All right. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to RPM's Investor Day, which is being hosted at our Stonhard facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I am Matt Schlarb, RPM's Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. We appreciate your interest in RPM, whether you are here with us in person or whether you are joining us online. Today, we will begin with an overview of RPM, then go into details about our new operating improvement program, MAP 2030, and then we will open the floor for questions. After Q&A, we will conclude our webcast. For those who are joining in person, you will hear from Greg Michael, Performance Coatings Group President, before visiting our Maple Shade location for a tour of our Stonhard plant. I would like to remind everybody that today's Investor Day is being recorded, and a replay will be available on our website.
Additionally, we have filed today's presentation with the SEC, and a copy is available online. Comments made today may include forward-looking statements based on current expectations that involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to be materially different. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please review RPM's reports filed with the SEC. During today's presentation, references may be made to non-GAAP financial measures. To assist you in understanding these non-GAAP terms, RPM has posted reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures on the RPM website. Now, before turning the call over to Frank Sullivan, RPM's Chair and CEO, I would like to welcome Mike Jewell, Stonhard's Executive Vice President of Operations, to the microphone to provide a safety message.
Thank you, Matt. For those of you that are here in person, welcome to Stonhard's world headquarters in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. If we need to leave suddenly, out the exit door right there to the right, out the way we came in the building, and there is a rally point all the way across the parking lot. We like to start every meeting everywhere in the world with a safety moment. Whether you are a customer service rep, whether you are a finance person, a salesperson, or our field personnel, anytime three or more people get together, we start with a safety moment. Today's safety moment, it is autumn, which means it is deer season. Many of us live in areas that have been developed. There are wooded areas, urban parks around us, and the deer are out in quite large numbers these days, especially in dense suburban areas.
We just turned the clocks back, so high-risk areas are happening. Their commute is our commute, so we have to be really vigilant and really looking around, right? Change your alertness, look to the sides of the road. If you can, drive with your high beams on. Those little gimmicky things, the little whistle things that go on your bumper, they do not work. Science says they do not work. High beams are the best thing. Your eyes are the best thing. Keep your eyes out. Remember, if you see one deer, there is more than one deer. So, a deer might be crossing the road. That means he has friends behind him, so be really, really careful. If for some reason you think you are going to hit the deer, hit the brakes. Do not swerve. You are better off hitting the deer.
We drive in these amazing vehicles these days that have all kinds of safety precautions. That's much safer than trying to swerve into oncoming traffic or running off the side of the road. If for some reason you do hit a deer, stay in your car, put your flashers on, don't get out of the car. Many times, the deer's not dead, and if it's frightened and injured, it's going to jump up, and you could do more damage to yourself than staying in the car. So, be careful out there. Welcome to autumn.
Good afternoon. Welcome to RPM's 2026 Investor Day. I'm Frank Sullivan, RPM's Chairman and CEO. I'm pleased to be talking to about 40 equity analysts who have covered us for a long time, and investors who invested their clients' money into RPM. So thank you all for being here, and for more than the 100 people that are listening online. Our meeting is coming to you today from our Stonhard business in New Jersey. We're in the Cherry Hill headquarters. Later this afternoon, for those present, we will be going to the Stonhard manufacturing facility in Maple Shade, New Jersey, probably the most efficient manufacturing facility in our industry. I will let those who visit it and write research to be the judge of that, but stay tuned. Stonhard, like all great coatings companies, was founded in 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio.
You'll hear more about Stonhard from Greg Michael, President of our Performance Coatings Group later this afternoon, formerly President of Stonhard. Also with me are Dave Dennsteadt, President and Chief Operating Officer of RPM, and Rusty Gordon, our Chief Financial Officer. Founded in 1947, RPM is a world leader in specialty coatings, sealants, and building materials, and related services. With $7.9 billion in revenues for our fiscal year ended May 31, 2026, our revenues are split 50/50 between coatings, high-performance coatings and related products, and construction chemicals and services. Notably, 65% of our revenues are in non-cyclical repair and maintenance, versus the remaining 35% in OEM and new construction. We manufacture in 22 different countries and sell our products and services in 167 countries around the globe. Our 17,500 associates have delivered record results for most of RPM's 80 years.
In the last 25 years, we have had two years in which revenues declined year-over-year. The first was in 2009 during the financial crisis, where revenues were down 7%, and the last was due to COVID in 2020, where revenues declined 1%. I am highly confident that our associates will deliver growing sales in each and every year for as far as you can see, barring a global financial crisis or a global pandemic. That group of associates has allowed RPM to generate that stability, which has driven 53 consecutive years of increases in cash dividends, a simplistic but very telling factor and element of RPM's growth with consistency. We are here today to introduce our MAP 2030 program. RPM's mission: by building a better world, we create value for all. What do we do?
We formulate product systems and solutions to protect, beautify, repair, enhance performance, and extend the useful life of objects, structures, and buildings that people value. We do it to create value for the three primary constituencies that we exist to serve. Our associates, where we deliver superior benefits and rewards to those individuals who invest their time and talent in our combined success. Our customers, where we deliver innovative products and solutions with passion and integrity. Our shareholders, where we deliver superior returns through a growing cash dividend, stock price appreciation in a way in which you can be proud. There are three primary strategies that drive our successful execution of our mission. Strategies to drive growth, better understanding our value advantage, and allocating our human and financial capital to that.
Strategies to drive margins and profitability, better optimizing our structure and amplifying connectivity across RPM, continuing that very successful MS-168 MAP-driven program of operational excellence, and a more focused effort to simplify our product lines and portfolios going forward. Lastly, and most importantly, our strategies to drive values. Operating with transparency, trust, and respect in all that we do, keeping that core entrepreneurial spirit alive at RPM, and what we call creating and keeping cathedral builders, the people that invest their time and talent in our combined success and create the value we deliver to our shareholders. By building a better world and creating value for all, through a focused MAP 2030 initiative execution, by the end of 2030, RPM will deliver more than $10 billion in revenues, a 20% EBITDA margin, and a market cap of $30 billion, or roughly double of where we are today.
This chart represents RPM's structure for our May 31, 2026 fiscal year end. Three groups on top of 20 independent operating company units, driven by the power of RPM, that entrepreneurial approach to customers with leading brands, driving innovation and growth, center-led in operations and administration, driving efficiency and continuous improvement, and the value of 168, operating with transparency, trust, and respect in all that we do. The opportunities for us to continue record levels of growth and performance from this 2026 base are tremendous. This chart reflects the total addressable market for the RPM businesses today. These are the products in which we operate, adjacencies in different product categories, in the geographies in which we operate, indicating $500 billion of growth opportunities through organic growth and through acquisitions.
You will be hearing more details of our 2030 MAP program, and our opportunities from growth this afternoon from Rusty Gordon and from Dave Dennsteadt. It is now my pleasure and honor to introduce Rusty Gordon, RPM's Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Rusty has been with RPM for more than 25 years.
31 years.
A great story about Rusty is, originally he was an engineer. That's where his degree is from. Was in a tech company and then BF Goodrich for a period of time. Joined RPM, really ran our planning process and ran FP&A at RPM. At a period of time when we were looking for a new CFO for RPM, Rusty was in the hunt for that. I talked to Rusty, he asked me, "What do CEOs typically have?" I said to him, "Experience in finance, accounting, running a planning process, much like you have.
A lot of times it's nice to have a CPA, but I didn't have a CPA and I was our CFO, so I don't think that is disqualifying." A year later, Rusty came into my office and informed me that after that meeting, he had signed up for accounting classes at night over the last year, and a week earlier sat for the CPA exam and passed it. That gives you the sense of the dedication, commitment, and intensity of RPM CFO, Rusty Gordon.
Thank you, Frank, and welcome everybody to Cherry Hill. It's great to see everybody. I'm going to start with a recap of our last MAP program. MAP 2025, you see some figures up here on the screen. We had record sales and record adjusted earnings every year during that last MAP program. Our consistency is fantastic. Of the last 19 quarters for RPM, 17 have been records for adjusted EBIT. So very consistent. Then if you look at our gross margins, we got very close to our 42% goal in the last MAP program, with 510 basis points of improvement. Great progress in working capital as well. That was something we always felt we had an opportunity to improve, and we really got at it in the last program.
One thing I will highlight here is the difference between our gross margin improvement of 510, and then you see only 260 hitting the bottom line in EBIT margins. That highlights our opportunity to better manage SG&A. One thing we have learned from our last MAP program is that applying those MAP disciplines in the cost of sales area can also be applied as well, those same disciplines to SG&A, and we will talk more about that and the opportunity to improve SG&A. Looking forward, we are going to take a more aggressive stance on capital allocation and really fund with a differentiated approach toward allocating capital and fund those high-margin, high-growth areas of RPM. On the other side of the coin, we will be exiting businesses that do not meet our financial criteria with tight implementation timelines in MAP 2030.
Also looking ahead, we are going to continue to increase collaboration and really leverage our intellectual assets, so that we can achieve two things at once, which is improving efficiency and driving high growth. Taking a look at our cash flow, you could see a dramatic step up, and when you are improving margins while you are simultaneously reducing working capital, you get outsized gains in cash flow, and that is what you saw from us over the last MAP program. This cash flow also provides a flywheel effect in that it improves our growth. We can do larger acquisitions in the future. We have larger share repurchases possible. We have been able to do big deals.
For example, we did two large deals about 18 months ago in The Pink Stuff and Ready Seal, and we have our leverage ratio right back down to the levels that they were right before those two deals. So you can see how cash flow will help us fuel higher growth in the future. In terms of the MAP program, we had a challenge on our hands, and we have outlined that before, which is, how do you keep the growth going in spite of the distraction of all the restructuring taking place at RPM? I think you could see on this slide, we were able to accomplish that. We were able to grow through all the restructurings, through all the ERP consolidations, and you could see that sales growth is pretty good despite a pretty challenging economic environment.
We are going to take that growth up about just a percentage point, you will see on the next slide, for MAP 2030. In terms of why we expect sales growth to pick up a bit, there is really three reasons. Number one, we expect international growth will accelerate due to better collaboration in international markets, and Dave will address that later. Second reason is that we expect acquisition growth to pick up. We have seen multiples on acquisitions return to earth and become more normalized, and as a result, we expect to be able to complete more deals. We have had more activity recently as a result. You have seen that. We did $200 million of deals last year, $600 million the year before. That is a good thing as well for our growth.
Then the third reason why growth will pick up is we are going to be more purposeful in how we allocate capital to areas of our business that are higher growth or more profitable areas. So again, a more differentiated approach to capital allocation. This next slide goes through our projections for MAP 2030. I will go through these one line at a time. We just discussed sales. As you can see off to the right of the slide, sales is split evenly among volume, price, and M&A, and I explained to you, relative to our 5% or so growth we demonstrated over the last two MAP cycles, why we think it will just pick up a bit to that 6.2% level. In terms of gross margins, I mentioned before, we have made great progress, got close to our 42% goal.
We are going to continue to make progress with our army of Green Belts. We have over 600 we have trained. You will see on the next slide more about the work streams and procurement and manufacturing. Also, we expect gross margins to improve as our pricing catches up, our selling pricing, that is, catches up with the recent spike that we have seen in inflation. On SG&A, we expect that we will be able to grow SG&A at a slower pace than our sales growth, and the way we will do that is by standardizing and automating certain administrative processes, including my area in accounting. As a result, we would expect to get that leverage on SG&A and see the ratio fall. EBITDA, you could see, we are projecting 20%.
That would get us up to the best peers in our peer group, who are operating at that level, and we believe we will be there too after executing MAP 2030. On working capital, we are going to continue to make progress. We have had a lot of success with our centralized procurement team. They have negotiated better terms with our suppliers and also have utilized trade finance vehicles where appropriate. On DSO, we expect to make some progress in our construction businesses with more cash in advance, so that is something we will push there. On days of inventory, we have rolled out SIOP, or sales inventory and operations planning, across a number of our businesses, and we are going to continue to do so to drive days of inventory down. As you know, at RPM, we cannot have a MAP program unless we have a wave chart, and you are probably familiar with this.
The work streams are familiar to you from the last MAP program. One that is new that we did not have in MAP 2025 is SG&A. SG&A, you see $125 million of savings. We have got about half of that now in the pipeline as a result of last January's SG&A optimization program. So halfway more to go there. You are familiar as well with our manufacturing and procurement work streams. That is, again, our Green Belts continuing to do what they have done very successfully. Now we are putting administrative personnel through Green Belt training too, to find more savings in the SG&A area. Lastly, on this page, as you saw in MAP 2025, we do have a commercial excellence work stream, and this will help us on margins as we utilize smarter pricing to realize the value of what we sell. This will be my last slide.
This talks about our capital allocation, and we have a lot of flexibility thanks to our balance sheet, which is the best it has ever been in my 31 years at RPM. Being investment grade on the left is very important to us. We, as you know, do acquisitions in all economic cycles, and as a result, we need capital markets open in both good times and bad times. As a result, maintaining that IG rating is very important to us. In terms of organic growth, we will be funding through not just CapEx, but through our SG&A expense, our highest growth, highest margin businesses. One thing I will say on CapEx going forward, we have done a lot of the heavy lifting on infrastructure in the previous two MAP programs. We went from 75 instances of ERPs down to one for each segment.
We are mostly the way through that, very little left to do. In terms of infrastructure, we have built a lot of infrastructure internationally for manufacturing as well as distribution centers. A lot of these are shared facilities, and Dave will talk more about our collaborative approach to international markets. In regards to dividends, we do like to reward our shareholders through steady dividend increases because our cash flow is very steady, being in maintenance with our strategic balanced business model. I would also comment that since we have launched the last MAP program four years ago, our dividend has gone up from $0.42 per share per quarter up to $0.57 with last month's dividend increase. Looking at strategic M&A, we see lots of room to grow. RPM has multiple platforms. We are in construction chemicals and waterproofing. We are in cleaning. We are in paint and coatings.
There are lots of acquisition opportunities and lots of ways for us to grow. We always say with discipline, we are not known for paying the crazy multiples that make the front page of the business section. We are very disciplined in what we pay, so with normalizing multiples out there, that is a good thing for us as we look ahead. In regards to share repurchase, we have bought back almost $1 billion of stock since launching our original MAP program in 2018, and we will continue to do that when the time is right. So far through the second quarter, we have purchased $75 million of stock to date in Q2. That is the end of my portion. I will turn it back over to Frank.
Thank you, Rusty. I am pleased to introduce our next speaker, Dave Dennsteadt, RPM's President and Chief Operating Officer. Dave joined RPM in 1995 out of school. He was an engineer, worked in Stonhard and Tech Service, spent time in the Middle East, time in Europe, for a brief period of time left RPM and Stonhard to work in a PE-owned construction business, rejoined Stonhard, and from 2018 to 2025, was the President of our Performance Coatings Group. Over that timeframe, revenues grew by more than 30%, adjusted EBIT of the PCG doubled, and EBIT margin expanded by over 500 basis points. Along the way, Dave built our shared service center in Mexico and then in India, both of which now serve the entirety of RPM. He oversaw the introduction of our MAP program in Europe and created the platform structure that we now use in emerging markets.
Dave is here to discuss the details of our MAP 2030 program. Please welcome Dave Dennsteadt, RPM's President and Chief Operating Officer.
Thanks, Frank. Thanks very much, Frank. We switch mics okay? We're good? All right. Thanks for giving me a chance to speak. It's an honor. I'm excited to speak to you about MAP 2030. That was a great introduction. MAP 3.0 is the term Frank's been using for a couple quarters now about MAP 2030. We're going to call it MAP 2030. Before I get into it, I just want to acknowledge first and foremost that I am particularly proud that we're doing this here. Stonhard was where I grew up, so I did start here, as Frank alluded to. For those that are joining later, you'll hear from Greg Michael. Greg and I actually started together in the same year, and he was my successor when I went to corporate.
We did not plan this, for those that are physically here, but two of the three tour guides you have actually interviewed me when I started. The third one, Tim, was probably playing with LEGOs. It's a testament to the culture, sincerely, the culture. If you went to other locations, other business units, other segments, we try to replicate that to keep a very close connection with the culture of the brands, but still align around RPM. I'm very proud and honored to be talking to you today about that. As it relates to the MAP 2030 program, I am convinced there are four items that are going to drive our success or challenges in MAP 2030. When I think about this, I want to humbly start by, I do not know the impact of the midterm elections. I don't know where FX rates are going.
I don't know when housing's coming back. I do know what we have in our control. At RPM, we've done a lot of things right, as Rusty alluded to in the program earlier. I'm going to build on Frank's comments about where we're going next. I'll spend about 30 minutes on this, and I'll really walk you through these four items line by line to make sure you understand how we're approaching and how we're thinking about it to be successful. Of course, if I'm going to talk about these things, we're going to dedicate a lot to growth. Really, one and two, you could say, are about growth. First and foremost, we do have lots of market share gains we can still make. We intend to outgrow our peers. We intend to outgrow our markets. We're going to drive more through our direct channels.
We're going to drive more through our commercial partners. We're going to continue to be different. One of the things I'm going to spend time on today is on R&D and the large investments we're making to make sure we're innovating, even on these rougher cycles that Frank alluded to. We're going to get better at saying no. Rusty touched on this a little bit. I'm going to dive a little bit deeper on this point. We are not good at everything. We are, as the analysts in this room know and those listening, relatively diversified. We're going to really focus on what is core and what brings us the right return in this next cycle and think through that a little bit more. I'll expand on that a little bit more. Then part of that goes to global expansion, number two.
We want to talk about this. You've heard Frank talk about this on quarterly calls, certainly. We have a proven approach. It's evolved into a methodology on how we do work abroad. I'll help you understand it. Not only will you understand the opportunity, but the fantastic optionality to it. I will explain this in greater detail. It's an opportunity with huge optionality. We'll talk about that more. As Rusty suggested, we need to talk about leverage. We have to leverage our SG&A in a new and different way. We've been successful gross margins, we've improved our working capital, our cash flows. It funds a great deal of the big acquisitions we've been able to do and our large investments to grow.
At the same time, we need to leverage and take advantage of our size in a way we have not at the SG&A line through these first two cycles. That's going to be a key part of our growth, and building on these cross-brand systems that can go through the brands and segments, and not necessarily within the brands or segments. I'll talk about that more, and we want to take advantage of that. Lastly, I'm going to finish on culture. Why is always the most interesting question. We're here for a reason. You will sense that as you walk around these buildings and you meet the people. I've dedicated my closing to talk about the people, the leaders, the collaboration, the culture of entrepreneurship, but also perhaps, as we've grown bigger, the ownership, the ownership that we have within our business units and our segments.
We're very excited to talk to you about that. Let me start by putting everything on a page, and this will be one, if we're doing it right, this is a slide you'll see from time to time as we go through it, through MAP 2030. This cycle, we are going to transform. I'm not going to go through every single bullet point here. I'll highlight a couple quick points so I can keep pace and move forward. We're going to transform RPM. I don't mean change everything like we're broken. When it comes to our MAP program, they've really become part of our DNA these last two cycles. These multi-year programs are very meaningful to how we motivate people, compensate people, and think about what's changing holistically. At the same time, as Rusty, I'm going to make this more simple.
If we have three basic buckets of growth, efficiency, and amplified connectivity, I will explain amplified connectivity in a moment, but we cannot lose what we got pretty good at. We have been, on average, versus many peers, organically able to grow at or above the pace of the market in our peers. We have, as Rusty explained, improved our efficiency. If we lose these two things in the MAP 2030, they are table stakes. We cannot go backwards there. At the same time, we want to give ourselves aggressive goals. 10, 20, 30 is how we are approaching this. We want to improve our return on invested capital, want to improve our profitability, continue this continuous improvement, strategic growth. By the time I am done today, you will also understand a little bit more how we are creating value for all.
Frank spent some time on this, so I do not need to repeat it, but whether it is a shareholder, a customer, or an associate, we really want to make sure that we are delivering on all three constituents. Lastly, and you will understand this by the time we finish this presentation, we are going to talk about amplifying connectivity. What does it mean? The short version of it is, we are going to piece together our data, and we are going to take advantage of our size in a way that we have not in some areas, and we have been building up to this moment, which I will talk to in a moment. When you think about MAP 2030 and our core brands, to start with question one, how we are going to grow, I want to look backwards just for two slides, and then everything else I present will be about the future.
We are building on previous MAP successes here. I will not go through these bullet points. They are not financial in nature. They are actual objective, unsung components of what we have done successfully in our MAP program. They give us the ability to execute MAP 2030. This is less practical than it is cultural in nature. We have had some really hard learnings through these cycles. Rusty did a nice job of summarizing it. We have had great cash flows and improved and been able to invest in larger ways. At the same time, MAP 2030 is not more of the same. We have been building up to this moment culturally and practically. We are in a position over this next four-year cycle to deliver these things and foundationally to leverage our structure. I am going to talk more about efficiency in plants. That is a continuous improvement part of it.
We are not going to have as many plant closures. We are going to improve the plants we have. We have a long tail of some complex work that we are still doing. On average, this is more about improving our plants and less about further consolidation of them while we leverage our business as we go forward. When it comes to the EBITDA as my final backward-looking slide, we cannot lose our momentum. We had a watch out. We saw profitability for the first time in quite a few years. For those paying attention, actually did not improve. Our profitability did not increase in FY 2026. We have to get back to that and make sure we maintain our momentum. We have had record sales. For a host of reasons, our profitability did not increase, but we cannot get complacent in the way we approach this.
Our three segments have to win, and RPM consolidated. This is our serviceable obtainable market. We are roughly a tenth of the size of what we could be. We slice this pretty thinly. These are not markets we are not in geographically, nor products we do not supply. We literally, in what we are core in today, are about one-tenth the size of what we could be. RPM is small. The opportunity is big. We think we are in a unique position to grow in our markets, in what we are core in, particularly outside the U.S., while we continue to take advantage of our market position here in America, Canada, and Mexico. At the same time, as I said earlier, we are not good at everything, so we are going to address some of this in this next cycle. I will go further about that.
As it relates to the macro cycle, the only point I need to know, since there are plenty of analysts that have better information on the macro data than we do, our assumptions here are for a relatively tough growth environment. If conditions improve materially, we will do better. So, we are going to go earn it. This is how we are approaching it. We are going to approach the market aggressively and outgrow it. Tough conditions, you are aware, on consumer, on housing, et cetera, Europe particularly, but there are also pockets in this environment where it is really divergent. FY 2027 is not doing us any big favors, but we are going to continue to approach these things methodically, as we have in prior MAPs, to be successful, and we are going to adapt and invest accordingly.
That is one of RPM's greatest strengths, is we can pivot to what has been, I think we can agree, a very volatile, fast-moving environment. At the same time, we have to be different. RPM has a unique, balanced, resilient portfolio, and we want to maintain that. Whether that is consumer versus industrial, whether it is products versus services, whether it is geographic or vertical markets. Frank touched on this earlier, but we are well-positioned in both maintenance and new construction. In tough times, you will do more maintenance. In good times, you tend to build new. We have products and services for both sides of that equation, which helps us invest in both areas, and each segment is unique. We strive to be different. Let me spend a moment on each one of those segments so you better understand who we are. So, first and foremost, we have Tremco CPG.
It is our largest segment. They have 16 leading technology platforms. We have the most technical people on the streets in our industry, and they are taking unique components of that 16 different platforms to solve unique problems and be of value to the customers. Then there is the Performance Coatings Group. Stonhard sits within that. Generally speaking, they play at the top part of the triangle. That is to say, the harder the environment, the more difficult the environment, the more it is critical that you do not need to come back and do the work. That is where we want to play. That could be anything from a semiconductor plant, a data center that has to be built quickly, or a medical operational office environment. Then there is the consumer.
Consumer, we need to take our trusted, great brands and continue to build them into more of a powerhouse for the future, driving more and more demand through our consumer channels and our direct channels with strong loyalty. I will talk a little bit more about brands and the consumer brands in the coming slides. Let me give you some quick examples, because we have solutions that our customers need. Let me go back here for a minute to make one final point. On the blue bar across the bottom, these are things we all share. You will find a theme to these coming slides of our examples, whether that is best in class, delivering technical solutions, our shared assets, which we are taking better advantage of. All three of these segments are doing this, whether it is production or more admin functions, and we are expanding upon it.
At the same time, we do, on average, have more feet on the streets. We have to make sure they have the best tools to differentiate in the marketplace. I will talk more about that. Whether it is a home project that you are working on or it is a complicated construction production facility, high-rise building, whatever it might be, saving time and labor drives value, and we are very, very committed to innovating in this regard. Lastly, perhaps the most important role RPM can play in the environment is making things last longer. Whether that is new construction or maintenance, we are very proud to be able to take existing structures and new structures and make sure they last as long as possible with quality products. Let me give you some quick examples. It is only a few here.
Whether you are in your home or the architect with a complex project or that critical production area that you need to make sure is done perfectly, again, it could be semiconductors, data centers, energy space, residential DIYers, pro shop, this is all constructions and coatings related. These things overlap and merge in different ways depending on the markets we are in, and we have a solution to that. We are continuing to do more investments in new products and acquisitions. Time and durability are very important factors for our customer base, so here are three great examples. Most recently, you have heard about our German acquisition for Kalzip. It really is a door opener for architects with very unique metal-based solutions to roofing. We also have Carboline SBS products, very specialized.
If you are in LNG or oil and gas, petrochem, even windmills, you need to know that your products are being put on in rough environments quickly. You cannot control temperature, cannot control rain. You have to get them on quickly and well and make sure they are performing. We provide those products. Then consumer, particularly in this environment where, let us be honest, housing is relatively rough, consumer spending not fantastic in the space we are in right now. More important than ever is innovation. When it comes to innovation, as a great example, here is DAP's product, patent pending foam, easy cleanup and quick cure. Helping the contractor, helping the DIYer, less mess and faster work. Just three great examples of what we are doing. At the same time, on the project side, complexity is our friend. We appreciate really complexity. We have deeper technical expertise.
Our success has been heavily in the PCG and CPG side. On the system side of things, we're doubling down our efforts as it relates to investments in our people and in our acquisitions in that way. Although data centers labor was at 1%-2%, you can see here a wide variety of applications, and we're continuing to drive these new solutions, whether they're FRP or wall systems or flooring systems, fireproofing, or admix and fibers. We are driving these through combinations of technical unique solutions that really can drive. At the same time, we are stealing with pride from our consumer friends because we are noticing, architectural and engineering-wise, there is more influence digitally than there used to be to all of us, and our consumer guys are further ahead on how to handle the digital customer and influence.
When it comes to architects and engineers, we're able to spread those learnings into the other parts of our segment, which is really exciting to help us make progress in some of these complex areas. These key drivers really define our strategic growth. Rusty touched on them, so I won't spend a lot of time diving deeper. None of these should surprise you. We are spending more attention on our investment. We are leveraging our brands in new ways all the time. I'll expand on this in a moment. We're going to leverage our acquisitions in new ways and get after the opportunities in larger ways. We're going to expand our global teams relatively largely. At the same time, product and business reviews are going to take place.
If you're looking for something unique on this page, I'll get there as it relates to divestitures, but we're tracking our growth. One thing you have to appreciate, not unique to us, but something that's particularly challenging, is a lot of our growth cycles for adoption require time. So, we are getting better at tracking our biggest and best growth initiatives that require the most time, care, and investment so that we can track them over time, and in a changing environment, we can invest more or slow down accordingly. At RPM, we generally do much better on things we measure, and we'll be tracking this particularly on our growth items over time. At the same time, you'll see on this slide, if you look closely, a word you don't typically see at RPM, which is divestment.
At the margin, there is going to be both products, SKUs, and business rationalization for two reasons. One is they're not core to where we're going over this next four-year cycle, or two is, it can be and/or two is they don't meet our criteria financially in a mature state. These are tough decisions. These are at the margin. It's not going to represent an enormous part of our portfolio, but we want to acknowledge that we're going on this. When it comes to examples of this, I'm proud to say at PCG, we did this quite a bit before I moved over to the corporate side, and we're very proud of the way we handled it. We divested several businesses of size, and almost all those employees kept their jobs. Very little cash impact to RPM.
And by the way, in one or two cases, they are still customers to us today. They did not meet our financial criteria, they were not core to our future strategy, and we were able to do this in a constructive way. We will see some more of that over time, always putting our three constituencies in place. Then on R&D, we need more cross-collaboration, and that is improving, and we are measuring how we are doing on the R&D side. We are not centralizing our R&D teams. You can imagine with our unique portfolio of products and solutions, we need to have very deep industry bench. At the same time, we are coordinating better, and we are picking the biggest projects that cross through the business units and segments, and those areas include obviously innovation, but also global sourcing work. We were talking about this at lunch earlier.
We have a great opportunity to bring in new raw materials from new suppliers, approve them, and do the vetting in some of our international markets to help drive procurement and efficiency. We are also working on our resilience in a post-COVID world. We are being careful with the tariffs and everything else. This is something we can do across collaboration with our great organizations as we become more global and are able to expand our supply chain, and we share best practices. These are just three examples of large investments, both domestic and international, that we are doubling down on to make sure we are at the forefront of this. Let us talk a little bit more about international expansion. The first thing you need to know about global expansion is, at RPM, there is no longer any small and far away.
I will humbly admit, as someone who has spent almost my entire career in some part of RPM, we got this right by first experimenting with every wrong way to do it, okay? We tend to buy companies and leave them alone. That enhances their entrepreneurial approach, but it does require deeper coordination to get after what could be very obvious things, such as procurement, or more complex things of IT and other administration. So, we have really figured that out. At the same time, these things are proven, and they also help us grow much faster. If you had looked at this chart only a few years ago, that 8% would have been 5%. I will explain how it works, but for those that are physically here, I think we are going to wrap up your tour, if I understand, with umbrellas.
That is our symbol of what the platform organization within RPM does. You have to protect the brands, especially for the rainy days, to make sure you are investing long-term to be consistent with our global direction that we are going, but still modify for your local markets. The CAGRs of the organic growth of these businesses, now that we have got this in place, have really been impressive, and Frank Sullivan talked a little bit more about that. I spent a lot of my time overseas, as Frank Sullivan said. Personally, we have to scale and exploit our optionality internationally. That is truly how I see it. We can scale better and exploit our optionality outside the U.S. or North America in general, okay? If your international strategy is complicated, I think it is flawed. We are doing so many things at RPM.
If I cannot explain to you on an elevator ride what we are doing internationally in a way that you believe, I do not think it is going to work very well. It is hard to execute internationally and globally. When you look at this, it is very simple. We are going to scale our existing assets and invest in them. We are going to scale our existing departments, particularly in areas of HR, admin, IT, and distribution, so that we can keep our businesses administratively and production simple, but still service all our core constituencies. This circle on the outside rim, using the common core for all of our international markets, we can change the brands that represent the outside circle. This is a random set of some of our most popular brands.
We can go into a new market in Vietnam, and depending on where the competitors are, what the customer value proposition is, we can move this around and invest in those markets in a way that no one thing is necessary for us to be successful. That is the beauty of RPM, our brands, and our IP. If you look at where we are being successful in the Middle East versus Africa versus India or APAC or even South America, the mix of products, frankly speaking, is very different, and margin profile. We can take that optionality, but with a common core. We have proven that time and time again, and now we are expanding this into a methodology, and there is great We are putting our money where our mouth is.
When it comes to production in India, for example, as it relates to production, all products made under one roof for all three segments. Malaysia, we are doing the same thing. In Belgium, we have taken seven different locations from Northern Europe and are combining them into one distribution center. This is some of the leverage, taking advantage of our side. It is very important that we do this without impacting our culture or screwing up our service levels. So we are doing this very methodically, and we are just building muscle memory to do this in bigger and bigger ways, and we are very excited about this, as we have figured it out. Let us talk about amplified connectivity. If we are going to make progress on the efficiency side, we will continue our efficiency journey, okay?
We do not have enough time today to have additional presenters, but Andy Polanco is here from us in the back. Some of you should take a moment to meet him. Tim Kinser has really been with us through these two MAP programs and helped, in combination with our business units and segments, center-led wise, really drive some of the great success we have had in procurement, consolidation, efficiencies. Andy is here to take it to the next level. He is with Consumer and DAP originally, so we stole from one of our segments, one of our best people. Frankly speaking, DAP is one of our most efficient operators within the business, so we are taking best practices as well, and we are lucky to have him. On the production side, Andy and team, in combination with the business units, are going to be expanding what MS168, which is our foundational efficiency program, means.
I'm going to talk more about Green Belt shortly. We're going to share best practices, plant efficiency, and safety to make sure we're making progress on all these fronts. At the same time, purchasing, we're going to do acquisitions with faster purchasing integration. We're going to do this right up front, faster with future deals. We're also getting after stuff that's large and more complicated now, indirect spend being an obvious one. We haven't really tackled indirect spend in a big way till this MAP 2030 initiative. Why? Even though it's large, it is more complicated than just raw materials, and our teams are getting after it, and it's very exciting to see.
At the same time, Frank and Rusty touched on this, when it comes to SG&A, we are going to leverage our businesses better for better return on invested capital, process coordination, whether that's IT, admin, HR, so we can take advantage of our size without impacting customers, and we need to rewire our data. I'm going to give you one or two examples of how we're using our data differently, and wait for it, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence. Can't get out of this meeting without talking about artificial intelligence a little bit, and I'll explain how we're thinking about it a little bit more clearly. So, when you ask yourself and you leave this room or you think, "Oh, what did Dave say about MAP 2030?" This slide hasn't changed too much at the bottom. We've gone from four segments to three segments.
We've grown record results every year for quite some time, as you've heard. But those in white letters, blue box at the bottom, the power of RPM hasn't changed too much. MAP 2030, we are going to be able to answer to our three constituents what center-led administration means. That's really where we're going with MAP 2030 in a nutshell. That means a whole lot of things, but most importantly, it means simplify and standardize so we can leverage our growth with our teams, with taking a better advantage of our size. This cannot impact the customers. It requires a ton of coordination, and I used the word at the very beginning of ownership. Ownership is very critical to this process, and we think we can get there at this point. Our tech stack will be narrowing.
I'm going to show you a couple examples how we're using our data, but whether it's R&D, which I talked about, or using our data differently, we're going to invest in these programs, simplify our tech stack and processes, but making sure that our people in the field have absolutely everything they need on the cutting edge. While we do this, our associates are challenging how we do our work, and we love it, okay? You heard Rusty mention Green Belts. One of the things we're very proud of here is we have over 600 trained Green Belts today.
As you would suspect, this started for sure as an operational initiative to get our production plants thinking about how we can optimize, but now we have people from HR, accounting, marketing, commercial leadership going through these Green Belt programs, finding projects to help us become a better company and expand out further. We are very proud about where this Green Belt program's going, and it's coming from within, and it's culturally a big part of where we're going next. At the same time, I'm very proud of what we've developed with these service centers in India and Mexico. I will tell you, some of the people in the back room will remember this, I signed that first lease personally.
I went down to Mexico in 2018, and I signed a lease for a 50-person office, and I really stressed about how quickly were we going to be able to fill a 50-person office to start a GSC. There are 750 employees associated with our Mexico and India operations today. By the way, don't care about quantity. It's about the quality of the services and the quality of the people that we get within these centers that helps drive our growth. But they're helping us expand our support programs so we can spend more time, money, and investment on our growth initiatives to differentiate in the market. Very exciting stuff. Okay. AI. How do we extract value? Okay. Do not worry, I am not going to convince you that we are the next hyperscaler. This is RPM, and we sell stuff that people use, okay?
But at the same time, with AI, we can't just throw it in the middle of the room and see what happens. We were very proud that we had adoption to get things started, but as we track it closer, AI does have a role in what we do. What we're challenging really is how are we using our data? By the way, we have pockets, and I'll give you an example in a moment. We have pockets of strength with our data, and we're starting to see more and more examples of this starting to come out, particularly where we have our own data. Since we have the most feet on the streets, if we can do this in a way and invest in our future and augment accordingly with the best tools, we can do really, really well. So we're pretty excited about this.
Let me give you one quick example. Okay, if we can take Sorry, let me go back here. If we can take our teams to go from flip phone to tablet, which we've done successfully and helped us organically grow faster than many of our other peers, if we can then take that and move us into this AI-augmented world where with less time, we can provide higher services and service more customers in the field. By the way, it's a retention tool. If you have the best stuff in the industry, these are not easy industries to work in, you can keep great people, okay? So, when it comes to AI, we are spending quite a bit of money on our tech stack and our new tools. I'm going to give a very simple example.
I won't go through all these different components, but we have, as some of you might know, a relatively large position in roofing, particularly in North America. We have great people, technical and commercial people out there every day on roofs, assessing particularly maintenance projects. What else is the other thing on every single roof? HVAC units, right? It will not surprise you to learn that our highly technical roofing commercial and technical teams are not HVAC experts. What happens with these projects when you have an HVAC that breaks down, like your home, same thing for the landlord of the big building or the hospital, that's pretty old, you got to replace it.
What if somebody could come in that's already someone you trust on top of your roof and say, "For a fifth or possibly a third of the price, I'll give you a seven-year warranty on the existing unit. Let me fix it for you, and you'll be up and running very quickly." Reducing the CapEx, reducing the downtime, and getting it done. Great idea, but again, our people are not experts in HVAC. We started to acquire some small pieces into the CPG business, if you paid attention closely, Pure Air being an example. What we learned is it takes a really long time to assess the projects on how we can help them and what their actual issues are.
Then we trained some of our people how to take the right pictures on the roof deck, in the maintenance shop, of the duct and associated blower units, and take the right pictures, ask the right questions, dump it into a formula that goes into a complex AI machine, and instead of waiting four to six months for us to get the right validation, within 36 hours now, we're providing quotes for long-term answers and solutions with warranties for customers that want to consider us. We're doing this before their HVAC breaks down, so guess who gets the call when it breaks? This is just starting to form, and without AI, we could not do this. We'd have to build an entire new organization to do this while we're up on those roofs.
We're complementing, for sure you need technical experts, but it's a great idea and great approach that I give compliments to the Tremco team for what they're doing on that front, particularly the Pure Air staff. Really exciting to see. At the same time, we have to invest in our people. We are attracting and retaining as best we can in a really difficult environment. We also need these people to collaborate. We're actually trying to get after quite a few challenges at once here. First and foremost, we are growing on average, as Rusty alluded to. With growth, you generally need more talented people, so we're investing in our leadership programs. Secondly, we need them to collaborate. Cross-functional collaboration is a critical part of amplifying connectivity. You need a forum and programs to cross these over. Frank has been building these for decades.
We're just taking them to the next level. Then, frankly speaking, particularly in our industry, not unique to us, demographically, a whole lot of really senior good people are going to start playing more golf. We got to be ready. We got to be ready for the next generation, and these leadership programs are helping us. By the way, we're taking the best programs, whether they're business units or segment programs or corporate programs, and we're now doing them outside the U.S. and other parts of our global market to make sure that our teams are expanding that same content. I said in the beginning I wanted to finish with culture. Our culture is our strategic advantage. Our culture is our biggest strategic advantage. Whether that's entrepreneurship or ownership, it's a key part of who we are, and these brands really matter.
We have to create an environment and keep an environment, despite our size and complexity, where associates are empowered to make a difference. That's really critical to where we go, and we do that through maintaining our RPM values and a close subset of segments and business units around that. Our customers don't know RPM. Do not confuse your customers. Our customers know these brands, including where we are right now at Stonhard. They don't think about RPM, and we're okay with that. Our people are closer to the front lines, as I just gave you an example of. If we can give them the best data and the best tools, we can differentiate for the next generation.
Over time, what this has meant to our commercial proposition is we are relatively large in niches and relatively niche in large spaces, and we're pretty happy with the way that works out. Again, we're still relatively small in what we do, so it's pretty exciting to see where we can go next. Brand loyalty really matters. Customers get a vote. You can imagine some parts of our businesses are struggling with demand. What we're seeing under the hood, frankly, is they're not trading down. They might be buying the 1 gallon instead of the 5 gallon, or just a small pint instead of the 1 gallon, or the small caulk tube versus the big drum. They're getting by, but they're staying loyal to our brands because our brands are one of our systematic advantages. We got to keep that close relationship with our customers.
I hope that this brief review of what MAP 2030 resonates with you. These are our four foundational priorities that if we're doing this right, in future quarters and years, we will refer back to. I sincerely believe that this will be our most successful MAP program ever as we get to MAP 2030, and we have everything we need. We have everyone we need. That is to say, we have both the talent and we have the tools to get this done. I am honored to play the role I get to play in this aggressive pursuit of growth and leverage. I am excited to support the teams, 17,500 associates around the world, some of which listening to this right now, so that we can continue to make progress. I finish with this slide. For those in the room, very similar picture on the side wall here.
As I said at the very beginning, the why is very important. It's a quote, but it's also a legacy, and on hard times, we've leaned on this pretty heavy. We need more growth. We need more coordination. We need strong ownership, and not all these things happen overnight. Frank started with, "We have to create value for all," and we really feel like we're going to be able to do that in a more succinct way in this MAP 2030, associates, shareholders, and customers. Thanks to the RPM associates, both in this room and listening to this call, for dedicating time. Thanks for everybody in this room and those listening for being a part of this to learn more about where we're going next in our multi-year program, and we really appreciate the time and interest in RPM. We look forward to answering your questions.
Thank you, Dave. If anyone has any questions, please raise your hand. I'll bring around the microphone, and then also, if you don't mind stating your name when you ask your question. All right?
Thank you for that. It's Matthew DeYoe from Bank of America. There we go. Wanted to talk a little bit about some of the top line assumptions laid out. 2% volume growth almost seems a little light for a company that's managed as well as you have in as bad of an environment as we've had for the last year and a half. Conversely, I'd say 2% price is almost kind of a curious assumption for a company that historically doesn't have price beyond raw material push. I wanted to break down a little bit where you feel you're conservative, where you might not.
I know you said there's not much actual organic, or how should I say, macro support in that number, and that's a great base assumption, but I wanted to give you a little bit more time to kind of expand upon that.
Sure. Thank you. I will address that at a high level, and then if Rusty or Dave have anything to add, they can. I think first in the 2% price, we are certainly getting price in FY 2027, and we expect that to moderate as the follow-on years of MAP 2030 continue. I think we will see some moderation of inflation, but in the meantime, we are getting price, probably 2%-3% on average. Not quite enough to maintain our profitability, but as we have in every other cycle, as we cycle out of this rising raw material environment and rising SG&A environment, we tend to hang onto price, and we will pick up that lost margin. In the last inflation cycle, we actually added to gross profit margin, and I think through this cycle, we will do the same.
Concurrently, on the unit volume question, I appreciate that, you should expect to see better unit volume than that 2% over the following years of MAP 2030. But here we are again in FY 2027 with higher raw material costs, higher price, challenging housing markets, and as we speak, it is a really tough organic growth environment. But I do think, as we get to the follow-on years, you are going to see a more consistent delivery of unit volume growth of RPM that is more in line with the 3% or 4% we have been able to deliver historically. Acquisition-wise, I will just reiterate what Rusty said. PE is not in the market right now. We have not seen the full capitulation of assets being sold at a reduced value. In fact, most of the PE sales that are happening today are from PE firm to PE firm.
I think some of that is protecting the perception of the value of what they are holding. Frustratingly, for about five or seven years, we would lose M&A transactions, not to a strategic, but to a PE firm that was at two or three margin, or two or three points, multiple points higher than what the market would pay. We have seen M&A values come down by two or three multiple points. I would be hopeful that M&A will be a bigger part of this MAP program than it has been. The last comment is, I do not think that 6% CAGR is very conservative in light of what we are facing today in FY 2027.
On the other hand, I am very cognizant of the fact in my leadership of two MAP programs, the one absolute goal that we put out there that we did not hit was our revenue numbers, and we intend to hit the revenue numbers in this one.
Hi. Patrick Cunningham with Citi. How should we think of the build versus buy decision specifically in some of the higher growth international markets? It seems like you have some pretty compelling examples of both over the past decade or so. Is this a function of how difficult it is to penetrate some of your brands into these markets versus where have you maybe seen success doing that?
I will talk about high-level strategy and then turn it over to Dave. Five years ago, we did an analysis, maybe six now, with our board of our M&A activity, and we are pretty good at M&A. Our performance and track record, I think, is better than average. The one category that we saw as consistently failing were these small acquisitions in developing world. We looked over 20 years, and what happened is, very strategically, we encouraged our businesses to find a small acquisition in the developing world and low risk, invest in it, and grow from there. What we ended up with was just a bunch of small operations in Indonesia, in the Middle East, in India. When our markets were booming, all of our time and attention was focused on our core North American and European markets.
When we introduced our MAP programs, we focused on our largest plants and our operations. Basically, we were sending the message to our small operations in the developing world that we do not care about you. Over time, we got a message back from those small operations. It was essentially, "We don't care about you either." I find over time, if you can boil down business problems to human nature, it will help you get to the root cause. The one exception was a Stonhard and a PCG operation in South Africa. It was a Carboline licensee we acquired 20+ years ago. It was $8 million. Organically, it is $50 million today. A guy named Grant Boonsar and his team did a fabulous job. Great performance, good control environment, good compliance.
Dave Dennsteadt, as President of PCG, and Paul Hoogenboom, as President of our Construction Products Group, got together and said, "How about if we use this platform approach in the Middle East, Africa, India, Southeast Asia?" We have just extended that to South America. What we have seen in the last three years is EBIT margins that have gone from single digit to double digit, organic growth in the mid-teens, most recently actually 23% growth. That is a great lesson of an intentional strategy that did not work, and better late than never, a strategy adjustment that, for the time being, is working really well. I think Dave can add some more clarity on your question specifically about build versus buy.
We are not big fans of building, mostly because the time, and it also is an upfront to a customer base that adoption is already challenged, unless it is so special and different. Sometimes what is different here in the U.S. is not necessarily what is important in other markets, right? What we got better at, if you think about the good, better, best, right? Sometimes we have the best here, but we can buy good and then offer, as a part of their portfolio, the better or the best. Sometimes it is they have already got better or best, and we are just sharing IP, and there is no recognition of the brand that is very strong here in the U.S. or Canada or Mexico, but has no relevance to Spain or Indonesia or Malaysia. What we figured out is brands really matter, but so does IP.
Instead of trying to re-educate a customer base on what you think is great, adapt to their needs and then take advantage of the mothership learnings, whether those are formulas, marketing, and things of this nature. This has worked phenomenally well. We were talking at lunch today, there is a great example within Stonhard. We have a great business called Kemtile in the U.K. Hopefully some of those guys are listening. I will humbly admit, as the guy who ran Europe for a long time for Stonhard back in the day, U.K. was a zigzag. We never really had consistent, fantastic growth. It was profitable, it was good. When we finally acquired Kemtile and made it part of Stonhard, we gained so much opportunity and share. What did we do to this day? It is called Kemtile Division of Stonhard. It is not Stonhard.
It is Stonhard, but the customer knows, in many cases, unless you are the multinationals and the big guys, you know that local, fantastic U.K.-based company. That really made a difference. That is humility, learning curve, and what is IP versus what is brand.
I just want to reemphasize one thing Dave said in his opening remarks on optionality. Under the old strategy in the developing world, if Carboline acquired a business in Indonesia or Stonhard acquired a business in the Middle East, you better believe that the focus was on growing Carboline, growing Stonhard. One of the beauties of what we did in South Africa, and now we are doing everywhere, is the local team had the benefit of all the different RPM brands and technology, and they could decide what the market wanted. There was no They were the deciders of whether Fibergrate is going to work there and if there is demand, or Stonhard or Carboline.
We have taken that model across the southern hemisphere, so it will be local teams that will be driving the RPM technology or RPM brands based on the local needs and opportunity, which gives us that optionality and really lets us bring the right technology and the right brands that that market needs, not just the product or the brands of the mothership in the U.S. that owned that business. That is also going to help us drive growth. It is a model that is working. Organic growth there has been in the mid-teens for the last couple of years, so it is very exciting. It is telling us that it is working.
Thank you. Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. Wanted to come back to the portfolio activity that you have baked into MAP 2030. Frank, if I look back at the last five years or 10 years, I think of RPM as garnering 1% or 2% growth from net acquisitions per year. Is that the right glide path to think about moving forward, given the quality of your balance sheet today and the multiples that you talked about coming down in the private market, or might it be higher? Then a second piece of it, sounds like you have got your eyes on more divestitures than maybe you normally have, although you have done some. Is there any way to dimensionalize that?
The spirit of these two questions is I am trying to get at the organic rate of growth that you think is kind of the center of gravity for the next several years.
Sure. The organic growth rate is most definitely accentuated by our acquisition activity. I do think as we get through 2027 and beyond, you will see a 3% or 4% organic growth rate, typically market share gains, new product introductions, and very importantly, the follow-on years of product line acquisitions. A big chunk of We have analysts that follow us that say, "As you have gotten bigger, you have to do bigger deals." I love the small deals we do because we do them at two or three multiple turns lower. They have better synergies, and none of them are done principally on an IRR basis, even though the IRRs are high. They are done on what can we do with growth. When they work best, within three to five years, that top line is doubled or tripled. We will keep looking for those opportunities.
On the divestiture piece, without getting into too many of the details, it is work we are doing internally, and our associates involved deserve the first knowledge. Probably, over the cycle of the MAP 2030 program, it will be about $200 million to, at most, $300 million of revenues.
Sorry, Frank Mitsch from Fermium Research. I want to come back to the growth vector, the three growth vectors you outlined, initially international growth, M&A growth, and then you also said preferentially investing in high-growth businesses. That is mom and apple pie. I would be stunned if you have not been doing that over the past 25 years. But are you signaling, A, is that true, or B, are you signaling that you are going to ramp up your CapEx, and how do we think about that third piece of growth for RPM?
I will let Dave add some color. We have talked a lot about international. I think we have a strategy that will allow us to grow organically, particularly in the southern hemisphere developing world, in ways that we have not. We are very excited about that. We got plenty of capacity. We have actually been through a period of time where we have invested significantly in CapEx, so I see that evening out, particularly given the challenging environment. But from a big picture, the three categories, I think Dave can add some.
Great question. First, closing plants and consolidating plants has never come natural to RPM. Remember our heritage, our history with Tim Kinser's help with the business units, we have gotten really good at getting better at that. What comes next after that is being very intentional, to your point, it is strategically obvious, but we are going to do a better job of where we are spending our money and where we are not in this next phase. What we have learned is there are parts of our businesses that we are under-investing despite their great return on invested capital, whether it is domestically or internationally, and there are parts where, frankly, we are going to have to pull back a little bit in order to get the right value proposition to shareholders in a larger way. These are things that are obvious.
I'm not saying we were terrible at them, but we are being more intentional. I meant what I said earlier. RPM does really well on things we pay attention to and measure. When it comes specifically to growth projects and their return, as opposed to all the other strategic things we consider important, including the P&L overall, not as much discipline as you saw and Rusty alluded to on the gross margin side, where we had 4,600 projects. We are really taking from what we did really well in a category of business and applying it to be better stewards of capital in the future in these regards.
Hi, Lucas Beaumont, UBS. I just wanted to ask you about the difference between your growth sort of expectations for the international growth versus North America. Particularly on the top line, sort of 6% algo. I don't know, are you including Europe in there as well? It's about a quarter of the sales base that you're looking at differently, and how are you thinking about the variability in the different pieces there? Thanks.
I would say growth-wise, again, we've talked about the developing world plenty. We expect that to continue. Obviously, the most significant, consistently best-growing market globally is U.S. and North America. We're obviously well represented there. In the last couple of years, and I expect this to continue for the next year or two, don't expect to see a lot of growth out of Europe. We are seeing profitability improvement, as we bring our MAP initiatives and administration, consolidation, coordination, into Europe, a couple years behind what we were able to accomplish in North America.
Yeah. It's very important to note that, as I said earlier, we're not necessarily trying to be the big We might desire to be the most desired brand or product. We don't necessarily want to be the largest. And I don't think we'll ever be the most efficient shop out there compared to some of our very worthy competitors, but we'd like to be the most adaptable. Okay? Europe is a very mature, if not declining market, depending on what part we're looking at. It's still the second-largest market after North America, and we see as an enormous opportunity for us, despite the headwinds and challenges. But to the question earlier, we have to make sure we're hitting the right notes in terms of investment. What you've seen more recently is almost like hypocrisy on what I just said.
We've done three or four acquisitions in the last 18 months in Europe. Why? Every single one of those are technology and product platforms for our global strategy. We'll grow the local piece, whether it's Germany, Italy most recently, or what we're doing in Northern Europe, but we're taking those technologies and IPs and brand recognition for projects across a larger platform, through the rest of the globe. That's the exciting stuff we are doing when it's appropriate and it meets our larger global strategy. But in Europe specifically, it's a tough slog and going relatively well.
I'll just add some color to that. Kalzip, Dave talked about, a really high-end specialty aluminum and metal roofing business. Think the Sphere, a lot of these big airports, but also a lot of commercial stuff. What's been driving our chase of something like that for quite a while is the fact that we have $45 million worth of metal roofing sales in the U.S., and it's all purchased for resale. We're going to bring that Kalzip technology and their unique forming capabilities on site into the U.S. to really take advantage of our Tremco roofing sales activity. You should see over time both that $45 million grow meaningfully, and to the extent that we are basic in our production with Kalzip, a much higher margin profile.
That's an acquisition in Europe that was really driven by the opportunity in North America.
Abigail Eberts, Wells Fargo. You made a lot of comments on SG&A, provided some examples. I welcome any additional color examples there. But just wondering what prevented you from achieving these savings in the past, and what gives you confidence that you'll be able to do so in the future? Thanks.
Great question. I think when you look at our past MAP programs, we were very methodical in terms of working capital, very methodical in terms of introducing lean manufacturing disciplines into our factories. What does methodical look like? It looks like, in some cases, weekly meetings, remote, taking outside consultants and ultimately our inside CI people into factories. We would prep what we call the introduction MS168, and then we would go spend a week on the factory floor working on tiered meetings. It is very methodical. Other than the belief that with higher growth, we would leverage SG&A to a better place, we did not have the same methodical approach in SG&A. For MAP 2030, that will be changing. I think Rusty can add some more color to that.
Also, as the guy who was a critical piece of that methodical approach to working capital, which has more than doubled our free cash flow, and it has been very powerful. I would add, we spent almost $600 million between $500 and change for Consumer with The Pink Stuff acquisition and Ready Seal. 18 months later, that is paid off. That is the power of that cash flow benefit. It is the power of the methodical nature of having and how we get at it, and we have to do the same thing in SG&A.
As you look at the last MAP program, we did not have SG&A as a work stream, and it escalated over the MAP 25 period. Like Frank says, we really need to introduce that thinking in the administrative area. There is a lot we can automate. There are pretty simple things. We are training Green Belts now in the administrative category, and we are asking people for their ideas. They have always had those ideas, we just did not ask for it. I think what we find with the Green Belt program is that people get energized when you ask them to apply their own creativity to a project to improve efficiency or whatever else the objective might be. So, we are finding a lot of more energy from these people, and what gets measured gets done. So, that is what we are going to do differently.
Thank you. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. Two questions. Of the $2.3 billion-$2.4 billion of gross sales you are forecasting, how much do you expect to be outside of U.S. and Canada? Of the pricing you have put through here, if we do see raws come back, how much will you retain, and could that help gross margins exceed your target? Thank you.
Historically, we have been able to hang on to most of our price. Almost through every cycle, we have chased price up, and I can tell you this cycle is pretty much the same. We have been able to, so far, pass on dollar for dollar of raw material costs, but in some of our larger businesses, not enough to maintain that margin. As raw material costs cycle down, we will hang on to that price, and you will see the margin recovery there. The only area that that has not been true is in more purchase for resale commodity. Silicones is a good example, where we add value to them, we modify them, but the core silicones come from major chemical companies, and so we tend to chase that price up, but then that price will come down. Everywhere else is value added. Stonhard is a great example.
I will tell you a little bit of a story about what we are getting better at, and it is that whole data story. Stonhard is the only supply and apply model globally in terms of polymer flooring. To a certain extent, we gave away the pricing there. Stonhard utilized outside consultant to help us do some pricing analysis to really discover what segment of the market truly valued our supply and apply model. We were able to take data over the prior year, thankfully this was before inflation, load it into a system, and end up with a tablet-based or mobile-based tool where a sales rep could see the price of the product. It could be a single product in gray that was sold over the prior 12 months. The price disparity shocked us because it was not driven by what you think of as just volume driven.
Different pricing in different products in different markets. Now with that data, our sales force can toggle over and find how much they can push price in a particular project within that successful price band of the prior year and what happens to their commissions. What I think is most interesting about it is, and this is generally correct, statistically it will be wrong, but I think historically, we were bidding on every polymer flooring project we could, including a lot that were price sensitive. We would be successful in two out of five projects. Now we have a sales force that is much more attuned to where that supply and apply value and the unique value we deliver, and we are being successful on three out of five bids at a higher margin.
We need to take that same use of data and that same analytical approach across all of RPM. It is also an area not just in relationship to pricing, but understanding where our value proposition works best and leaning our resources into that. I have to tell you, it is a funny story. If you have been to the RPM campus, we have a corporate headquarters, and then we have a meeting center, a lodge, and we utilize it a lot. If I come in in the morning and have a relatively free morning, and there is a lot of cars in the lodge and I do not know who is there, I will stop in and say hello. People love that. I do that one morning, and it is the Stonhard regional sales force, and we are just introducing this new concept.
I listen to it, outside consultants, some of Greg and his team, and introduced that to the sales force. At a break, I said to the regional manager, "What do you think?" He said, "This is great. You guys are paying a couple million bucks to an outside consultant to tell us to raise our prices, and we're going to lose a lot of business." It's not how it worked out. Because we're utilizing data to better understand where the high performance, typically higher priced, we are not low-priced commodity products anywhere, and we don't want to be, where those are most valued. Who values speed over price? Who values, like a particular, in a renovation in Stonhard, you need to get in on a certain day, a lot of work over the holidays, and you need to get out a week later.
We had one tech plant in China that we lost, this is years ago, over price. We were 15% or 20% higher than the Chinese competitor. Very disappointing. Weeks into that project, we got a desperation call to get a Stonhard team on the site because the plant couldn't operate. This was a chip plant, U.S. chip plant in China. 15% higher flooring project. We need to better understand at Carboline, at Tremco, at Stonhard, where our value proposition wins the most. Sorry for dominating this, but it's really a change that Dave, Greg, Tim, Stonhard, Carboline are driving across RPM that I think's going to really impact the success of MAP 2030.
I was just going to make a macro statement about geography. If you think about acquisitions in two very simple buckets, the answer's going to be, it depends. I will share that we were very close to closing what would have been, not transformational, but the largest transaction in our history recently, and would have changed the percentage outside of North America as a result. Got close. We have high discipline about how we approach things. We were very far along, and I'll say it's on hold, if not stopped entirely. My answer would have been different about where we're going to be outside. There's two approaches.
There is the product lines we absolutely need to do what we want to do globally, and there is these, as we discussed in the platform, these bases for which we can operate to build the rest of our portfolio and whatever makes sense in that market. Those are two very different criteria. A geography where we want to be there and find a good business that does one of the things we do and then build on it, versus the, like the Kalzip, something we're really good at, but we're missing this part of the product line. Who ends up being available and who we acquire will drive that behavior of what percentage is outside North America versus in North America. I personally would be very disappointed if that still looks like 77% or even mid-70s in this next cycle because the opportunity's so big.
I've chosen to think about this almost even more simple. You think about RPM here in the U.S., we're here at 2026. I think about Europe, because of our market share position, our size of our business, we're more like early 2000s. In the emerging markets, we're really in the '90s or the '80s in terms of what we're doing. So if we can take advantage of our size and the pockets we have, find the right partners and companies, that percentage revenue change will drive based on those two ways that we'll be acquiring companies in combination of what's been really strong organic growth.
I think that wraps it up for the Q&A. That will end the webcast. We appreciate, excuse me, everyone who's joined us online. For those who are still here, you're going to hear next from Greg Michael, who's the Performance Coatings Group President, and Frank will introduce him. Thanks to all of those who joined online.