All right, good afternoon everybody and thank you for coming. Up next we have Powell Industries trading on NASDAQ under symbol POWL. On behalf of the company, we have Michael Metcalf, EVP and CFO.
Thanks Errol. Good afternoon and thanks for your time today. It's good to be back. I was telling Errol this is my third annual time here, gets better every time, so it doesn't disappoint. Good attendance. I'm from Powell, I'm the CFO and I've been with the company for about seven years. Unfortunately, our CEO was unable to make it. I'm carrying the banner today. A little bit about who Powell is. We're an electrical distribution company. We make electrical, industrial, electrical components predominantly in the Gulf Coast in Houston. We were founded in Houston. We had our 77th birthday here this last year. We've been around a while. We do have a global footprint.
We have facilities. Our largest facilities are in the U.S. We've got five manufacturing facilities in the U.S., three of which are in the Houston area, one here in Chicago in Northlake, and one in Ohio. We have a large facility in Western Alberta in Canada and we have a facility in the United Kingdom as well. Last year we hit our high watermark of revenues of just over $1 billion. We like to clamor, you know, brag about our balance sheet, which is very, very, very liquid and remains that way today. These are the products that Powell builds. On the left-hand side, this is the IP of the business. This is a circuit breaker. If you were to go into your place of residence and open that gray box with all those circuits, this is the same thing, but a 500 lbs version.
This is distributing power across utilities, across petrochemical facilities. It could be sitting outside a data center. Every channel that we play in, that product goes into what's called switchgear, this middle picture. It's essentially the metal cabinet that's engineered to distribute the power through the breaker to the sources that require it. We make medium voltage switchgear and we also make low voltage switchgear. From a breaker standpoint, we have two breakers. We have a Powell breaker, medium voltage breaker that was developed in the 80s. In 2006, Tom Powell bought GE's medium voltage breaker. We have two medium voltage breakers. Suffice it to say, very strong in medium voltage. That goes into our medium voltage switchgear and our low voltage switchgear. We do not have a low voltage breaker, so we'll buy low voltage breakers from the likes of Eaton, Siemens, Schneider.
That equipment, when it's assembled, goes into what's called a power control room or on the right hand side, this looks to be an offshore module, two story module. All this electrical equipment will be packed into this module and it will be built on site, tested and ultimately shipped to its final destination. As I mentioned, our wheelhouse is in 0 -38 kV, so anything up to 38,000 V down to 1,000 V is where we play. We're very strong. We're an ETO engineer to order operation, so most of our products, when they leave the facility, are specifically engineered and designed for a specific electrical configuration. We have very, very sticky customer relationships as well. I get asked a lot about the grid and where do we play in the grid. This is a snapshot of the grid.
It's important to understand Powell is agnostic to how the power is derived. If the power is derived solar, wind, coal, hydro, really doesn't matter. We're also agnostic to where that power goes. There's probably medium voltage switchgear on the bottom of this that's being stepped down and then powering the lights, Chicago transit, we've got gear on CTA, industrial applications, et cetera. We really don't, we're agnostic to where it goes. In between those two streams, all the switching that happens in the medium voltage space is where Powell plays. Powell plays very strong. Across the globe today, there are two electrical standards. This is an important facet for investors to understand as you understand how we grew up, where we grew up and the channels we play in.
There's the ANSI electrical standard, which is common in all of North America, some parts of the Middle East, Saudi, Kuwait, big swaths of the Southeast. The rest of the world is on what's called IEC. The same reason you take an electrical appliance over to Europe, you can't plug it in, it's because you're on. There's two different electrical standards. Powell is very, very strong in the ANSI standard here in North America and in some parts of the Middle East. We bought our U.K. facility to begin to have a presence, not a large presence, but a presence in the IEC space, in the industrial elements and utility sector within the U.K. We do have IEC capabilities, just not nearly to the magnitude that we have ANSI capabilities, and that's very important as I get into the geographical revenue.
A typical power control room, I mean it could be a 2,000- 3,000 sq ft power control room. They can go up to 10,000 sq ft . The picture on the left-hand side looks like a two-piece, so that seam on the top, that'll split apart and then when it gets to, it'll be built in one piece, they'll split it apart, they'll ship it, they'll get it back to the site and then they'll put it back together. That's a power control room and that's full of Powell gear, switchgear, breakers, etc. I mentioned the module previously, that's an offshore module. We do those. We have an offshore yard right on the water that feeds into Galveston Bay. Because they're too large to ship over the road, we'll do this. That module is probably 750 tons and it'll be put on a barge and shipped to its ultimate destination.
All the electrical configuration is unique to each one. There are multiple subcontractors. We don't make everything that goes into these PCRs. We have to buy, you can see HVAC units off the side of this building. We have to buy that. There are battery backup systems inside. We don't make those. Transformers we don't make. What we do is we buy the things we don't make, we make the things we make. We integrate the overall solution for the customer, put it at its final resting spot here on its pilings, plug it in, and it's distributing power across the site. We also have a growing arm of our business, control and monitoring solutions. This is an automation arm whereby we have the hardware probes, if you will, that are embedded within this equipment.
These are potassium-tipped probes and they can detect anomalies, electrical anomalies, heat anomalies, dust, grease, et cetera. They communicate with that yellow box. Today that yellow box will sit on the face of, on the outside of switchgear. That's where it stops. We announced about three weeks ago an acquisition, a U.K. operation called Remsdaq. That's a controller that will interface. They'll take SCADA from the hardware that we have today and ultimately read it and send it to an operator's device, whether it's an iPad, an iPhone, a desktop, whatever the case may be to give predictive analytics and preventative maintenance data to an operator. Say, hey, across your two dozen power control rooms on your site, building number 10 has a problem in switchgear lineup number 72, go look at it. Much more efficient than manually checking each lineup as they do in a lot of cases today.
Where we play today strongly is about 50%- 60% depending on the time. Today it's a little over 50% is what I would call core industrial markets. So it's LNG, it's carbon capture, it's hydrogen, it's your legacy refineries, pipelines, green diesel, sustainable airline fuels. Wherever you have a hydrocarbon that's being moved in large quantities, needs a lot of power to move it. That's going to fall under our oil and gas umbrella. We also segment out our utility sector. So any generation and distribution, we don't do any transmission today, but predominantly generation and distribution application for utility is separated out in our Qs and our Ks. We also are heavy, not heavy, but we're present a lot less so today than we were probably five years ago in the light rail traction sector.
As I mentioned earlier, if you were to go on CTA, you pass substations. In a lot of cases those substations could be Powell substations that are powering the tracks. We do that all over the country. In Canada as well, metals and mining. This is not frequent, but we did just book a large mining project, potash mine in Canada here about six months ago. Wherever you need large amounts of power to move material, Powell is going to be relevant. Ultimately, data centers have been a new add to the portfolio over the last two or three years. Today we've broken that out into a separate sector because it was being captured in an all other bucket that exceeded the 10%. We broke that out into a commercial and other industrial sector here probably two, three years ago. That sector today altogether is 15%.
About 1/2 of that is attributable to data centers. Powell's business model is unique. I often get people are sometimes surprised that we go toe to toe with the guys on the left hand side, the multinationals, they build the same products we build. They have a lot of smart engineering folks, but when they go to market, they don't have the building kit, the wrapper, the building capabilities, and the integrating on one site capability. When Powell goes into a campaign, our value prop is number one. We will engineer this thing any way you want it. If we're in the middle of the project and you have a change, great, that's fine. We'll work with the customer to accommodate that change. They're going to pay for it, but we're happy to do it. It's done all in one site, under one roof.
We build raw steel, copper comes in the back door, it gets cut, bent, welded, painted, assembled into switchgear breakers, and then ultimately the power control room. It gets assembled in the front of the shop. The customer comes in, they test it, they don't like something, we use our labor on site to fix it. The next morning they come in, everything's fine, we put it on a truck and off it goes to the facility. On the other hand, the folks on the left-hand side, because they don't have that building capability and they're a little bit less nimble from an engineered-to-order standpoint and a flexibility standpoint, they have to go hire one of the building manufacturers, three of which are listed on the right-hand side, but there are many.
They have to ship their gear from all points across the globe to this facility and get it integrated and then go through the same process that I just explained. It's a lot more, it's much clunkier. If there's issues, there's not on-site engineers to help them. We found that this is highly valued across whether it's our core industrial customers, utility customers, and now we're finding data center customers value that as well. Our CEO Brett Cope's been in that seat for roughly a dozen years. About five years ago, four or five years ago, we got to the point where his vision was ready to be assimilated with the investment community. We put this slide together and this is where both from an organic standpoint and an inorganic standpoint, these are the areas where Brett is really focused on adding to the portfolio, adding growth to the portfolio.
I just mentioned the automation business that we bought here mid-August. Automation is a passion of his. He grew up in ABB, 20+ years in ABB with controls and automation hardware. He knows it very well. This is an area that I think as you learn Powell and you follow Powell, this is an area that you'll see continued focus on our services franchise. When we bought the General Electric breaker in 2006, we also bought an installed base of these breakers. I mean, how many GE refrigerators are there across the U.S.? Equal number of these GE breakers in Middle East and wherever the ANSI electrical standard is prevalent. GE PowerVac medium voltage breakers, you can pretty much guarantee they're there. This is an area where we've brought on a new Vice President of Service. He's building a team. They have a lot of great ideas.
This is an area where we want to deliver value-added services to our customer base, new and existing customer base, and then ultimately building out the product portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, if you think about the utility space, there's generation, there's distribution, there's transmission. We are heavy in the distribution and generation piece. We're very, very relevant there. We don't have anything in transmission. Are there some opportunities that could be nice tuck-ins in that area amongst a plethora of other portfolio adds? These are the areas as we think forward 5, 10, 15 years, what does this business want to look like in a decade? These are the areas where we're really focused. From a capital allocation perspective, I mentioned we're very liquid. We closed last fiscal quarter with over $400 million of cash, $0 debt.
Of that cash, and I'll get into it in a minute, I think on the next slide, a lot of that cash will be deployed to working capital. These projects that we have in our backlog, they span one to three years. When we take the order, we take cash, we take down payment milestones, and then we'll spend that, we'll start spending that money 6, 9, 12, 18 months later. We need to focus on the working capital, making sure that we've got adequate capital there. The organic and inorganic growth, I just talked about that. We were spending a lot in R&D. Recently announced three new products within our commercial portfolio that exited the R&D pipeline, one for utilities, one for the oil and gas sector, and really spanning across all of our end markets. We aren't overly weighted in one or the other.
We've got a very robust R&D pipeline, and hopefully we continue to see products get commercialized out of that over the next several years, frankly. We talk about whether it's buybacks, dividends every quarter with the board. We did just have our 48th consecutive dividend announcement this last quarter. When you think about the capital, as I said, $433 million as we exited the last quarter, roughly 1/2 of that is deployed to working capital. Between R&D, CapEx, and the dividend, it's roughly $45 million. We just announced this acquisition, which was roughly $16 million, leaves us roughly $150 million plus free cash for deploying to other initiatives. You can see what we've done, you can see how we've increased it as the level of business has gone up over the last few years. We have deployed more capital across the business in those different areas.
CapEx, we've made some very thoughtful CapEx adds, haven't gone crazy. We bought a piece of property in 2024 for about $6 million. That gives us about 9, 10 acres if we need additional area to lay down buildings that's close to our facility. We just announced last week a deployment of about $12 million, a little better than $12 million, to stabilize the remaining portion of a 20-acre plot of land on the fabrication yard on the water that I mentioned earlier where we do the very, very large buildings. Financially speaking, a five-year snapshot. You're going from really tough times to the market's really good. You can see how the margins have reflected the market activity. 2020 actually wasn't that bad of a year because in February of 2020 we booked the largest, and it still is the largest order.
It was over $200 million LNG order that we booked in February 2020 and then March, the pandemic hit. That fed us through the pandemic and remember the lead time for our products is when we book them, when we book these products, it's going to take us 12, 18, maybe longer months to execute them. The projects that we booked in 2020, 2021 kind of exited the backlog in 2022, 2023. These are projects that had leaner margins. They're firm fixed price contracts. At the end of COVID, beginning of 2022, when the inflationary pressures hit, we got caught flat footed, hit the reset button, made a ton of changes commercially, operationally, and that culminated with the data center resurgence.
Whether there's a second derivative and how that's impacting the utility demand, it's really helped us from an operating leverage perspective as well as just the natural pricing dynamics in the market. You can see the operating cash flow very, very strong across last three years, we generate a lot of cash. I won't belabor this page other than to say if you look at that lower left hand corner chart, you can see in 2023, the fourth quarter 2022 through the third quarter 2023, we booked an order that was, we call them mega orders. If it's greater than $50 million, we call them out to our investors and from 4Q22 to 3Q23, there was a minimum of 1 mega and they were all well over $50 million that we booked and that you can see in the upper left hand quadrant.
That resulted in the backlog surpassing $1 billion in 2023. In 2024, we didn't book any large mega orders, nothing over $50 million. The activity across all of our end markets, data centers, utilities, just the regular traditional oil and gas refining pipeline, petrochem, just very steady state plus some and we were able to maintain a 1.1 book -to- bill through 2024, didn't erode the margin at all. This latest quarter and on the heels of last couple quarters, we've started to see some of these larger $50 million+ jobs come back. The last quarter that we just announced, 3Q25, we were up about $100 million in our backlog and we've booked $880 million of orders through the first nine months of the year and that compares to about $1.056 billion all of 2024.
We're very pleased with our orders cadence and our backlog and our throughput in the business. As we sit here today, we added this slide this quarter because we get a lot of questions on our backlog, especially given what utility's done. You can clearly see it was in the high teens in 2020 that as of the last quarter was almost a third of our backlog. The 17% of a total backlog of $477 million in 2020 is now 32% of a total backlog of $1.4 billion. We also segmented out the commercial and other industrial sector. In 2020 that was 2% that had $0 data center volume. We started to see through COVID specifically 2022 plus 2022 and on started to see that data center work which is captured in the sector begin to build up in backlog in 2022.
I mentioned the difference between ANSI and IEC and this is, this is kind of where you see it. We are over 80% of our revenues are in the United States. In that international revenue, you've got Canada, which Canada is the predominant piece of that other 19%. We do include it in international. That international revenue is U.K.-based revenue as well as Canada, but it's really driven. That U.S. revenue is driven by the ANSI electrical standard. Where we grew up, we're very strong in the ANSI world. Anything in blue, the blue color is 100% ANSI. The yellowish color, they have a mix of ANSI and IEC. We can compete there if it's an ANSI application. We can compete less competitively if it's an IEC application. The gray is all IEC, and we pick our battles. We pick our battles well.
There's now over $806 million through the first nine months. 50%+ is, I call it, core industrial. Oil and gas, you can see everything we put in oil and gas there, and then petrochemicals. Petrochem is plastics, fertilizers, ammonia, gas to chemicals, if you will. The utility space, if this chart were to go out to 2020, 2021, as I alluded to on the backlog chart, we have held 20%- 25% top line segmentation to electrical utilities for at least the last three years. You can see the pie in the bright blue. The commercial and other industrial, that was in 2021, that was high single digits, and now it's grown into the 15 %- 17% type of number. That's really driven by data centers. Probably 1/2 of that is data center attributable. That's really all I have today for Powell.
I'll leave a few minutes to take questions, but suffice it to say, to wrap up, really, all of our end markets are very active. Whether it's in the oil and gas segment, in LNG, utilities, whether it's attributable to the demand for data centers, to the demand of the infrastructure build out. We're starting to see some of these ancillary markets, whether it's mining, getting a mining job here, a light rail traction job there. The jobs coming in are larger in scale, more power is demanded. That's where Powell plays very, very well. With that, I'll take any questions. Got about five minutes left.
Oil and gas, [audio distortion]
We don't specifically grade that out, but I would say it's probably roughly 10 %- 15%. Roughly.
Is your customer typically the EPC or is it the—
It's typically the EPC. We do have both of those.
In LNG specifically, we will work with the end customer very closely, even if it's with an EPC. When the EPC leaves, we want them to know Powell, they're going to, they know who to call for that application as well as their next application. We do see instances where they will reach out if they've got, say, a brownfield expansion and they don't want to engage an EPC, they might come direct to us. For the large greenfield projects, big new configuration, complex, they will typically select a large EPC and then the EPC will put the spec out for bid on the street. For utilities, that's typically direct. They'll come direct.
Two questions, tariffs. Second question, the ability to control and monitoring, what percentage of your revenue did they and you consider.
So on tariffs, fortunately we were a little worried with the Canada back and forth because we build all of our breakers that go into this equipment in Houston and then we ship them to the United Kingdom and Canada. Fortunately, our breakers are covered under USMCA, so we don't have any exposure there. That was a concern at one point. We build all of our wiring harnesses on the shoulders of the auto industry right across the border with the maquiladoras. They do all these very fine wiring and they label the wires and then they ship the wiring harnesses up to our production facilities and we plug it into the switchgear. That was a concern early on, but that too is covered under USMCA. My most recent concern was this copper thing.
When copper spiked up to $5.50 a pound, fortunately we're hedged, but hedges run out and I was wondering what we're going to do if it maintains at $5.50. Fortunately, the administration clarified a specific type of source of copper that is exempted and that was that. That fell under what we call what we buy. So copper went away. My most recent concern is India, with India's exposure to tariffs due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. We buy batteries and transformers out of India. In August, if that continues, we are in the process of pivoting suppliers, but that doesn't help us in the short term, unfortunately. It's immaterial. It's rather immaterial, but we're watching it closely. If it's a tariff that we are not going to be able to mitigate, we're going to roll it into our price of mile and pass it on.
Now, your recurring revenue question on this business that we bought in the United Kingdom. Today, it's a product model. They sell a controller. There's no software as a service. Recurring updates, things of that nature. Can we get there someday? Potentially. Remsdaq's been part of the family for two weeks and I think the biggest opportunity that we see is today they are laser focused on the U.K. utility side. That's it. This product is agnostic to either electrical standard, irrespective of the geography, irrespective of the channel, whether it's an oil and gas customer, whether it's a utility customer, whether it's a traction power customer. This product can be deployed anywhere in our gear. They weren't able to penetrate other markets because you need to embed it in switchgear, which they don't build, they just build the product. They have to go to a switchgear manufacturer.
We've got switchgear all over the place. We've got switchgear in the U.K., we've got Atlanta, we've got it here. That's the value prop that Brett and the team identified. This one was in the works for a long time and fortunately they didn't sell to PE. They didn't like PE. They didn't like some of the local U.K. folks that they were talking to. They liked Powell, they liked the culture. I think it'll be a good add to the portfolio.
Somebody else have a question?
[audio distortion]
Backlog is a firm contractual commitment with a termination clause. Nothing in backlog. We have zero letters of intent in backlog, zero MoUs, memorandums of understanding, in backlog. It is a signed contract to deliver and if the customer deems that they want to terminate, there's a cost to do something.
Is there an organic instance?
Just given some of the things going on with Dennis and others? There hasn't been any indication or explanation at all to any type of double order.
Double order? I think it'd be very jealous if you could double order a PCR because they're so massive and then they're specifically configured. If you double ordered a PCR, I don't know what you do. I don't know. It would be very challenging. Anyone else? Okay, thank you.