two tablets in my pool a week, right? I went from $1.60- $3.20. I don't know, that's gonna cause anybody to say, "This pool is killing me because I have another $2 a week in chemicals during the season." Quite frankly, you know, your chemical load, depending on time of year, so that would be at peak, right? During the colder months, it's even less chemical. Again, is it a big number from an inflation perspective? Yeah, it's a big number.
The reason it passes through the channel is it's not a number that's gonna change anybody's behavior. It works through the channel. The same thing with a pump, right? If you have a pump, are variable speed pumps now more than they were a couple of years ago? You bet. If the water stops moving in your pool, you don't have a choice to say, "Well, wow, that pump is an extra $200 now. I don't wanna buy it." You have no choice. You have to replace that pump. Because unless you have that water moving, it's going to turn green, and then you're going to end up with mosquitoes and frogs and an unsightly mess in your yard. Let's face it, you're using a pool every day, whether you're in it or not, right?
Whether you're in it or not, you're using that pool because it's part of your yard. It's part of your landscape. You have to maintain that pool. Whether you're talking about, you know, on the material side, when you consider that on the price of a pool, material makes up 25%. The vast majority of it is labor. Even with the increase in the cost of the material that we would sell, that's not the deterrent that says, "Hey, you know what? I'm not gonna do that project." Inflation is real. It's real. We all feel it as consumers. We see it, you know, as the bridge between the suppliers and our customers and how that falls or flows all the way through.
However, we've been fortunate that it passes through the channel. It's not materially affected demand, and quite frankly, it has provided some gross margin tailwinds when you consider the fact that our inventory is significantly higher. Of course, that's going to help from a gross margin perspective, this year. The competitive landscape. What we would say is wholesale distribution is still the most efficient channel to market. When you consider the numbers that I started the presentation with, 2,200 suppliers, 120,000 customers, 200,000 different products. The best way for that product to flow through the channel is through wholesale distribution. From a competitive landscape, the customer base is fragmented, supplier is fragmented. There have been recent investments from private equity into the space.
Private equity has come in, and they've bought some distribution businesses. The reality is there's no new competition. They simply bought the existing businesses that were out there, so there's no new competition. There's new ownership. There's no new capabilities. You know, people say, "Has it really changed the competitive landscape?" The answer from our perspective is no, because the same people that were running those other companies are now running them now as part of a private equity-backed group. There's many, many, many differences between how a business like that operates and how we operate in terms of tools and resources. You know, there was a thought, you know, a couple of years ago, somebody said specialty retailer is going to get into supporting, they're going to go after the professional trade.
Again, specialty retailers lack the infrastructure to serve the professional trade. You guys walked into a typical pool retail store today, the Pinch A Penny training store that we have. That's not unlike, you know, almost every pool retail store that you would see. Fairly small footprint. Our branches would be 15,000 sq ft-20,000 sq ft. If we could serve the professional out of a 2,000 sq ft store, then boy, am I way overinvested in real estate. It's just a value, the value proposition is very different. They lack the infrastructure in order to really cater to. Now, let's not kid ourselves.
Last year, when chemicals were really short, or if it happens to be a convenience, is that I go to David's pool, and I look in his pool, and I'm like, "Wow, you need some algaecide, and I'm out of algaecide on the truck." There is a pool retail store that is half a mile from where I'm at or 1 mi from where I'm at, or I could drive 4 mi or 5 mi back to SCP. I don't kid myself to think that the service tech is going to drive all the way back to SCP if all he needs is a $15 bottle of algaecide. He's probably just go in there and buy it. I get it. It's a convenience thing. But are they going to have the parts? Are they going to have the whole goods?
Are they going to have the commercial-sized chemicals? Because remember, those are not bought in consumer-sized quantities, typically. Nobody buys algaecide a bottle at a time. They're buying a case or cases at a time. Again, specialty retail, it's just a completely different model. I think it's a. Certainly, there's a convenient aspect. But when I look at them as in terms of competition to what we do for the majority of our business, let alone construction, that's just on the maintenance side. I really think there's a completely different set of capabilities there. The M&A pipeline is still robust. We remain strategic and disciplined buyers. I think one of the things that you guys have come to know and expect about POOLCORP is that we are very disciplined allocators of capital.
We look at. You know, you can imagine from where we sit in the market, there aren't many businesses that transact that we don't get a look at, okay? You know, most companies that decide they are going to sell, they want POOLCORP to look at it because we would be, could be an attractive acquirer. We look at almost everything that transacts. I would tell you that, you know, we are disciplined, and we're strategic. There's some businesses that we like, and we say, "Hey, look, you know, whether the multiple or the price, you know, is up a turn or two." I would tell you prices now versus what they were a few years ago, yeah, they might be a couple of turns higher for some. Some want just a crazy multiple.
The difference with us is I don't need to buy anybody in terms of a distributor because I'm in almost every market today. We also have the ability to greenfield. It's not a question of, wow, if I want to get into that market, I have nothing there. I could try and greenfield and put three, four, five locations to make it credible. That takes a long time. Probably better if you want to be in the pool business in that market, if there's somebody that you could buy, great. I don't have to buy anybody because I'm already there. For me, it's a question of capacity. For me, it's a question of capabilities. If there's something unique about that business, are we in a position to fund it and buy it? Absolutely.
What you count on from us is to be disciplined with that capital dollar and say, if there's nothing unique, and you can get that same business, you can grow with that same share by opening up a facility, and your investment necessary, you know, to buy versus versus greenfielding, if the return on capital is better for greenfielding, then your expectation for us should be, well, then don't pay anybody a bunch of money. You should greenfield and open up, and that's what we do. In areas where there's something that's unique, so Pinch A Penny, for instance, we'll talk about in a minute, there was a bunch of unique things about that that says, you know, could I have built a building just like you saw? Sure.
There's a lot of things that go on inside of that building and capabilities and knowledge that would have taken us years to go get. That, in my mind, is a very strategic acquisition. Buying another distributor that happens to be across the street from me in town, again, there's a price where it's logical, and we've done that historically for many years, and we look at those, you know. We have a pipeline full of businesses. If it's strategic, and we like the culture, 'cause culture is a big thing about this business. I don't want to buy a business with a lousy culture because POOLCORP has a great culture, and I don't want to take that problem and take a problem child 'cause I don't need to, 'cause I'm already operate in those facilities.
If you take markets like Dallas, for instance. In Dallas, I have 12 facilities. In Houston, I have 12 facilities. In Tampa, I have five facilities. For us, it's not a question of, wow, I need to go open six businesses or seven businesses to be credible. It's like, no, if I really need it and the economics make sense, can we buy it? Certainly. But am I going to pay a crazy multiple for something that I don't need? No, and you wouldn't expect us to nor want us to. Long-term trends and outlook. The housing market, rising home values, and increased home investments. Those are very common themes that we see today. You know, the favorable U.S. population migration trends.
I was reading an article coming down here yesterday, very, timing was awesome, but it basically said there's 1,000 people a day moving to the state of Florida. Texas has a very similar number, right? The number of families that are moving to Texas. Again, you have families that are moving. The migration pattern is, you know, the joke in our industry is no moving vans go north, right? They go north with oranges, south with furniture. You have a bunch of people that are moving into year-round markets. Outdoor living, whether it's a pool, whether it's a patio, whether it's a spa, those are all very high on everybody's list of wants and needs, right?
If you're going to live in Florida, I sell my house up north. I have the markets are good everywhere, so I'm pretty flush with cash. I'm coming to Florida. I'm going to be in a year-round market. This is the place. If I thought about having a pool and I lived in Buffalo, New York, it's kind of a stretch. I'm not going to put a ton of money into a pool in most cases in Buffalo, New York, because the season is so short. There's some very nice pools there, but for the most part, the nicer pools are in areas where we're in a year-round market. Well, that happens to be where the population is growing. That will continue to fuel our growth. The aging install base.
You know, the installed base of pools, which we put at about 5.4 million pools now today, the average age on that is 20 years plus. I look at that, and I say, okay, there's 20 years. Those of you that have a pool understand this, and those of you don't, I'll just give you a quick picture. When you think about a pool, you got to think about there's the equipment pad, which is very similar to the HVAC systems and hot water that you have in your house. The useful life on an equipment pad, if you take care of your water, this assumes that you balance your water and that you maintain your pool.
It can get, you know, eight to 10 years, again, depending on whether you're in a year-round market, depending on whether you have a spa and all that other stuff. The interior surface of the pool is like the exterior surfaces of your home. There's a couple of things that happen. One is if I take care of my water quality, the interior surface of the pool lasts longer. If I don't take care of the water quality, and the water becomes very corrosive, you can take a brand-new pool, and you can wreck it, you know, inside of a month. You can wreck the finish on a pool. Then there's also colors and style, right? There's colors. Those of you that have had the fortune of having multiple houses, I think back, my wife and I were actually over last weekend.
I moved my wife 11 times. She's a saint. We were just looking at pictures of some of our older houses, and the very first house that we built, we looked at the colors that were in the house, and I looked at it, and I go, "What were we thinking?" Colors change. If I have a pool that was built 10 years ago, it looks very different than a pool that is built today. There's new design features. I built a pool, my first pool, a couple of years ago. I have a tanning ledge in the pool. If you asked me 10 years ago what a tanning ledge was, I had no idea. I know that for pools, they're in now.
Everybody wants a tanning ledge because they're great for little kids because the water's only this deep, so they can play and splash in the water if you want to tan, whatever. It's one of those things that if you look at a pool that was built 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, you don't really see a lot of those. If you look at pools that are built today, you see a lot of tanning ledges. You look at water features. You look at, again, we talked about a pool having a strip of land around it or a strip of concrete around it. Now you have, you know, acres of decks in some cases. Outdoor lighting, water features, fire features. The market's getting bigger.
That upgraded pool features, that's what that means, is that pools today are different than they were. It all starts with that the vessel. When we count 5.4 million, it's the vessel in the ground that we're counting. A remodel and a renovation is simply taking that vessel that holds the water, and you can add the decking to it. You can add the water features. You can add the fire features. You can add automation, right? Which is, which is the point of the last bullet. There are today, of the 5.3 million pools, the vast majority of those have little to no automation on them, yet our homes are all becoming automated. The good news is that manufacturers are coming out with more and more connected products.
There's an expectation in the market from people that say, "I want a connected pool." I have one of those connected pools, right? It allows me to do a couple of things. I can control everything from my phone. Every time I do an investor conference, you know, we have, Melanie and I have one coming up in Boston. Every time I sit, and we explain this to folks. Guaranteed, I sell at least one upgraded automation system to people that don't know they exist. Friends of mine that come to my house for the first time that have a swimming pool, and they look at mine, and then, you know, they say. I turn on some features from my phone, they're like, "How'd you do that?" I'm like, "Well, my phone." "Well, I don't have that. My builder never even told me about that.
The maintenance guy doesn't even tell me about that. Again, there's a huge upside and opportunity to modernize the pool pad. Again, this is a little bit about the favorable U.S. population dynamics. This is the forecast from the Census Bureau that across the South, 18% growth, West, 21% growth. Sorry for the Northeasterners, it looks like the population is not gonna grow all that much. Again, you got a couple of things going on. You have people that are migrating to the year-round markets. That's really good for us. We're in a healthy outdoor living lifestyle, right? Who doesn't want an outdoor kitchen? Even if I can't have a patio, if I can't have a pool, I'll have a patio.
If I have a patio now, I was talking to a builder the other day. I said, "How many times are you adding an outdoor kitchen to a pool project?" He said, "Almost every time when I sit down with a homeowner and say, 'Well, you're spending all this money on a pool, why don't we do an outdoor kitchen?'" Who doesn't want an outdoor kitchen, right? If you make it easy, and what the builder was telling me, he says, "If I make it easy for the customer, they'll do it. But if the customer has to figure out, well, how do I do that? Where do I do that? Can you do that for me?" The question is if can you do that for me? They're like, "Yeah." All they want is a price.
If it's a fair price, they're doing it 'cause they're spending a lot of money on other things too. The work from home flexibility is a big deal. We went from everybody, you know, commuted every day, you were in the office every day, to virtually nobody was in the office, to now a hybrid. You have a lot of businesses that maybe your own, your own companies are trying to drive people back to the office. I get it. I think, and again, I don't know that there is any certainty on how it's going to work out, but I believe that the end state is gonna be a hybrid. I don't think we're all going back to work, everybody's gonna make that commute every day.
I think with technology and being able to work from home, that we've proven over the last couple of years, I think the end state is gonna be a lot more flexibility in the work from home. Then, of course, with increasing home values, outdoor living, spending in the core markets, and that's where we are most heavily invested. Again, the demographic trends, you have boomers, you have Gen X, and you have millennials. I guess the real takeaway for me on that is look at the right-hand side, the millennials with the 25- to 40-year-olds, and they're just starting household formation. 72 million folks. Then I'd like to draw your attention to the $70 trillion of wealth transfer that is about to happen.
All of that sets up a very robust environment, housing market, and you have people that are gonna be owning pools for the first time. That's great. They have money, and they want outdoor living. You know, the days of sitting inside in front of your TV. Like when I was a kid, we didn't have a patio, and frankly, none of my friends had patios. Maybe a couple of them had pools, but it was basically an inside, you know, people spent time inside. You know, people were finishing basements. Now the bigger deal is outdoor living. Pools, patios, fireplaces, fire pits, outdoor kitchens, that's our. If you look at the realtors, you know, if you follow any of the information that the realtors shared, it would tell you that, you know, there was a time when, like I would tell you this.
Like I said, I moved 11 times early on in my career, we never had a pool. This, in fact, the pool I have now is the first time, and the reason is because I was, I always knew I was gonna move in about, you know, 2-3 years. Every time I talk to a realtor, I was like, "Look, don't buy a house with a pool 'cause I won't be able to sell it." What's the most desired feature on a house right now, if you ask realtors what they want, is a pool or outdoor living. Again, it's come into favor, and we don't see that trend changing. Again, here's the new pool construction. The map, so you can see that.
You can see where it dropped during the Great Recession, dropped to you know 40,000 pools-50,000 pools. It's now back. Last year was 120,000 pools. We think 2022 is going to be even larger. Again, the important takeaway on this is really the average age of that installed base. It provides almost an endless opportunity of people that. There's a waiting list for people that wanna get pools built, no doubt. There is also a bigger waiting list for people that want to have their pools remodeled, and those aging installed base are pools that would have no automation, no technology. The number of heaters that we sold in the last couple of years is tremendous. Why?
Because people are like, "If I have the pool, you know, I can heat the water, and I can use it longer." That simply just extends the pool season. Home investment spending, again, home improvement, I think we talked about most of that, I won't repeat that. Then look at these product categories. Our automation and control sales growth from 2021 or 2019 to 2021. You know, look at all of those numbers. Almost all of them up 100%, right? Automation, sanitizing systems. Why? Because, you know, chemicals is part of it, so there was a chemical shortage, but you also have a younger generation that says, "I don't really want harsh chemicals.
Is there another way for me to sanitize our pool?" Salt systems, UV systems, ozone systems are also, we see those growing tremendously, and I don't think that trend is gonna change. 'Cause again, you have the millennials that this whole environmentally friendly thing, that trend isn't going to change. People are saying, "If I can have a pool, and I can put, you know, half of the amount of chemicals in my pool because I have an ozone machine or I have a UV machine," that frankly is an easy sell, and that's not going to change. Demand for those products is going to improve. Heaters, heat pumps, we talked about extend the season. Also, the heat pumps are a far more efficient way to heat a pool.
The other thing I would tell you is that a lot of people don't know is a heat pump, and I keep telling the manufacturers that make this, they have a branding issue, heat pumps also cool. Okay? In the Florida market, right? Here where pools can get very warm, if you have a pool that's exposed to the sun, most people don't know that that same heat pump that they have, there's one model that's usually, you know, a few hundred bucks more than what they pay for the heat pump that allows you to cool the pool. You basically can set a thermostat on your pool water and say, "Look, I want year-round, I want 85-degree pool." Well, you can have that. I live in North Carolina.
My pool without the chiller on, my pool is exposed to the sun. My pool will get, you know, 93 degrees. I gotta be honest with you, I don't really want to swim in a 93-degree pool. It's just not all that refreshing. But I can turn the chiller on and set my pool to 85 degrees. It feels awesome. Again, with all of these folks moving, and the fact that most heat pumps today are just heat pumps, there's a large opportunity to have the marketplace continue to grow because instead of just a heat pump, now I'm going to get a heat cool. Robotic cleaners, right?
There was a time when almost every pool years ago had this little, you used to call them, the pressure cleaner or a suction cleaner, and there was a name that we used to call them as a kid, and I'm drawing a blank right now. But again, those were that was the standard. It was a big hose in your pool, and the thing just kind of randomly went around your pool. Did an okay job, didn't climb the wall, didn't scrub the wall. Guess what? You know that same Roomba that you have in your house that, you know, vacuums your house effortlessly, that same technology exists in a swimming pool. So you have pools that have robots that climb the wall and scrub the wall. So I have a robot. Why?
Because if I didn't have that, I'd have to go out there and scrub the walls, right? And I would also be stuck with that big 2-inch hose in my pool, which I don't like. Most new cleaners that are being sold today are robots. Why? Because they're better. Plus, if I see something in the bottom of my pool, again, with my phone, I can drive the robot over to the area that needs to be cleaned up with leaves or debris or something, and I'm done. Before, I'd have to go get the net and the brush and try and get it out. Now, I can just steer it over with my robot. Variable speed pumps is, again, we got some help from the DOE, so those are required now.
They're also better for our customers. They're quieter, they're much more energy efficient, and they're better for the environment too. Natural stone pavers we talked about. Look at the pictures there, those two pools, right? That pool on the right. Funny story. When I saw that picture when I lived in Dallas before I joined POOLCORP, I was going to put a pool in, and my backyard was very much like that, and I was going to build that pool, right? I looked at it, I'm like, "Wow, this is crazy. It's almost exactly the pool that I was going to build." Again, didn't know anything about the natural stone, the travertine and all this. This was in 2016.
I look at that pool and I'm like, "Wow, the one on the right is so much nicer." There's so many more features. Which pool would you rather have in the backyard? Well, that was how pools used to be built. This is the pools that they are building today. Pool builders don't want to build the pool on the right. Our NPT franchise, right, which is the natural stones and the pool tile and the pool finish, are all part of what is benefiting and helping, quite frankly, fuel that growth. LED lighting is the same thing. Again, those of you that have been around a while know that a swimming pool at one time, if you had a light, it was a white light.
You turned it on at night if you wanted to swim at night. Great. Now, like, you know, LED lighting, you could have multiple colors. You can have it sync to music. You can do all kinds of things. It basically changes the theme, and it basically makes the pool a, you know, a part of your view from the whole time that you are in your house and awake. My pool is in the backyard. We look out over the pool. The pool is lit with LED, with colors, changing colors. It's gorgeous. The only difference is it's an LED light that you can program versus the old technology, which was a white light, and your programming was it's on or it's off. Less than 30% of the existing pools have that automation, right?
Majority of new pool construction is getting the automation. Every time a neighbor gets a pool, we always, you know, we can tell. We talk to builders, they say, "Look, if I put a pool in here and I deck out that pool, as soon as the neighbor looks over the fence and, you know, Mrs. Arvan says, 'Hey, I can control this new pool. I can do everything with my phone.' The first thing they do is call their dealer and say, 'Hey, I want what she has. Can you do that to my pool? Her pump, I don't even hear it. My pump sits under my bedroom window and it screams. Can you change that?'" Sure, I can change it. It's a variable speed pump. Newer technology, and it's a quieter pump. This is connected outdoor living, right?
Again, just an example of everything. Basically what you're looking at, whether it's the outdoor lighting, the fire, water features and all that is all done through the smartphone. Now, I have an idea that there's a fair amount of interest in Pinch A Penny. I'm going to spend a little bit of time on Pinch A Penny. For perspective, right? I know that I heard from you guys that most of you enjoyed the tour, and it's a very impressive facility. It's 5% of our revenue, okay? Today, it represents 5% of our revenue. Just to kind of keep that in perspective, it's a very impressive facility, but it's a very small part of our business.
We are very proud of the acquisition. We think it has a lot of potential, but it's 5% of our business, so just keep that in context. What you saw was, you got to see the DC, which is 210,000 sq ft. There are 255 franchise locations in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. The vast majority of those locations are in the state of Florida. Then, of course, you got to see Suncoast Chemicals, which is 105,000 sq ft of what I would tell you is a state-of-the-art and pristine chemical repackaging facility. I have been to others that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.
You know, my first sense when I walked in that facility was I was expecting the chlorine aroma to knock me off my feet. I walked in, I looked around, and I'm like, this is cool. This is a state-of-the-art facility. Let's talk about the franchise. You can see on the map, you can see the red dot, high concentration of dots in the state of Florida. You can see Texas is a growing market for us. We have some in Georgia and Louisiana. Everything that you saw, the warehouse that you saw ships to every store in the network. You see the locations down in Houston, Texas. That's a 19-hour drive from where you stand.
Every Monday morning, a truck leaves from here, drives 19 hours to Houston, drops off along the way, but drops its final drop in the Houston stores, and then comes all the way back. On Wednesday, a second truck leaves, follows that same route. That's the job, right? All of those stores are delivered out of Clearwater. Who has a bunch of warehouses in the state of Texas? Me. Who has a CSL in the state of Texas? Me. Do you think that would allow us to be more efficient in how we operate and supply the stores in the state of Texas? Of course. Do we think it will allow us to continue to grow that platform, you know, throughout the Sun Belt? Absolutely. Are you gonna see us become Subway and put 200 dots on a map every year? No.
We have no interest in doing that. We have a business that is a very high-quality business with highly desirable franchises that we will continue to scale. Again, for perspective, we are targeting, you know, eight to 12 new franchise locations a year. We think we can help them grow faster because of the warehouse network that we have. No doubt in my mind. We think that the expanded product offering, whether it's the NPT product, the building materials, we think that makes it easier for the franchisees to grow and expand their business and help more pool owners get the work done that they want to get done. We believe that the chemical sourcing and availability and gross margin benefits through Suncoast Chemicals is significant. There's a lot of potential there.
Again, for perspective, we've owned this business for about 75 days. You know, we're not gonna tell you today that here's exactly what our chemical capacity is, and here's how we're going to, here's when we'll be at this milestone, that milestone, or that milestone. Logically, we will leverage the assets that we have. We will max out the facilities that we have. Why? Because who has the largest appetite for pool chemicals in the world? Us. We have a great asset we'll use. The primary purpose of that plant is to service the stores. Do they have surplus capacity that we will soak up in POOLCORP? Absolutely. Can that one facility supply all of POOLCORP? Absolutely not. We have a massive appetite for chemicals.
Is there capacity there for them to do an additional product for us that they were doing for independent distribution before? Absolutely. Can we leverage the asset, you know, and stretch capacity to do right. You saw maybe, you know, if you saw when you walked by, they were actually running Regal liquids, okay? Regal is the SCP brand of algaecides and balancers. When you walk past that, you, if you look closely, you saw Regal on the bottle. That's our brand. They're now making our brands. Again, we are. It's brand new. We clearly see the benefits over time, but the keyword there is over time. Over time, right? The operating cost synergies through transportation and logistics, absolutely. We import a lot of product, right?
We import a lot of product. We have CSLs on the East Coast, we have CSLs in the central area, and we have CSLs out over on the West Coast and up north. There's a lot of products coming into the Port of Houston. There's an opportunity just from a backhaul perspective, that truck that goes today all the way back to Clearwater, which one day we hope it doesn't actually return to Clearwater, that we're serving Texas from Texas. Today there's an opportunity to put freight on that truck from a backhaul perspective. There's lots of opportunities from a synergy perspective. Everything you saw in that building that they buy, so they, I guess, is we now, but everything in that building, we buy. There's cost synergies, same suppliers, right?
Same suppliers, so we'll end up with better fulfillment and a strategic advantage in terms of our purchasing. Of course, the retail support systems. One of the questions that I have gotten several times is, "What about the channel conflict, Pete? Is that a big deal?" What I would tell you is that, when we first announced the deal, there was some customers that said, "Wait a minute. You supplied my retail store, but now we're competitors. I don't know if I like that." I'm like, "Okay, well, let's think about that for a minute. We're actually not competitors because that store is independently owned and operated." Today we operate three stores that are company stores. Eventually, that likely goes to one because I think I have to have one.
I have no desire to own any retail stores, and won't. We're not going to open POOLCORP retail stores. I said to the customer I was talking to, I said, "That store is independently owned and operated. Guess what? The pool store that is across the street from you or around the corner on the other side of town is also your competitor, right? Yes. I sell them, and you know that. When you go into the counter, the guy in front of you or the lady in front of you is also your competitor, right? Yeah. And I'm selling them." I said, "Here's the dirty little secret.
We've also been selling Pinch A Penny. They're independently owned and operated businesses. The idea that we are somehow now competitors, once we have explained this, and again, was one of the risks that we took when we did the acquisition about how big a deal is it going to be. I can tell you, so far, because of how we have operated and will operate, it has not created the threat of channel conflict. The threat has not materialized. Most of the customers, and I'm with customers all the time, have said, "You know what? I think [Shake] is a good idea for you." It's a good idea, it's a good acquisition, and there are synergies. If you look at those retail support programs. Right. Let's talk about that for a second. Water chemistry and testing.
Jim told you, rightfully so, that the heart and soul of every pool retail store is that water chemistry station. Prior to the acquisition, we sold a lot of independent pool retail stores their chemicals. Here was my sales pitch. I've got a great supply of chemicals with the exception of last year. I have a great supply of chemicals, and you can get pretty much everything you want from me. But what I didn't have was the software that allowed them to become a better retailer, that allowed them to professionally prescribe the recipe that Jim showed you that the computer prints out that says, "Hey, based on the water test, here's what you should put in the store." Okay? We now have that software that we will eventually brand as Regal.
It will be offered to the independents, so they too have a professional system. You know, one of our other competitors that services the mass and some independent retail stores has a system like that. Leslie's has a system like that. Unfortunately, I didn't have one for my independent retailers that I now have that we will be adding to our toolkit, which will help them sell more product. Water chemistry is a big deal. Point-of-sale system. We have a B2B tool called POOL 360. You guys have been following that for many, many years. Melanie's going to show you the stats on where we are with that. But what we didn't have was a point-of-sale system.
We allowed you as an independent retailer to buy product from us by going into POOL360 and entering the order. You can enter the order, you can do it 24 hours a day, we would deliver it to you. The operative word is you had to enter the order. With a point-of-sale system, we'll be able to say to that same store, "Would you like to run our point-of-sale software?" And by the way, it will eventually be linked with POOL360, so that it will do your replenishment order for you. We think that, and the same thing in terms of, most of our independent retailers also have service routes, right? Pool cleaning routes. There's software that helps them run their business better. We now have that.
The point is, there is a suite of tools that we bring to the independents that will help them run a better business, and we think, create tremendous value, for them, which makes a stickier transaction. Before we were, "We have product, and we have a lot of it, we have more of it, we have it in more places than anybody else." Now we have a technology piece that we can match with that frankly makes our service offering second to none. With that, I'm going to be done, and I'm going to turn it over to Donna, who is our Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. She's going to talk, and after her presentation, we're going to take a two-minute break.
Go out, and you guys will be able to grab lunch, come back in, and then we'll continue the presentation, and go to Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Pete. Okay, as you said, just a few slides. I'm going to cover the market, the market opportunity, the market reach, how we get there, and then our sales center network. Starting first, let's talk about the addressable market. $28 billion of the areas we touch. The wholesale distribution, $10 billion. Wholesale meaning the wholesale value. Hardscapes, which is shared between the Horizon side of the business and the pool side at $3 billion. Irrigation and landscape at $7 billion just in the areas in where we serve those markets. The DIY is another $3 billion. Commercial pool, which is a whole other set of pools, $2 billion. Then the European portion, which you'll hear about a little later, is also $3 billion. $28 billion addressable market.
The slide on your left is where we talk about the market at $22 billion. Remember that this portion includes the labor. It includes the installation cost. It's what the consumer pays in the U.S. pool market, again, at $22 billion. If you go on the right side, that is the $10 billion that we just spoke about, that's the wholesale value. As you can see, we play in each of those markets, whether it's in-ground, pool construction, remodel, repair, or the service side of the business. Let's look at that $10 billion and how we address it. Major markets, medium markets, and minor. Pool share, if you look at that portion, but look at how much other additional share is still available to us. Our market share has increased as those markets have each grown.
Again, either from the direct side of the business or through distribution, we have the opportunity to continue to grow. Now, this is probably the most important slide, I think, that I'm going to cover with you today. Pete talked about the opportunity for acquisitions, and we strategically look at those and what we can gather from them. What are the capabilities that we can pick up, just as you saw with the Pinch A Penny side on this chemical packaging? Well, what's extremely important about this slide, 410 locations. It's not just important because we have 410. What is really important, if you look at the acquisitions and the new locations we have opened in 2020 and in 2021, all of those are completely integrated into our system. The enterprise system that we run includes all of those new locations.
Meaning if you're an employee there, you're in our Workday system. If you are a vendor supplying to those, you are able to see our demands. If you are a customer, you're again, part of that included system. That's how we do the integration into our businesses, and that's how we continue to grow, and we will continue to do so in the future. We have a strong market position. On the domestic $10 billion, that's 5.4 million pools of the in-ground install base, plus another 3 million pools that are above ground. 280 of those 410 locations I just discussed are for the pool side of the business. We are growing that at an annual rate of 6%-8%. Let's talk about some of those other areas of growth.
Looking at the commercial pool business, $2 billion, but that's another 300,000 pools in addition to the residential side. We have 75 locations that are stocking the commercial products. When a commercial pool is down, it's extremely important to get it running again. Time is money. It's a resort pool. It's a club pool. They need it up and running. Having those products is a great competitive advantage for us. We also have all of the specialized bid and spec for the new construction of commercial pools. That is growing annual rate 10%-15%. Again, this is organic growth, opportunity to grow in an expanded market. The hardscapes and outdoor living, as we talked about, everyone now wants that outdoor oasis. $3 billion for that market, just in the outdoor living and hardscapes.
We have 120 and growing of our NPT locations. I talked to someone earlier about when we did the presentation in Orlando, we had 12 of them at that time, and we've grown them extensively across the country. It gives the consumer an opportunity to come in, touch, feel, look at those products. What do they want to put around their pool deck? That is growing, again, organic growth of 10%-15%. You see the difference of looking at the basic pool and then as we grow all of the other categories. Our competitive advantage for our sales center network. We are where the pools are, and we are going where the pools are going to be. If you look at this, 70% of our business is done at that sales center counter. That's a lot.
Just as we're with you today, our customers are there in that sales center doing business. They expect them to have the product. Those teams have the product knowledge. They know how to help their customers at the local level. We continue to open sales centers as we grow, and we continue to widen our competitive advantage every single day as we open those sales centers, and we have them in the right place and are able to provide the product at the right time. We spoke about some of the other categories where we're growing quickly with the building materials at a faster pace, hardscapes, fiberglass pools, commercial pools. We have the facilities. We have them in stock, whether it is the building part of it, the hardscapes or the commercial pool to continue to grow.
Now, when we talk about where the pools are, when you flew in yesterday, did you happen to look down? Do you see how many pools are in the Tampa market, right? We have more than anyone else in this location, five locations in Tampa. They have a full complement of product. They have two of those consumer showrooms in this market. When we talked about hardscapes and the ability to stock, we have off-site storage for hardscapes. We have all of the equipment to deliver, so we can do on-site. Again, let's go back to 70% is done at the counter, especially in a high service market, which you have in Tampa. A great opportunity for us, four more are scheduled for 2024 this year and next year, four more locations in this highly visible market.
That's just giving you example of the place you sit today. We've already talked a little bit about our consolidated locations, consolidated stocking. When I talked about how all of the sales centers are encompassed in that enterprise, our CSLs are as well. When someone needs a product, we're able to bring the product in, take advantage of large capacity buys. That's a cost advantage. It's a competitive advantage for us. We have the technology to help our vendors understand the demand, and it also gives us an opportunity to do private label and exclusive products. We're able to bring them in and distribute them out to other locations. Finally, what we have is a complete enterprise called POOLCORP. We distribute, and we take care of the customers at that local level. They know who we are.
They know they can depend on coming in to get the chemicals, the products they need, even on a daily basis. That's where they come. With that, we're going to take the quick break, and after that, Todd Marshall, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, will present.
Who's ready to tal k technology? I haven't gotten to meet everyone personally, but I'm Todd Marshall, CIO for Pool, and gonna walk you through at a very high level, very quickly, some of the exciting things we're working on related to digital transformation and related technology initiatives. I'm gonna walk through basically kind of our journey, some of the new tech that we're working on and the future. You know, digital transformation is one of those. It's an IT buzzword. IT loves buzzwords.
You know, it's really, again, Pete talked about that driven culture inside of POOLCORP, and really focused, again, on our customer experience. Wanna deliver the best possible experience to our customers and really, again, digital transformation, really using technology as the enabler to improve that customer experience, which leads to a plan of new investments, new technologies that we're gonna use to improve that customer experience. I'll touch very briefly on the future we see, right? When we talk about technology and the role it's gonna have in the organization and that continued value creation. When you look at our journey, our transformation journey, it really starts with
Our best-in-class distribution, right? It's who we are. From there, really kind of focusing on opportunities to improve that world-class customer experience that our branches deliver day in and day out. And again, tied, we always want to create and add value to our customers. From a technology perspective, my team and I focus very heavily on agile, cloud-based technologies to make sure that we build a foundation that will handle the needs of our customers and ourselves for right now, but also allow us to rapidly change and adjust and deliver increased value in the future. We focus very heavily on enhancing again that execution, right? Which is key to our business, key to our customers, helping them run their businesses.
You know, an area that gets a lot of attention when you start talking about digital transformation is that digital sales counter, that interaction point with our customer. Everybody today wants to do everything from their phones, right? We obviously have POOL360 Pete mentioned before, and we have related mobile applications, but we knew these were areas that with investment, with additional focus, we could transform and provide again a better customer experience. When you look at our data, again and with our unique position in the industry that Pete talked about, our data is extremely valuable. It's very, very valuable to us as it relates to charting our course forward.
again, with a greater distinct and focus on our data, we wanna we know we've unlocked some of the potential, but we know there's so much more we can do with it. This is not all exhaustive, but this gives you these are some of the areas we identified very quickly as hey, these are opportunities for us to transform, add technology, and again enhance our customer experience and continue to create additional value. You know, areas that we started to focus on and invest in. New technology to improve execution. Capacity creation is at the top of one of our IT priorities, tied to what Pete was talking about earlier, right? Using technology to help us again improve that customer experience and become more efficient.
Whether that's tied to efficiency related to the pricing increases moving through the chain that Pete talked about, or maybe it's visibility of inventory for our customers, or transparency on when orders are ready. These are all areas that we've identified that we're working to add technology to put better tools in the hands of our employees, again, improving that customer experience that we've become known for in the industry, helping our customers run their businesses and deal with pool season. POOL360 is 10+ years old. It's been wildly successful, had a great year last year, but we know we can do more, right? It's been rewritten from top to bottom. New user experience, new search technology, the underlying technology that supports it and a whole new framework ready to go.
Tied to that, coupled very heavily, an improved mobile application, right? 'Cause again, we know that B2B customers want to do everything from their phones. One of the things we were very focused on as a team is that if you look at B2B users, right, they're consumers too. They've become used to that world-class customer service that they get or improved customer experience that they get in mobile applications and websites every day. We have to keep step with that. They expect that same level of user experience when they're interacting with us digitally. Blues treak was an application we rolled out to help our employees provide or kind of break the customer experience we provide in the branches away from the sales counter and make it a little bit more mobile. That has also been rewritten.
Same framework, same enhanced search technology. Again, the idea really to deliver a better tool to the employees. We're taking it one step further in that we've now delivered a mobile application that our employees can take basically that sales counter experience and go anywhere. They can go to the job site, they can go to a customer location, they can basically go anywhere they need to and take an order, and be able to help the customers other than the sales counter. Again, underpinning all this is investments in our development teams and our development technologies, focusing on continuous deployment and development to create a cadence where we're releasing new features on a routine basis, again, to continue to add value to these applications. Substantial investment and progress here. Data-driven decision making.
Again, this kind of ties to that strategy of, hey, we wanna do more with our data, right? Making sure that the applications we develop, as well as the data we have now, can be used to create greater data-driven decisions, make it more useful to our customers and to the industry. This kind of creates a plan or a framework or a foundation that we're focused on, to really kind of move toward the future that we see. Again, one of those principles that Pete talked about is creating value for our customers, right? It's one of our core tenets. One of the things that we see emerging is really using technology to deliver technology to, I'm sorry, to deliver value to our customers, right?
Providing software solutions to our customers to help them deal with the challenges they deal with day in and day out, all of which is gonna be tied back to our world-class distribution through Pool, or the POOL360 engine, right? Whether it's, and as Pete mentioned when we were talking about the Pinch A Penny technology stack, again, integrated so that whether it's replenishment or it's water testing or whatever, we'll be able to provide that solution. When you look at, you know, what that looks like from a picture perspective, right? This is what we kind of think about when we talk about a B2B cloud, and you'll recognize some of the pieces in that cloud, right? Service management, supply chain, digital marketing, point of sale.
These are all things we plan to bring together, but again, each one being positioned to help one of our customer segments, whether that's independent retail or independent service, commercial. It allows us really to now create this unrivaled value proposition for our customers and evolve into the digital distributor we intend to be. All right. Jeff?
Here. Is that good? Got the clicker?
Yep.
All right.
All you.
All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you guys for giving me a little time. I'm gonna cover Horizon Distributors. Horizon, for you guys that don't know, we're a kind of a four-leg irrigation landscape business. Our four legs are irrigation, you know, sprinkler systems at the home. Landscape products, so that's chemicals, fertilizers, and then equipment. We sell equipment, mowers, blowers, trimmers, that type of stuff. And then a fourth category, which is kinda all-encompassing outdoor living. That outdoor living category, as Pete alluded to, is really where we get quite a bit of overlap between our business and the pool business. Now pool builders and everyone's getting into the outdoor kitchens and all that, and that's the area of lighting that we sell.
In terms of me, I started here in March 2020. Really right as COVID was hitting, I started. You know, it was talked about that quite a bit. I would say the one benefit for me starting at that time was, there was a lot of uncertainty. Didn't know which way the business, the market was gonna go, the business was gonna go. Really what that allowed me to do was go dig into all our costs, right? Dig into what we did, what everyone did, right, from a customer-facing, but also a back office support. Really allowed us to position ourselves, and you know, we'll talk a little bit about margin, but really position ourselves from a profitability standpoint. We had been a, what I'd characterize as an underinvested, stagnant business, right?
This was acquired. It had always kinda run at, you know, 6%-8% of sales of POOLCORP. Really in the grand scheme of things, it was not, you know, the priority. If you look on, you know, the right-hand side, what it showed where there was really the margin profile was pretty anemic as you compared it to the pool business. If you thought about investment dollars and where you're gonna go put those, historically, it wasn't going into the Horizon business. As I stepped back and said, "How are we gonna make sure that this is a viable business and gonna grow?" Really the first step for me was, you know, getting to a point of profitability where this became a viable investment as you look at, you know, the entire portfolio.
We did a number of things, and I'll characterize those that got us to that point. Looking on the left-hand side, this really shows our footprint and where we are today. We're heavy on the West Coast and heavy on, you know, the Southern U.S. The history and the origins of Horizon were a distributor out of Arizona and a distributor out of Northern California. They were both market leaders in those markets. Those businesses came together, and that was really what was acquired by POOLCORP. You'll see since then there's been bolt-on acquisitions and some greenfields from there. The West Coast franchise and the Arizona is a phenomenal business. Great business.
had really been a little bit underinvested, a little bit stagnant, but really, as I dug into it and really understood what that business was, my opportunity there was really just to unleash those guys and let them get back to what they did, let them go grow that business. West Coast was that. As you move further east across the U.S., I would say probably you know, the relevance to the overall brand and the profitability diminished significantly, right? If you look at Texas, you started to fall off, and then when we got to Florida, Virginia, fell off significantly. What I did there is we had two divisions in the business when I took over, two general managers. We had a West and a South.
I pieced off and created a third division, so really said, "Where's our opportunity to grow?" As you recall, the graph that Pete had up there, really the West and the South is where the growth is, and that's where we're focused. By piecing off the Florida division, what I was able to do is put a new general manager in charge. It was really a turnaround. Florida/Virginia was a turnaround. He spent, you know, 8-10 months really turning that business around, getting it operational. In the meantime, we've added 12 branches to his location. If you look at the bottom, you'll see our branch count when I started and our branch count where we expect to end today. We started, we were about 70 branches. We should end the year at about 93 branches.
In terms of our growth, you know, trying to get 8-10 branches a year. As Pete, you know, talked about, I would say our philosophy on acquisition is pretty similar to what it is on the pool side, right? Gonna be very disciplined. What I found as we went out and, you know, struggled with some acquisitions in terms of where those multiples were and where, you know, were we able to get there to stretch to those multiples, what we stepped back to say is, you know, "Could we go do this on a greenfield and do this organically ourselves?" What we've proven over the last two years doing four greenfields last year, I have six in process now, is that, you know, we're pretty good at them, right?
We get them off the ground, and within 12 months, all those first four that, you know, came on the ground last year will be profitable, and the ones that, you know, we're doing now we expect to be profitable. Again, that's really the makeup of the business. You know, in terms of when we got here, I would say it was stagnant, underinvested. What I did was really just get people excited and unleash the growth, things that I think inherently were in that business, in the DNA of that business, but it hadn't really had the opportunity to do that. Having a dedicated leader who was really focused on growth has got that going.
You'll look on the right-hand side in terms of the economics, the green line, the profitability, and my sense is part of that is market-driven, right, where there were some tailwinds in terms of inflation, things that, you know, brought that up. A lot of it is what we did in, you know, in the business and uncovering some opportunities on the profitability side. The growth has been, you know, significant for us. Next slide, just digging a little bit into the business to show you our market. So what Donna alluded to, she said there was a $7 billion addressable market for us. $7 billion is in the states we're in today. So the whole U.S. market is about a $14 billion market.
If you look at, you know, if you follow SiteOne, they'll put up a similar chart, which has it at about $20 billion. What they include in theirs is nursery. We don't sell nursery, but they include in theirs, you know, live plants that they sell. That takes that, you know, addressable market to about $20 billion. How we look at it is pretty similar to how SiteOne looks at it. What you'll see here is the different segments, right? Fairly equal in terms of equipment, irrigation, hardscapes, and landscape in the market. What you'll see on the right-hand side is our mix. What I'll say, you know, about our mix is, you know, we're heavily weighted, heavier weighted on the irrigation side as a percentage. You know, it's driven by new construction.
Irrigation, and we were talking earlier about a lot of jurisdictions. New homes require irrigation systems to be put in. There's, you know, a residential side, a commercial side. In times of demand and new construction growth, irrigation is a great place to be. It's got a great margin profile, and we're very well positioned in that space. I feel very good about that franchise. That said, there are cycles, and I think where Horizon, you know, got sideways in the business historically was it was more driven by new construction than the pool side. When there was downturn, we weren't very well positioned on maintenance and that type of stuff. What I'm trying to do and what you'll see here is on landscape, equipment, those things that are more recurring revenue, more maintenance categories, is where we're making investments, right?
We're very good on irrigation. I would say probably some of the best in the business, in the markets we're in terms of irrigation. Where we're not as strong is some of these other areas, and that's been my focus the last two years, is really focus on, you know, what I'd characterize as landscape, which is high margin profile. What it requires is quite a bit of expertise, right? There's a lot of expertise. It's similar to the pool side, where there's chemistries and there's things you gotta understand that are very market driven. We've brought in a lot of expertise in that area to grow. Then outdoor living, right? That's the theme of what we've been talking about today, is that growth in outdoor living.
Our hardscape categories and our outdoor living, or outdoor lighting really are the driver behind that. As I see going forward, I highlighted landscape and outdoor living, right? Which today makes up probably about 35% of our business combined. The growth rates that we've had the last two years, my expectation is that, you know, could get to 40%-45% of the business, and from a margin profile is pretty good. Hardscapes, I'll, you know, segment that a little bit because that is some overlap, what we have with the pool side, and we have four dedicated rock yards in our business, so stone yards that we operate. And that's about half of that revenue, the other half is pavers that we sell out of all our distribution locations. Again, you know, irrigation centric, great margin profile.
From what we see from a backlog standpoint, we feel really good about that business. We're gonna focus on, you know, more of that maintenance business to make sure when there is a downturn, we're well positioned, you know, for that. Then finally, just to close out, really, I think I touched on a few of these, but I'll highlight a few in terms of current conditions. You know, I would say all our builders have significant backlogs. It says here through second half, a lot of them are through the end of the year, right? Our irrigation guys. Really for us, it's, you know, the next bullet is the bigger issue, is getting supply.
Equipment has been tough the last year and a half, very tough in terms of, you know, there's chips, there's Asian manufacturing, there's things in that segment of the business that have made that supply constrained. We've been able, through price increases, we've been able to make that up, right? In terms of, you know, that volume loss that we've had. Irrigation has been one where you've had significant inflation on the pipe side, but we're now running into some shortages on controllers, things that have chips, right? Things that have technology that's manufactured in Asia and other places. Labor constraint, again, ongoing for us, drivers being the toughest one, right? Where you think about the wage escalation, wage inflation for drivers. We do a lot of delivery in our business.
In terms of, you know, fragmentation, it's still a pretty fragmented business, right? You think there's, you know, a few bigger players now in terms of there's been roll-ups over time, but really feel like there's still a significant opportunity for us. We're still out looking for acquisitions, and we'll continue to be opportunistic and do acquisitions in our space, but also feel very confident in our greenfield model and what we can do there. Again, 10%-15% target growth in terms of organic growth. Feel very confident in our ability to hit that. 6-10 new locations. My sense is that'll be a mix, right? I said, you know, before we have six in process now that we believe all six of those will be in before the height of the season.
In, you know, call it that April-May timeframe, those things should be operational, and we should see, you know, revenue and profit from those. Acquisitions in the targeted areas, and then really the continued business improvement, right? There's a couple things that we did there. Historically, we had migrated our marketing, our product management, all those, you know, support functions under the POOLCORP side. What happened was, just given our sheer size, we got lost, right? Got lost in that. What I did when I came in is I brought that stuff back under me into our business so that anything that's customer facing or vendor facing, we've brought back into our business.
I think it's had a significant impact in terms of not only morale and people feel like, hey, we're in control of this now. We're not just, you know, the stepchild to the bigger pool business. But also from a vendor-customer standpoint, where the decisions are now made kind of, you know, at our level, and there's not, you know, anywhere up the chain we need to go to make some big decisions. So again, I know it was quick, but hopefully we made up, you know, made back a little time, but be around for questions if there's anything on that.
Thanks, Jeff. May I introduce myself. My name is Jean-Louis Albouy. I'm the General Manager of SCP in Europe, in the company since 20 years. I'm going to fly you in Europe to have an overview about the growth and opportunity in the market. Let's go to Europe now. We have a presence there with a head office in Paris. We have 18 locations there. We are the second-largest distribution company in Europe. We represent just 5% revenue of global group that already represents 5% in the total revenue of the company. We have done a very impressive job this year in 39% growing on the revenue on sales, and it just represents 12% of market share.
As Donna mentioned to you that $3 billion overview of the European market is addressable market of $2.2 billion in Europe. We have a strong leadership team, really new people involved in place in this new industry, and we are focused for the future on organic growth and also on merger and acquisition. I'm going to share with you some information about that. Important point is Europe represents 30% of the worldwide business in the swimming pool industry. With 5.2 million in-ground pools, more or less 3 million above-ground pools, and one key point also is the spa business is close to 1 million. Due to the fact that the lands are really small and the backyards are really small, people also invest, especially in the north of Europe, in the wellness category called the spa, for example. We are really fragmented.
That's been the distribution is, of course, due to the situation of the orientation in Europe, we are really fragmented on distribution. The new construction pool is not only due to the fact that we've missed that part on numbers on new construction since two years of the COVID situation. We are more or less 10 years less advanced than U.S. on new construction, and we have great opportunities in the past five years of growth in new construction. That means the trend is actually 140,000 unit pool a year, and that's been stable, the past two or three years, down to 110,000 a year. That means there's still growth opportunity on new construction.
You know, the number of people living in Europe, it's a large place, and we still have a lot of countries to try the market of the new construction. Just add another view about the market size. That's actually the three main markets are France, Spain, and Portugal, that we call the Iberian area, south of Europe, and Germany. This is where the main markets are focused. If you go and see how many spaces that we have based on the sales centers, we just have a small sales center in some areas. That means a greenfield is not enough actually, and this is where we want to go. That's definitely we want to implement some new locations in some key countries where the market is.
If you just selected about the three main market in Europe, that represent $1.3 billion possible addressable market on the global revenue. Important point is we just have 12% market share, that's already mentioned to you. The price cost for a pool in Europe is $25,000. That means it's nothing compared to the U.S. standard. Of course, up to Europe, on the north area of Europe, Germany, all around is $45,000. When you go to the south, it's close to $15,000 due to the labor cost, the price of the labor cost that is less in Europe, down to the south. On the wholesale content, that's approximately $5,000 on the sales. We do it here actually in distribution for the new construction.
One important point on that is we are really basic compared to the U.S. We have a filter, basic stuff, a single pump, pipe, and that's it. No technology, no new things. The good point is on that, for the new generation of retrofit market, that will be huge opportunity for us on the remodeling, processing, and retrofit market to increase the value of that, especially on water treatment, especially on filtration, especially on all equipment that are going to be in place on the retrofit market. Just to give you any ideas on the 5.2 million pools available, actually 3.2 million pools are older than 10 years. That means we have absolutely a great opportunity on retrofit and remodeling market for the future.
Retail segment, I already mentioned to you, we have a great opportunity also due to the fact that, on the retail segment, there is a spa also available, and it is key for the wellness maintenance and services on the spa category, especially on the north of Europe and retails and maintenance and accessory and cleaning everything. Due to the fact that the install base is 4.2 million pools, that is a great opportunity for us. Impressive numbers since the past three years, we improved in Europe, with the same organization. That means we're operating in the same base.
Our sales have been really impressive this year with $46 million+ in sales and a 39% increase in sales, but we doubled the operating income just due to the fact that we have been really disciplined in applying in the correct way to profitability actually in our organization. We have a great team. We focus on discipline on expenses. We control our margin. We want to be really sustainable on return on investment, especially for investments for the future. That's a key point for that. The competitive landscape in Europe is fragmented, I already told you. You just need to know that we have four of us in competition, including ourselves. We have three main competitors, one of whom is also a supplier for us.
We got 50 locations all around Europe, and we got two other competitors that are more based on profile on water care and manufacturing on water care and distribution. That's because Europe is more manufacturing distribution. We are the only worldwide master distribution company to provide all the products from all the industry. That's a key opportunity of us because we can serve the market, of course, today on the new construction, but also on retrofit market. If we have very huge footprint in the market in the future growth with a new implementation, we can serve the market better than ever and better than others that they're doing manufacturing distribution in the same time. Good point of opportunity also of growth is in each country in Europe, 50% of the revenue is done by local player and distribution.
That can be an opportunity for first in merger and acquisition. That's a growth opportunity. The plan is to have three to five new locations here for the next five years. To be sure we have implemented in correct way and to continue to win market share. Merger and acquisition opportunity, if it is an opportunity, of course, in some country with respect to profitability, of course. We're going to integrate the digital platform to be sure we are really efficient, especially on go-to-market strategy, including product, including supply chain, including everything on developing the best profitability on return on investment. That means, let me pass now the message to Melanie, and I have a special guest for you. Today is International Women's Day.
Oh, excellent. All right. Well, thank you for that introduction. I appreciate it. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Melanie Hart. I am a Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I'm gonna cover just a couple of financial review topics with you today just to kind of wrap up our presentation. Starting off, taking a look at our growth on the net sales. We know that we are a significantly bigger and stronger company than we were just as we came out in 2019. We know that we've seen accelerated sales growth for the last couple of years. Really, the key to our history and the key to our model is that, as Pete mentioned, our growth is primarily organic growth. It is by expanding and growing our existing sales centers.
With that, over time, we've been able to maintain very relatively stable gross profit margins. Really, the message here is that it's not necessarily the gross profit margins, but it's the increases in the gross profit dollars. We have continued to increase gross profit dollars over time, and with that, our operating margin has continued to improve. We certainly reached a record high in 2021 on our operating margin, and we'll look to continue that as we go forward. We believe that we can do that because of our scale and because of our efficiencies that we've been talking about to you today. Looking at the revenue growth model, I know this is a slide that many of you are familiar with.
We wanted to make sure that we talked about it again today because we get a lot of questions on it. We've talked about our growth components, and those are really made up of two different things. One is gonna be the market, the organic growth, and that's the growth of the swimming pool industry. We've talked about that in two different components. We've talked about it as it relates to the installed base. We did see an accelerated growth in 2021, a 25% increase in the number of the installed base in pools, getting us to that 5.4 million installed base in pools.
As we look at that, we know that, even there may have been a slight downturn of the number of new pools installed over time, but each year, that number has continued to grow. We believe that the market will continue to grow, the installed base will continue to grow, and that really feeds 60% of our sales activity. That maintenance is gonna continue to grow our business. As well as the inflation, which again has been unusual, but as we look to kind of return to more normal levels, that kind of gives us the 1%-2% we'll target our long-term growth expectation. The new pool construction market, it's been a very significant component of our growth going forward.
As that continues to grow and as our overall revenue grows, we would expect that to grow at about 2% level. Then we have the growth that we contribute to that. It's the growth in the new products that Donna talked about. It's the expansion of the new sales centers that we've talked about, and it's the market share gains and the expanded market opportunities that we have from some of our acquisitions. With that, our expectation from a long-term growth perspective, kind of excluding any future acquisitions, would be at 6%-9%. You know, as we talk about that 6%-9%, that may sound like the same old story, although it's, you know, 6%-9% is a very good story. We all like consistency.
Really, those numbers are much different as we go forward than what they have been in the past. What that amount, 6%-9%, would have provided to us in previous based on the size and the scale where we were is much different going forward. This is just a little bit of an example. This excludes inflation because we certainly can't predict what that's gonna be at this point. Our 2019 growth contribution just from the market and our organic growth was about $170 million. Those numbers, as we look forward to long term, is gonna be over $300 million. Again, that growth contribution is gonna be much more significant as we look forward. Gross margins. Certainly we've talked about 2021.
We also did hit a record high on the gross margin. We've talked about a couple of components of that. Certainly, we did see some changes in the pricing more frequently and at higher levels from our vendors than we've seen historically. With that, we did take the opportunity to buy ahead on some inventory, primarily to make sure from a customer service standpoint that we had the products in stock that our customers needed, but that did provide some benefits to our margins in 2021. Along with that, we had some increases in volume from some of our vendor incentive programs. Outside of that, we've been really working on several different things. We've been working on some structural pricing changes. We've been working on some additional things on the supply chain side.
Those are some of the things that we know are going to continue to benefit us going forward. The efforts that we've put in in 2021 and forward will continue to provide benefits on the margin side. Our guidance that we've provided for 2022, we've talked about, higher margins in the first half, maybe coming down a little bit in the second half of the year, but overall, relative for the year, we would expect those to be flat with 2021. As we look forward to our future margin opportunities, we do expect that the base that we've been able to provide in 2021 and 2022 will be consistent going forward. A little bit different than kind of what we've seen in the past.
The reason we can stand here and talk about those things is because of the actions that we put into place, because of the strategic initiatives that we've been working on. We certainly will benefit from the acquisition that we've talked about. We've seen some of the incredible opportunities that the Porpoise is gonna provide to us, as it relates to just the franchising model as well as our chemical operations. In addition to that, we've been focused on some additional private label expansions, you know, reaching out into different markets and different products. All of those things that we've been continuously working on are gonna be able to provide us benefits as we look forward to the future. Margins and operating leverage.
You know, we've talked about our 2022 outlook, that our gross margins will be comparable to 2021. We also, in our year-end earnings conference call, we talked about some of the cost pressures. We've seen that inflation certainly has benefited us from the top line, but also we're seeing that in some of our cost structure. We know we've seen some wage inflation, we've seen rent inflation, and we've also talked about some of the additional investments that we're gonna be making in technology. With that, for the 2021 outlook, our expectation is that, of course, expenses would continue to grow less than gross profit growth, but it would be at a higher rate than maybe what we've seen in some of our historical levels.
With that, we would return to our model where we believe that we can provide 20 basis points-40 basis points in operating margin contribution. Let's talk about the operating margin contribution and how do we get to that. We started off, we talked a couple times about customer experience. All of the things that we've been working on, when we talk about capacity creation, you know, those things actually take time to implement. Really we're at a point where, you know, we've been focused on this area for about four years now, where we can actually, from a financial perspective, actually put numbers to some of those things that we've been able to accomplish. That is a lot, you know, a portion of what you've seen in our operating margin improvement.
You know, starting with, you know, from a customer experience, we know that we have more locations than anyone else. We know that we're close to the pools. When customers come into our sales centers, they're looking to us for product knowledge, for advice on what parts they need, what equipment they need in order to complete their projects. They have 24/7 access to our tools and our inventory availability through our 360 technology. We have dedicated call centers that they can call, and they can get all the answers that they need. We've done all of these things and put this in place really to make sure that we can operate efficiently from a capacity creation standpoint, but more importantly, our customers.
You know, one of the things that we've talked about a lot is the labor constraints and, you know, what's holding us back from, you know, why is that number only 120,000 that we've been able to build in 2021, because we know that the demand is there. You know, this capacity creation really focuses, you know, on our profitability, but also those of our customers. We've highlighted just a couple of service metrics that we've been monitoring that looks at, you know, how quickly we've been able to get our customers in and out of our locations. Right now, our average transaction time is about 4.5 minutes.
That's very significantly different from when we first started measuring this in 2019, when we were really just at about six minutes. You look at, you know, 18 seconds. We talk about year over year. This is going from third quarter of 2020 to Q3 of 2021, and, you know, 18 seconds doesn't really sound like a lot. When you take that and you multiply that for the 9 million transactions that have occurred in our sales centers, that's about 44,000 man-hours that we've saved, and that we've been able to contribute to our time and to that time of our customer. That really has expanded the ability for our customers to be able to get into more backyards and to build more pools. POOL360, we've had phenomenal growth there.
We're looking forward to a lot more growth as we roll out the new model, and it becomes even more user-friendly. We really have had a 44% sales growth in that. It's relatively about 10%-12% of our net sales, so we have some room to grow from a penetration standpoint. We're working, you know, from a sales side to get that introduced to more and more customers. We also offer priority pickup.
These are the customers that, they know what they want, they place their orders using our online tools, or they call ahead, and we have those stages ready to go for them, so they're not having to stand in line in our locations, and they're not having to, you know, wait and talk to someone at the sales center. It's ready to go when they're ready. We've certainly seen some expanded growth there, about 19% growth as well in just the number of transactions and the dollars that have gone through that priority pickup. Another component of operating leverage, you know, we've talked about our operating margin improvement, and we know from a consolidated standpoint we've of course made very significant improvements.
You know, really, as you look at our network, we have a lot of very high performing operating margin locations. We have 300 U.S. locations that operate at an operating margin of over 15%, which is a really just an exceptional benchmark. As we look at the data, when we look at acquisitions and other companies in our industry, that 15% operating margin at a sales center level is really just phenomenal. From our standpoint, we know that we have the opportunity to improve, that if we have the majority of our locations operating at that level, that we need to be able to get the rest of the locations up to that same level.
We have a program in place where we call focus sales centers, and that's to get the lower profitability sales centers up to our company averages. Really, very pleased to announce that as part of our overall look at that, we've actually increased the threshold. That target used to be at an 8% operating margin, and now we've raised it up to 10%. The locations that were on the focus list in 2021, just those 43 locations alone actually contributed an additional $54 million in operating income. That's just a one-year improvement, which really just shows how powerful it is to get those locations up into the next tier, into the next operating margin tier. You know, we've.
Cash flow, we are fortunate that we're a business that generates a lot of cash flow from operations, and so our target has always been that we would expect that we would provide cash flow from operations pretty consistent with net income. We have a very strong history of being able to do that. You'll see that there's been a couple of years in 2018 and again in 2021 where we have seen some of those price increases, and we took the opportunity to invest in the inventory. With that came gross margin benefits. We were able to convert that inventory into cash in a very short time period. Also, if you look at our overall debt capacity, our debt capacity has remained very similar throughout our operating history.
Even as we've continued to grow our EBITDA, because of the cash flow from operations, we've been able to maintain those very, very conservative debt levels. Capital allocation. Our first and priority, foremost is gonna be to invest back in the business. It's gonna be to invest in our existing business to make sure that we can continue to expand those locations to make them more profitable. It's gonna be racking, it's gonna be new vehicles, it's gonna be technology, and all of those things. That's captured just in kind of our expectations of right around 1% of net sales. Acquisitions, we do expect to continue to do acquisitions. This is really more of a historical target if you look at what we've done historically.
However, we've shown in 2021 that we have both the ability and certainly the interest in doing bigger acquisitions as it makes sense from the company's standpoint. Where we see those growth opportunities, we have the capabilities to continue to expand. Dividends is also something. We increased our dividend. We've increased it 14 times since 2004, and in 2021, we increased it 38%, really to correspond to our increases in revenue. This is an area for us to continue to reward shareholders. Then share repurchases. This continues to be a focus for our board of directors.
We increased our share repurchase authorization $450 million in 2021, and we also executed on those share repurchases more in 2021 than we did in the previous two years. We have been very active in this space as well. Financial performance. You know, these charts almost speak for themselves. If you take a look at our earnings per share, certainly our very long history of 15%+ in earnings is something that we are very, very proud of, and would expect to continue as we go forward to having those double-digit increases in earnings. EBITDA, we had an increase of over $300 million just in 2021 alone.
Our return on invested capital reached a high level of 40%, over 40%. With some of the latest investments that we've made, we would expect to see that number come down a little bit in 2022. However, it's still gonna be well above our historical level. We were kinda topped at around 29%, so we would expect that to be in the 30s%+ going forward. Exceptional shareholder returns. We know that from a historical perspective, we have provided returns well above market, and believe that our continued growth and the actions that we've taken and what we've proven we can do from our operating model, that will continue going forward. Returning cash to stockholders is also a very big significant commitment.
If you look at cumulative life to date, we have returned to shareholders $2.5 billion in cash. All of that excess cash from our highest and best use, we've continued to reward our loyal shareholders, and we plan to continue to do that as we go forward. Next is wrapping up, kinda confirming 2022 expectations. We've talked about certainly inflation is much higher than it has been from a historical perspective. But included in our revenue growth expectations of 17%-19%, it's gonna be higher inflation, but it's also going to be that continued industry growth, which I think is very important. You know, we've got a lot of questions and a lot of focus on will you continue to grow on top of where you are?
The answer to that is yes, we will. We're confirming today our 2022 guidance, and we will provide our Q1 update on April 21. I will now turn it back over to Pete to make some closing comments.
Thank you.
Okay, let me see if we can get this wrapped up. Our first ESG report will be issuing shortly, so I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail, but this is just kind of a framework of what you can expect to see. Improving energy efficiency, big part of reducing waste and protecting the natural resources, obviously part of what we strive to do. Under social employee care and safety, DE&I is certainly a big deal and, frankly, always has been for us. Giving back to the community. One thing I'll highlight in there, I just want you guys to know, we put out a release.
I think you already know this, but last year, we funded a swimming lesson program to the tune of over $1 million to teach kids across the country. We are partnering with the YMCA to teach a lot of kids how to swim. We have a goal that we will continue to fund that program. It'll be spelled out in our ESG thing. It was one of those things that when we announced it, I quite frankly was very surprised with just the number of emails I got back from our employees on how important it was for them that we're actually funding this initiative. It was a big investment. It was a seven-figure investment for the business.
Again, something we're very proud of and think is important to do. Then under governance, ethics, compliance, aligned compensation, data privacy, security. We're very blessed with a great board. They're very knowledgeable of the business. They're very skilled individuals, and they have really been instrumental in helping the company continue to progress. That's again all part of our governance program. We're gonna talk about really five things that really kind of sum up what we talked about today. I hope you can see the level of excitement that I have and that my team has for the future. You know, one of the things that we kept hearing is why you had a great year. Is that the tipping point?
Is that the tipping point? You know, is there any gas left in the tank? I think you can see that we have deployed a significant amount of capital. We've made investments over the years. We're very comfortable and excited about the market and our opportunity. We don't look at it and say, "Oh, is there, you know, are we gonna go off a cliff?" Rather, we look at it and say, the world has gotten bigger for us. I think you could see the excitement that Jean-Louis and Jeff have for their businesses. Europe is gonna provide some lift. Horizon is gonna provide some lift. The market is getting bigger. New products are gonna provide a lift.
Certainly, Pinch A Penny adds a whole level of capabilities to our business that again excites us. Again, the backlogs are good. Maintenance and repair business, that's gonna benefit from the install base that continues to grow. That's one of the beautiful parts of this business, is every time a pool goes in the ground, it's a customer for life. That pool has to be maintained. Most of the pools that are in the ground today need a retrofit. We have an opportunity to retrofit. The younger generations, as they become the pool owners and operators, they're the ones that are gonna say, "Hey, I can do everything else with my phone.
Why am I out in the bushes looking for valves to turn my pool or my hot tub on or off?" You know, Porpoise Pool & Patio or Pinch A Penny, very exciting opportunity. Again, we wanted you to see it because I think you have to see it to really appreciate it. Just consider that in our world today, that's only 5% of what the rest of the company is. Now, do I think that offers opportunity and continued growth? Absolutely. That's why we made the investment as part of our disciplined allocation of capital that you guys have come to know and expect. Organic growth focus of the business is complemented by expansion and acquisitions. We don't wake up every day and say, "Gosh, who can we buy?
Because if we don't buy somebody, we're not gonna grow." We wake up every day and say, "There's plenty of market out there for us to grow. There's new products, there's share that can be gained." If, as the markets grow, we continue to put dots on the map and add facilities. You heard Jeff talk about new facilities. You heard Melanie talk about facilities. You heard Jean-Louis talk about new facilities. The reality is that we're in a pretty tough real estate environment. I personally approved, as a pro forma process, for every new facility. Every new facility, the operating team has to come to me with a pro forma, which is a commitment, a five-year commitment that says, this is the justification for the branch.
You know, I would tell you more importantly, because paper will take anything you put on it in terms of justification. My question is, who's going to run it, okay? Who's going to run it? Who's the talent? Who's gonna be responsible for this? Who's gonna usher this new business, you know, into operation and make sure that it's successful? Every one of those new locations goes on our focus list. Why? Because we know that the new businesses are most vulnerable when they first open up. They all go on a focus list so that they get attention. There's a five-year pro forma commitment that we make the operator sign up for. Again, expansion of the footprint is part of how we grow. Acquisition, to a lesser extent, is part of how we grow.
Again, we have a big appetite for the number of new locations, but the reality is in some markets, we've been looking for quite some time for real estate. In many cases, we're actually our demand is ahead of what the real estate availability is. The number is gonna fluctuate somewhat by, hey, can we find a building that works for us? Building materials, commercial pool focus, Donna talked about that and the opportunity there. That pool has gotten bigger. All the install base that's there that has, you know, essentially no building materials, no hardscape around it, all of those represent an opportunity makes the market bigger. Capacity and scale driving efficiencies and operating leverage.
You know, Melanie talked about our gross margin expansion through supply chain initiatives, and Donna mentioned that a little bit. The things that we have that allow us to expand gross margin. The CSLs, for instance. This is a big differentiator. The fact that we have those multiple facilities in each market creates a significant opportunity for us. Our capital deployment, our pricing discipline is something I mentioned a couple of times over the last. We started talking about it more in 2021. That's an area that we thought we had an opportunity to improve our execution. We're by no means done. It's an area that we will continue to invest in. It's an area we'll continue to manage because we think there's opportunity for us to continue to improve in that area.
All of that should help us manage and hopefully expand our gross margin. Capacity creation is, again, it's become part of our culture. Everybody gets it. Again, all the things we measure say that there is still an opportunity. We talked about, you know, 4.5 minutes was where we are today. We started this journey at about six minutes on, you know, per customer through the sales centers. The reality is I have some locations that are at three minutes. Even though the median is, you know, the median is four, you know, 4.5 minutes, I have some facilities that are at three minutes. What does that tell me? That tells me that we still have an opportunity. I look at median, and I look at standard deviation.
When your median is one number and your standard deviation is large, all that says is you still have continued opportunity. Our standard deviation on the service time is still significant enough that tells us there's more gas in the tank for us to get better in that area. Future enhancements through accretive on the Porpoise Pool. Chemicals is part of that. Again, we talked about the buy. Everything you saw in that warehouse, as I mentioned earlier, is the same product that we have in the other warehouses. Of course, there's opportunity and synergies there. Technology investment. Todd talked a little bit about that. That's actually a very important part of our future because we see the world a little bit differently now.
We see the world in terms of a cloud and how we connect and the role that we play. We've got a world-class distribution business, but we're looking at ways that we can connect with our suppliers. Part of the reason that we had a better year in terms of fulfillment than most people last year is, one, is scale. We're simply bigger. The fact that we have in Dallas and Houston, as I mentioned, 12 locations each in each of those markets, and in Tampa, for instance, we have five locations. We have more product in each of those markets, that's true. But our connection with the suppliers, we're working very hard to make sure it's not just, "Hey, here's a bunch of purchase orders.
Ship them where you want and when you want." We're working to connect via the cloud, this data that says, "Here's where I need the product." I realize that branch A may have put their order in before branch B, but branch B is where I need you to ship that next product. You need connections, you need technology, and you need infrastructure to make that happen. We're investing in that area, so that helps us on the supply chain. Of course, the data capture is important, too. You know, data drives decisions, right? You need to collect the data, you need to have the data so that you can analyze the data in order to make those decisions that will improve the business and ultimately improve the customer experience. Lastly, you know, robust demand for outdoor living products.
I'm thrilled with Jeff and his team, and the same with Jean-Louis and his team because, again, I look at our market share in those two businesses. I look at the size of the market. I look at them as a growth opportunity. More importantly, I look at the performance that those teams have put up, and it's impressive. As they mentioned, years ago, that probably wasn't the case. They simply, you know, they showed you the charts on what the profitability levels of those businesses were, so when it came to time to allocate capital, you're kind of like, "Hmm." I look at them now, they're great. The market is available. We've got a great leadership team, and they're committed to it. We like that.
The M&A pipeline is building in both of those areas. As I mentioned, we still have an active M&A pipeline in the pool business. Great leadership, significant growth potential on both platforms and operating margin profile that is similar to North America. Now we get that question a lot, where does Horizon fare compared to the pool business? Well, I can tell you two things. One, it's improved a lot. Secondly, though, there's a bit of scale that comes into play. If I have a branch that is $12 million, $10 million, $15 million on the pool side, from a pure operating margin perspective, just scale says that that's going to be better.
The good news is that the green business has improved a lot, but as they continue to grow, it'll get better. Now, for a similar size branch, I would tell you the profile is better. Most of the blue branches tend to be larger just because of the market available and our historical focus areas. That will change over time. We're very happy with the progress that we're making. I just wanna thank you for coming today, and thank you for your support over the years and your interest in the company.
I hope you can see that our team is really excited, and we, you know, frankly, our biggest issue right now is there's not enough hours in the day. We have so much to do and so much opportunity. Our issue is there's simply not enough hours in the day. I couldn't be prouder of the team and the execution and the focus. When I look at the results that the team has managed to put together over the last several years, it's remarkable. We have a five-year strategic plan in this business that we update every year, so basically you drop a year and add a year, which is the five-year outlook on the business.
You know, we look at how much the business has grown and improved over the last couple of years. It would be one thing if you say, "Okay, we've grown a lot, but I got nothing left up my sleeve. I don't know how else we're gonna grow." I'd have a tough time standing in front of you saying that the guidance that we have is, you know, I'd be sitting here going, "Well, if this happens, if that happens, if this, if that." You know, I can tell you that we have a lot of opportunity, and we're excited about it. I have a team, I'm blessed to have a team that I think can deliver that.
With that, I know we're a little bit past, so I'm not sure what flight arrangements are for you guys, but we're happy to take some questions. For those of you that have to go because we ran over a little bit, if you have to go and you want to, you have questions and you're welcome to follow up with me or with Curt or with Melanie, and we're happy to answer any questions you have. As of now, I'll ask Melanie to come up, and we'll take any questions that you might have.
Sir. All right. Yeah. First off, thanks very much for doing this. I know there's a lot of preparation and there's a lot of information here. Really appreciate all the time that went into it. My questions actually all three are for Jeffrey Clay, if I could. So first off, you have a mix of product today that is somewhat legacy. The key question is why power equipment and why not nursery?
The mix that I inherited is the legacy mix. Nursery, we've shied away from primarily because of the operating. You know, it's got a great margin, but just the operations that you have to, you know, ramp up and scale up in order to successfully run a nursery, we've decided, hey, that's not the investment we wanna go make.
Our facilities too, Garik. You gotta remember is that even today, if Jeff pivoted and says, "I wanna be in nursery." Today we have 81 facilities.
81, but we're not set up to operate a nursery business. Does that mean that we'll never be in it? No. I can tell you it's not right around the corner. Why? Because we have other areas that we think we can continue to grow in. Even if we woke up tomorrow and said, "Gosh, huge strategic mistake, we need to be in nursery," we just don't have the facilities to do that. We have a growth plan today that doesn't include nursery. At some point in the future, might that change? It might, but it's not in the near-term offering.
On the equipment side, obviously it's something that we inherited. It's been tough because of chips, because of you know, engine supply chain, Asia supply chain. It's been a tough go. That said, what we're seeing is a migration to battery. Our feeling is, hey, we're well positioned to be in front of that migration. We have a couple partners that, you know, are allowing us to get into battery early, get those into customers' hands, and so we like the outlook of that franchise. It differentiates us from our, call it our traditional competitors, and allows us to have everything on that landscape, you know, truck. That guy that's a landscape guy that says he's buying the fertilizers, the chemicals, and the equipment.
We become that one-stop shop minus the nursery and you know the reasons why we're not in the nursery business.
Okay. Thank you. The follow-up here is the trajectory. If we look out a decade from now, will we see Horizon being a 400 location operation, totally nationwide? Is that what's on the docket today? Because you mentioned yourselves, you were talking about how it sort of stagnated for the last 10 years. I'm just wondering what the priority level is today and where are we ultimately going here.
Let me take that. What I would say is the 400 locations that we have on the blue side, 410 locations, we're basically in the Sun Belt and in the seasonal markets. Our plan right now, if you look at our strategic plan for Horizon, it's pretty much to stay in the Sun Belt markets. Does that mean that we get to 400 locations? Probably not. If you look at the map that we showed, it says that the Southeast, which is again, the recipient of a lot of population from all over the country, will continue to grow, and that will require a lot of new homes to be built.
This is a business that today, irrigation, which is the biggest part of the business today, goes in when new home construction. We see ample opportunity to grow that business by filling out the Southeast, by continuing to add branches as Texas continues to sprawl. Just added a branch now on the east side of Dallas. We're all the way out into the Rockwall suburb, which years ago was somewhere way over there. Now there's, you know, Rockwall is part of D.F.W., and now we'll add a branch up in Denton on the western side too. We'll continue to grow. I don't think you're ever gonna wake up one day and say, "Hey, you know what?
Horizon is, you know, 50% of POOLCORP because we've precluded ourselves from, at this point, we're not gonna go into irrigation. I'm not gonna go into nursery. Plus we said, "Let's keep it in the Sun Belt. We've got, you know, lots to do." We'll continue to grow it. We think we got lots of things we can do. We like the financial performance of the business now a lot more than we did. You know, I don't think you're ever gonna wake up and say, "Hey, I want..." It's half the size of the company, 'cause I think people value the pool franchise different than the irrigation franchise.
I think the other thing I'd add is there's a lot of fill-in markets. As Pete talked about the Southeast, but I'd also say if you look at that map and where there was, you know, significant concentration of dots and when there's not, there's a lot of fill-in that we can go do as well. That's kinda where our greenfield focus is, that fill out, fill in, and then the white space, we look at combination of acquisition and greenfield.
Good. Might as well stay here.
Okay.
You might get another.
Garik Shmois with Loop Capital. Just looking at the revenue growth algorithm that you have and looking at the component that's pool specific, the 2%-3% growth, very consistent with how you performed in the 2015-2019 time period. I'm kinda curious, just given everything that you laid out here today with respect to, you know, the Pinch A Penny with the growth in Horizon, with the growth in technology, with the backyard being a lot more inclusive with products that you sell, how should we think about that 2%-3% pool specific market growth? Could that end up being conservative?
I mean, I think the answer is it could, yes, but we're going back, so we know we have a pandemic bubble, right? That certainly supercharged our industry and brought a great deal of interest to it. It also dislodged a lot of people out of the Northeast and out of you know, high-cost living areas in California to move, and that's creating an opportunity. We also think that there is. For me to say we're gonna continue to grow at the rates we've grown for the last couple of years, I frankly think would be irresponsible.
I think we put together a list that says we're very comfortable saying that the growth engine of our business that we have historically said has been 6%-8%, and now we're 6%-9%. Might that be a little conservative? I guess the answer is maybe. Do I think we have a lot of stuff we're working on? Yes. The idea of today was to show you everything we're working on, but one of the things that you've seen from POOLCORP is historically, we don't over-commit and say, "Hey, sky's the limit. Here's what we're gonna do." And maybe we screw up and come in a little bit light. We're saying, "Look, here is a model that we know we can deliver, but we're always working on trying to improve that.
Yeah. I guess I'm gonna add one thing real quick. The slide that I had really kind of after that revenue growth build up, it really was just to illustrate, you know, the 2%-3% that we have historically grown in dollars that's worth significantly more. That was really what we're trying to illustrate in that next slide.
Yep. Ryan Merkel, William Blair. My first question is on gross margins. You went from 29%- 30.5%, and how much of that was inventory profits? The second part of the question is, are you saying that you can backfill, you know, that will eventually fall? Are you saying that you can backfill that with new initiatives and then sort of hold gross margins at 30.5%?
You wanna take them?
Yeah, I'll take that. From a detail standpoint, we typically, because there's so many things that really make up that margin and that margin improvement, you know, we haven't really called out specifically what component of that improvement relates to, you know, which piece of it. You know, we have talked about it specifically when we go through those comments. We talk about the things kind of in relative order. Certainly the inventory, the value in the inventory, the volume incentives that we've gotten from our vendors. As part of that, it's also been the supply chain initiatives, some of the things that we've talked about as it relates to the CSL and making sure that we're positioning our products where they need to be. We've talked about pricing.
Those two things really kind of outside of what you might consider just inflation-related. I wanna make sure that we're getting, you know, credit for the work that we've done in those particular areas. As we look at kind of the more long-term margins, you know, we talked about 2022 being flat with 2021. As we look to from a long-term modeling perspective, you know, getting closer to the 30% mark is probably what, you know, what I would look to from a reasonableness standpoint as we get through the inventory that we've built up and what that'll benefit for us for this year. Then as we go forward, but we feel comfortable with, you know, higher levels than what we've been, the 29% mark that we've looked at previously.
Okay, 30% is the new sort of watermark versus the old, which was 29% for gross margin.
We see the ability to be able to get to that level going forward, even without the inflation.
Got it. Okay. Follow up on Pinch. I guess two questions. One, I think EBIT margins are near 17% today. Where can you take that with some of the synergies? Secondly, can you isolate the impact from the chemical packaging business as it relates to POOLCORP? You know, how much can you buy in dollars, and what's the margin difference between what you're doing today and now the repackaging?
I'll take the back half of that question, and Molly can take the front half. The back half of the question as it relates to the chemical is the perspective. Remember, we've owned it for about 75 days, and we've got a lot to learn about capacity. Now, we know there is a lot of capacity in that plant that is yet untapped. We also know that our appetite for chemicals is insatiable, right? The amount of facilities that we have and the amount of product that we move is more than that plant can even if we said, "Look, I'm running 24/7 days a week," it still couldn't keep up with just the demand from our pool business, 'cause the pool business is massive.
We believe that there is a lot of value to be extracted by loading up that plant. Part of it is a question of, well, how much, you know. If you take the tablets, for instance, it's not just a question of, you know, how fast can you stamp them out? It's a question of how much chlorine can you get? Right now, chlorine supplies are tight. If you think about, you know, how many tablets that place can make, could it make enough? Just if I ran, you know, three shifts, seven days a week, and I had an unlimited supply of chlorine, they still couldn't make enough fast enough to serve the rest of the business. We believe that there is accretion there.
There's margin accretion by us doing the packaging. We believe that there's a better surety of supply. Then when you look at the rest of the products that are there, you know, again, it's we buy the same things. We buy the same pumps, we buy the same filters, we buy the same heaters, nets, brushes, everything that goes through Pinch essentially goes through SCP. We're in the process of layering on those programs to create those synergies.
We don't have an answer for you today that says, "Look, it's X amount." What we're saying is that there is a very nice opportunity, you know, for us to improve on the whole good side, if you will, just with synergies on programs, along with the chemical side. Quite frankly, there's an opportunity for us to do a better job serving our independent retailers, which we think will be rewarded with even more share from today.
Yeah, I'm gonna answer this, and then. From an expense standpoint, you know, we kind of segued that we're kind of really early in the game. You need to think about the way that, you know, Pinch is operated currently. It's from one distribution center, you know, throughout just to their expanded reach to their locations. You know, there's a lot of leverage just from an administrative, from an overhead standpoint, and then really a freight capacity standpoint as well. There's lots of components of that we'll be looking to gain going forward, but haven't quite quantified that at this point. Okay. I'm sorry. Susan, go ahead.
Wait. Is there a microphone?
My first question is on the private label products. Can you talk a little bit about where those sit today and the opportunity set there? Especially when we do think about the operations that we have seen today.
Yep.
Is there the opportunity to really sort of bring that higher and grow it as a bigger part of the pie?
Yep. If you look at the gross margin dollars from our what we would call our traditional private label products, the percentage really hasn't changed all that much, but we think that there is opportunity there. We look at that area and say, the good news is, you know, the dollars have really grown with the business. But I can't tell you that, you know, well, we've made significant headway with private label and exclusive brands. We look at that as an area that quite frankly is an opportunity. We acquired a lot of talent in that area, which we think will help us grow. What percentage will we eventually get to with that product? Couple things. One, if you think about equipment, right?
'Cause we get this question a lot that says, "Hey, are you guys gonna have a private label equipment line like some others I know that have?" Where we sit today is the answer to that is currently no. The reason is because I value the partnership that we have with our suppliers, number one. Number two, I view those as highly engineered products. We don't have engineers on staff that can specify a pump, a filter, a manufacturing quality. We don't employ those folks today. I look at the, you know, the money that it takes to develop new products and technology in the connected pool, and that's what our partner suppliers do. I wanna be the best channel to market for them. I don't want them to see us as competition.
Having said that, there are other areas that we are, you know, we do have private label products. Chemical would be one of them, right? 'Cause it's a commodity-based product that is blended. That's an area that I think we can grow. As that grows, I think the margin profile continues to improve for the business. I look at some of our building material products, whether it's our component pool finish or whether it's our tile, you know, they're some of the natural stones that we import that we private label, those are all areas that we see as upside. Remember I told you a little while ago that my biggest issue is there's just not enough hours in the day. It's not lack of opportunity.
It's hours in the day to get these things implemented. At the same time, you know, when we acquired Pinch, right? We acquired Pinch. We think it's a fabulous business. We think there's tons of opportunity with it. At the end of the day, in my head, I have to keep that straight with 95% of the business is something other than that is growing and operating tremendously. I don't wanna screw that up by pivoting and spending all of my time here. We have to do both of those things. The good news is that what you're looking at, I think is a very capable and talented management team with a lot of things on the list that we can do to continue to improve the business.
That was one of the key takeaways we were hoping you all would have, is that, wow, the runway that exists at Pool, whether it's because of the things that we talked about that aren't related to Pinch or Porpoise versus those things, whether it's Horizon or whether it's Europe, there's a lot of opportunity. The fundamental backdrop in the market in terms of, is the market going to continue to grow? You know, nobody's gonna leave Florida and say, "I'm headed back to New York." You know? That southern migration is going to continue. People are not gonna turn back into a "Hey, we're all gonna sit around a TV set and be an indoor society." Healthy outdoor living is what people want.
We look at all of those things as a very sustainable opportunity.
That's very helpful.
Thank you.
Hi, David MacGregor at Longbow Research. A couple of questions. First on capital allocation. You've got about 410 sites, service centers. You've got four RDCs. How are you thinking right now in terms of your capacity in an RDC to support further base door growth? How are you thinking about your investments in RDCs going forward? I have a follow-up.
I think we're gonna have to expand the footprint of the RDCs, or we call 'em CSLs. What we're trying to do is kind of going back to capacity creation. I don't want to expand the four walls and take on more base cost until I've leveraged the facilities to their full capability. We have opportunity to continue to leverage those, but honestly, given the rate of expansion of the business and our appetite to grow, that's an area that we're going to have to expand.
When I look at the CapEx required for a CSL, quite frankly, in perspective, relative to what we spend in total, it's not like if we decide to open one or two CSLs, there isn't an issue that says, "Wow, we have to make choices. Do I do that or do I do something else?" 'Cause the capital intensity of opening a CSL, because they're basically, you know, big boxes with racking and forklifts, the bigger issue about expanding the CSL is getting forklifts right now, right? Forklifts and those order pickers and things are in very high demand. That becomes. Frankly, that's part of our we talked about how many facilities you're gonna open this year, how many new branches. I gotta have a forklift to open a branch.
If I can't get enough—if I can only get 20 forklifts, then I can't open 30 locations, right? It's a question of how many facilities or how can we equip those. It's a logical conclusion to draw that we will have to expand the CSLs and to include Europe as well. Europe is a market that I look at. We don't have a CSL in Europe today. It is probably the most logical place to have a CSL, given the global supply chain that serves Europe. Jean-Louis and his team have identified that need and said, "We need a CSL," and we're with them.
In Horizon as well, I would suspect.
Yep.
Yeah. Second question is really just on supply chain. Just if you could talk about how vendor kind of volume-related incentives may be changing this year versus last year.
Yeah. The programs, this is nothing new, right? The programs reset every year. This is nothing new. Every year, we have negotiations with all of our key vendors. We put together a program that provides incentive for us to focus and grow, and we are rewarded for that. Nothing really new to report there. It's kinda business as usual in terms of incentives. Because we, you know, what I would tell you, and I mentioned to you guys at the first or second time that I was with you, is that our relationships with the suppliers are very important. We are not an 800-pound big box gorilla that bludgeons the suppliers. That's just not how we operate.
We view them as a partner because I don't wanna be viewed. Listen, I've had some of those type customers in the past. They're tough customers, and you're always thinking, "Gosh, this is really not something I want to do." I don't wanna really spend a whole lot of time with folks like that because I always feel like it's a one-sided deal. We work very collaboratively with the suppliers because we need them to win, and we need to win as well. We want to be compensated for our size and for our scale and for what we do, but it's certainly not a one-sided transaction, and I think that really helps that spirit kind of permeate the relationship with most of our key suppliers.
Curt.
Curt.
Thank you. This is Noah Merkousko with Stephens. Thank you for the presentation today. You know, it's encouraging to hear about the consumer interest in outdoor living, automation, new pool designs. And I guess my question is, are those products. You know, it looks like a lot of those are higher priced.
Mm-hmm.
Do those come at a higher margin? Is there an opportunity as you see those product categories possibly, you know, that sales growth outpace the rest of the company? Is there an opportunity for margin expansion there?
I would tell you it depends on the channel and how it's sold, right? So if it's part of a new construction package, you know, our larger customers buy more. They tend to have their own special pricing. So the answer is the margin profile. Like when we introduced the concept of the DOE variable speed pump legislation. So the price of the pump is higher than a single-speed pump. That's the good news. The bad news is that if I looked at the margin, the gross margin percentage, it was slightly lower than a single-speed pump, but the margin dollars, you know, were significantly more.
Just because of that change, I wouldn't look for a significant change in the margin profile. We look at it as an opportunity. The cost, you know, my cost to transact a variable speed pump, which may cost 2x what the old single-speed pump cost, costs me the same to transact that business. Margin rate is a little bit lower, but margin dollars are much more, which creates more operating income for the business. It's. Don't look for, I think, at this point from where I sit, a big shift that says, "Wow, automation is gonna carry a higher gross margin ticket.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. Again, one more question I had for Todd relative to the IT. You talked about Blues treak and about POOL360. But I just could you put it in the context of the broader roadmap at POOLCORP and the ERP consolidation? I mean, I'm not really understanding what you're working on right now in terms of upgrades for 2022. Could you put that in the context of the broader IT roadmap?
All the things that I talked about are investments that we are making that again should come into fruition in 2022, right? The new POOL360 and the related mobile app and Blue Streak are all foundational improvements under the covers, right? All of that again is part of the 2022 plan as it relates to improvement and investments that we're making around IT.
We shouldn't think about this as the, you know, point-of-purchase system or, you know, general ledger, anything else that's involved in the ERP. The only things that you're updating are the things that you refer to here, which are sort of bolt-on pieces of IT. Is that right?
The way I'll answer it is when you think about transformation, right? These are areas where you're adding around ERP, right? To lift processes out and add value, right? So I mentioned pricing, right? So that's not necessarily replacing pricing. It's enhancing pricing with additional functionality, and that could come in the form of additional software. It could be through AI and machine learning. It could be by combining both. So that's kind of the essence of digital transformation. So it's not so much, "Hey, I'm gonna pull general ledger out completely." I'm going to put technology around it to improve functionality and to create better functionality for the employee, which then transcends into a better customer experience, right? So again, that's kind of the way. So it's not...
I think what you're talking about is more of the overhaul, like replace everything, but we're talking about the digital transformation around.
Okay. Just when we hear digital and transformation.
Totally get it.
Many people think ERP.
But flying the journey slot-
Yeah. Right
Of like, hey, it's really around that idea factor, right? Looking for opportunities for improvement, taking those, and then, you know, focus on the customer experience, focus on the business outcome, and then using technology to get to the destination.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Yep.
Anybody else? Okay. Hey, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate everything you do, appreciate your support, and I'm always available for questions, as is Melanie and the rest of the team. Travel safe, and it was great seeing you in person. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.