New product to us, not necessarily a new product to the industry. So that's a really high-level overview. What does that mean to the numbers? So this is our trailing 12 months after Q2 of this year. So trailing 12 months are just short of $500 million revenue. Our guidance for this year puts us at the midpoint at $580 million by the time we finish this year. We believe we got gross margin for industry-leading gross margins from a manufacturing perspective. Last 12 months, we've averaged just over $7,200 of EBITDA per car shipped. When you compare and contrast that to 2018, it was negative $17,000 per car shipped. So hence the move to Mexico for manufacturing. Trailing 12 months shipments just short of 4,000 units. Guidance for this year is somewhere between 4,300 and 4,700, so 4,500 at the midpoint.
We have an installed capacity currently of about 5,000 units per year in our Mexico facility. You can see our evolution of revenue. Obviously COVID being in 2020 impacted the industry quite significantly. EBITDA from a revenue perspective over the last five or six years, and you can see our forecast for the final year 2024: 4,500 units shipped, $580 million of revenue, and approximately $37 million of EBITDA. That's a lot of the journey we've been on from a loss to a profit, and continue to grow. Some of the things that are interesting to note, the compound annual growth rate for our industry over the last four years has been 0.2%. Our CAGR is somewhere between 9% and if we hit our forecast this year, it'll be somewhere around 17% compared to an industry of pretty flat. How do we do it?
We believe we're well positioned within our market. The market for freight cars is pretty consistent at 40,000 units per year. It's really replacement rates. So the amounts of freight cars used in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, potentially U.S. and Canada, as they expire, so they're federally mandated to expire at 50 years. And as they expire 50 years, there's a replacement rate that goes into new car builds. That gives us about the 40,000 units per year. We have a current product portfolio that addresses 60% of that 40,000 units a year. And we believe on that we have about 10% market share captured, which is the red segment on the chart.
Then the tank car contract that we supplied in July is significant for us 'cause that puts us into another 20% of market share from our product portfolio and allows us to do a three-year program, two years of recertification, which is taking existing tank cars, rebuilding them and recertifying to be compliant, and then puts us in a position where we are then AAR approved or a regulation body approved to build new tank cars from 2028 onwards, which will expand our product portfolio to about 80% market share. The remaining 20% of market share is quite fragmented and distributed. It's very niche, and you would look at each design job by job as to whether you'd wanna offer that, but it probably wouldn't go into the product portfolio. Let's say industry CAGR is just over 0.2%, and our CAGR for the last three years is 9.4%.
When we finish 2024, we believe it'll be somewhere around 17%, when we add 2024 into the mix. We've got a broad product portfolio. I'm not gonna list all of them, but it covers 60% with tank cars at another 20%, so we went from coal cars, and we were number one in coal cars for 100 years. As coal car demand dropped down, we've diversified, and pretty much our product portfolio matches the needs of the U.S. economy, so when it moves aggregate, agricultural products, textiles, anything that's moving by rail, we've got a product that fits in there. Second row, right-hand side is also a large portion of our business, which is conversion and modifications. Rail cars are built to last 50 years, and due to the nature of some of the things that they haul, can be caustic or acidic, they can corrode the body.
Usually around the 20- to 30-year mark, if an asset owner has a significant number of freight cars that the body won't last for 50 years, but the sills and the trucks will, they can send them back to us. We will rebuild them, recertify them, and they'll get a new refresh to last that 50-year process. Our route to market really, you can think through three different routes. Shippers and direct owners. These can be large agricultural companies. They could be mining operations. This is where they have a dedicated fleet for their own use. That's what we call the shipper. That's about a third of our business. Class I railroads, that's about a third of our business. These are, these buy their own rolling stock and use them for their own purposes.
Then the leasing community in the red is just over a third, about 40%, and growing, and we'll likely finish around the 50% mark this week, this year, sorry. One of the interesting things about leasing is our two biggest competitors in the industry. They are manufacturers and leasing organizations. One of them states to be a leasing company that happens to manufacture. One's a manufacturing company that happens to lease. We're a pure-play manufacturer. When you think about that, there are many leasing companies in North America, as in, you know, over 100 of them, and they do not like going to another leasing company to ask for their product to be manufactured by them.
So a big portion of our growth is being leasing agnostic, where we can provide a manufacturing product to leasing companies without the fear of that conflict that leasing company introducing their customer to another leasing company, which is a big value proposition for us and spurs a lot of our growth in our route to market. So we've got a couple of pillars we've done. As I talked, it's profitable growth really, and what we have done over the last three to four years is turn it from a negative $18,000 of EBITDA per car shipped to a positive $7,500 EBITDA per car shipped. Really, that's a transition of consolidating our manufacturing footprints. So closing three U.S.-based facilities over the past decade and opening a dedicated campus in a place called Castaños in Mexico. We have 2,000 people workforce manufacturing down there.
We have a vertically integrated process, so we take raw materials in the form of sheet, coil, and plate, predominantly in steel. We do the fabrications of small parts into larger parts and eventually doing the assembly of a finally finished freight car. Couple of things we're doing this year, we'll continue to push this year, is recapitalize our debt structure. Mike, our CFO, was with us for Q&A, any questions on our debt structure, but we will be recapitalizing that to reduce the cost of our cost of debt and leverage. We have a product portfolio and additional white space opportunities to expand upon that product portfolio or use our manufacturing campus for other manufacturing processes that make sense in Mexico. What's our full year guidance this year? We are at the midpoint, 4,500 units shipped.
Just compared that to the prior 12 months, was just over 3,200. So significant growth in volume, predominantly 'cause we now have four operating lines in our Mexico facility. Revenue between $560 million and $600 million, midpoint $580 million. That will be a 62% year-on-year growth in revenue. And then EBITDA somewhere between $35 million and $39 million, midpoint to $37 million. Compare that to four years ago with significant negative EBITDA. So that's gonna be an 84%, so over 84% year-on-year growth at the midpoint. So pretty healthy growth for 2024, as confirmed by our guidance. And then some of our highlights for investments. So we have, we're utilizing our trailing 12 months at 358 was using 60% of capacity. This year at 4,500, about 95% of capacity with a capacity of 5,000 unit cars.
We do have the option to expand that capacity to 6,000 or 6,200, when demand manifests itself. What we'd most likely do is keep at 5,000 and increase our margin, increase enrichment of the mix as opposed to chase volume. We have industry-leading margin profiles, 11.7% gross margin for 2023, and finished the year last year at six just over $6,600 EBITDA per car shipped, and we have our third consecutive year of positive operating cash flow with our CapEx usually around about 0.5%-0.75% of revenue, which is more about the sustainability of the plant. For those interests, we have a breakdown of our equity capital, but you look at our market cap, we've got about 33 million shares outstanding that goes into our business, and with that, I will open up for questions.
And I'm gonna invite Mike to the stage, our CFO, in case there's a more financial question. Yes, sir.
Do you have any idea what the age of—I don't know if it's a difficult question to answer, but is there—do you have any idea the age of the fleet out there now?
Yeah. So the question is, do we have any idea of the age of the fleet? So the fleet is, it depends by product type.
Yeah.
So some product types were built heavily in the '70s. Some product types were built heavily in the '80s. They will all expire at 50 years. So if you take the average, you're gonna sit around about 24 to 25 years just because the way the averages work out. Covered hoppers, they're typically older. They're around 34, 35 years. There'll be a lot of those to replace over the next 10 or 15 years. That's the highest individual product in our product portfolio and in the industry. Tank cars are relatively younger 'cause they took a boom in the 2008, 2010, 2012. So they're a bit of a younger generation in the fleet. And the rest average somewhere around 22 to 28 years, Brett.
How do you see that reflected in your sales?
So we use the ARCI data, which is the industry collective data, allows us to see everything that was built 50 years ago and what's going to expire or has expired recently. So we're able to adjust our manufacturing or route to market to match what the demand is gonna be as those products roll out of the fleet that's being used. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Oh, so you go.
How do you guys manage commodity prices? I know you guys bought a lot of inventory. Are you just trying to take contract and buy all the inventory you can run? Or?
So all of our contracts, so the question was, how do we, how do you manage commodity prices? And all of our contracts have raw material pass-through. So we're protected from any volatility in steel. Steel is the primary commodity we're gonna use. So typically we will receive an order, nine months prior to build, so six to nine months prior to build. So we'll have an appreciation of what the current steel price is, and that's what we'll use with the customer. And then in the contract, any adjustments in steel price. So if the cost of steel increases, that's pass-through to the customer. If the cost of steel decreases, some customers, not all customers take that saving. It depends on what the contract is.
But we're always protected on raw material variability from a, and if it's a really long order cycle time, labor costs are escalatable as well. So if you go more than a year anniversary. Any other questions? Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you.