Shows you know we've strategically grown in a decentralized way by product, by end market, by geography. We think that's important because in our world, we can't control underlying metal prices coming from the mills. We pass those through, we pass the price on with a markup to our customers. If we're all in aluminum, we're all in carbon flat rolled, our earnings results we believe would be much more volatile. That's why we try to have this diversification across our products. Also by end markets, because again, we sell into cyclical end markets. We'd like to have a more balanced approach. I'm sure in Q&A we'll talk a little more about some of our major end markets. You'll see then they don't all do the same thing at the same time.
Our product mix generally reflective of the overall metal consumption in the U.S., about a little over half of our sales in carbon products. For us, compared to most other metal service center companies, we're a little lighter on flat rolled products than a lot of the other companies out there. That's kind of been on purpose. That's generally the most competitive part of the market. We are a large player there, but we try to balance it with other products like plate and specialty long products. Also geographically, we're primarily in the U.S. We do have some operations in Canada and Mexico, and then a couple of generally smaller locations outside of the U.S. That's generally a pretty targeted approach where we're going after more specialty products in specialty end markets.
Outside of North America, we're participating in aerospace, semiconductor, and energy because we feel we can get the returns for those types of products in those markets. Some markets are structured differently, and it's hard to hit our profit return metrics there. We talk about, again, with the differentiation of Reliance. As I mentioned, we're a very transactional business. As I said, $15 billion in sales, average order size $3,000 an order. We're doing a lot of transactions. 40% of those orders, customer calls us today, we deliver it tomorrow. We are currently processing, doing some level of value-add processing on 50% of the orders we're shipping, again, including some of those next-day orders. Not every service center company can do that. This kind of goes back to our decentralized structure.
Having assets and people close to our customers allows us to be able to provide this level of service. We think it makes sense. It takes a little more assets in the decentralized model, but as long as we get paid for it, as long as our customers see value in us being able to service them like this. This is where a majority of our customer base are small machine shops, fabricators. This afternoon, they'll come in and call and tell us what they need tomorrow, and we'll have it to them in the morning. They're not as price sensitive as a big OEM who's buying thousands of tons of metal on an order. That's kind of where we focus. This is showing our gross profit margins.
That's really where our people can control their pricing and how much they can earn on an order. This shows how we've stepped up over the years. We used to be about 25%-27% gross profit margin. Currently, our target range is 29%-31%. We've been able to grow that primarily by doing more value-added processing for our customers. What we charge there is not subject to fluctuations in metal prices, so it's a little more sustainable. About 10 years ago, we saw improvements in the technology of the processing equipment we use. We started investing more heavily in that. With that, we used to process about 40% of our orders. As I said, we've grown that to 50% now. With that, we also had to train our salespeople to understand the increased value they provide their customers and to price for that.
This slide talks about smart profitable growth. During that time where we were adding all this processing equipment, we were really messaging to our people to focus on the highest margin orders out there. We intentionally gave up some volume to do that. What we found was we maybe gave up a little too much volume in some of our locations. About two to three years ago, we started this smart profitable growth strategy saying, do not go after every ton, but we are leaving some volume out there that is profitable. It may not be a 40% gross profit margin, but 27% is putting dollars towards your bottom line. During the wonderful pricing environment we had for a few years, it was okay to give up some tons, but we knew prices would come down.
This year, our team has done a great job winning business through their customer service and their relationships. Through 9/30/2025, our tons sold are up 6%, whereas the industry is down 3%. We are out there taking share. That has given us extra profit dollars that are helping cover our expenses. We are getting some leverage on our OpEx there. This chart just shows Reliance's performance on gross profit and EBITDA compared to other metals companies and also the industrial distribution companies. For years, we have consistently outperformed the other metal service center companies. Really, through some of our longtime investors years ago, they said they looked at us more like an industrial distribution company and felt that we deserved a multiple more closer to the industrial distributors.
We've made progress with the margin profile and have seen a bit of an improvement in our multiple, which we think we deserve. Countercyclical cash flows. Reliance has again been profitable. We've grown those profits. Post-COVID, it's a higher pricing environment, so we have higher earnings, higher cash flows. Countercyclical, if we see a dip, we manage our working capital. Our accounts receivable, mainly our inventory, we consistently focus on our inventory turnover rate and try to buy what we're shipping, basically. It's important to manage your inventory in our business. We continue to invest in the growth of the company. As we mentioned earlier, significant investment through capital expenditure and organic growth, primarily in value-added processing equipment, but also adding some locations, expanding locations. The 76 acquisitions since we went public in 1994. It's an opportunistic approach. We don't set targets.
Our CapEx really comes from our customers asking us to do more. The acquisitions, we do not set targets because we do not want to do a bad deal. We want to do the right deals. Also on shareholder returns, we have paid a regular quarterly dividend for 66 years now. We do not have a set policy. We like to be flexible, but we generally try to increase the dividend annually and also opportunistically enter the market to repurchase our shares. We are proud of our stock performance over the last 30 years since we did our IPO. With that, turn it over to Davis.
Great. Thank you, Karla. Maybe you mentioned at the very beginning that we'd go back to end markets. I think that's probably one of the best places to start. Wondering if we could just dive in, talk a bit about where you're seeing strength, where there may be some weakness relative to the last few years, and then we can jump off from there.
Last night, we were downtown with a bunch of our local operators, and we said, let's talk about the hot end markets and the maybe not so hot end markets, but you can't mention data centers. We went around the table, and everyone mentioned data centers. I would say that continues to be one of the hotter markets and the trends in weaker markets. AG and HVAC and a couple other firearms came up.
For the most part, most of the end markets, we serve almost all of the end markets, and they're steady, but there's some that are really high, like infrastructure, data warehouse, et cetera.
Stepping off, I guess, kind of a tangent to data centers, there is a lot of supporting infrastructure that goes into that as well. Our coverage is sustainable energy and mobility. All of our stock charts look about the exact same. There has been a lot of growth in things like trackers for utility-scale solar and batteries and other types of energy-related infrastructure. One of the themes that we have seen is that deal sizes are getting larger. Is this something that you guys are seeing? If you could expand a bit more on what you are seeing from the, I guess, support infrastructure side, that would be helpful.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly true. With the data centers, initially, when we were hearing from some of our companies about some strength and participation in data centers, it was more kind of our structural steel type companies, people selling metal into the building of the building, right? Now we talk to almost all of our companies are touching the actual data center, a lot of interior racking, enclosures for servers. We do perforated metal. There's copper busbar. There's tubing for the cooling systems. There is also the electrification going on to be able to supply the energy. We've got a couple of small nuclear companies that sell. They're not nuclear. They sell into the nuclear end market. It is just interesting how many different products are feeding into that. Sometimes we do not even know what people are doing with our metal.
Data center certainly has been positive for us and for the industry. I think one of the examples one of our people gave last night was they're selling hot rolled steel for big tanks that are going underground to hold diesel fuel just because the data centers need backup power sitting there available just in case they have an issue.
The only thing worse than beating a dead horse is beating the wrong dead horse. I do not want to belabor this point, but just on data centers and the growth opportunity, and I guess looking forward for how long this cycle may be, if you want to term it that way, I'm wondering if you could just give your thoughts on if we're in the first inning, the middle of the game, or coming to the end as it relates to this type of infrastructure spend around data centers.
It sounds like we're probably early based on all of the announced builds. Probably it's not going to go on as strong as they say for as long as they say. I mean, that's generally what we see in different cycles. There are a lot of announcements and optimism upfront. I mean, we think we're still pretty early and I'd say at least a few more years' worth of good solid growth.
Sure. Maybe pivoting a little bit, looking at the policy backdrop. I don't think certainty is a word that anyone would use to describe the last year or maybe the next few, who knows. Just wondering how you've been impacted by tariffs, how that plays into your pricing and just supply strategy broadly. Maybe we can go for a few from there.
Yeah, so typically in the metal space, and I kind of mentioned this in my comments, the mills, the producers of the metal, whether it's carbon, aluminum, stainless, they set the price. We buy from them. Where they set the price is dependent on market fundamentals. A lot of times we'll have producers announce a price increase, but the price never changes. They're either trying to set a bottom or they attempt a price increase. If demand's not there, if the market doesn't accept it, then it doesn't go through. They're still just dealing transactionally with us. Generally with tariffs and in 2018, Section 232 came into play for metals. That was a really positive pricing environment for us because there was underlying demand that people wanted to buy metal. We were able to pass through the increased cost of the metal.
Even though the domestic producer's price did not go up, there was less import coming in. Generally with tariffs, we mark up not just the underlying cost of the metal, but tariffs, nickel surcharges. We look at the total cost of our cost of the metal, and then we mark that up. If tariffs, if it causes the price to go up $100, we are going to try to get $130 for the extra tariff. We pass it through plus a markup. Generally, like we said, we are able to expand our gross profit margins when the mills announce price increases because with our customer base, we try to pass through the increase before we get the higher cost metal in our inventory. In 2025, first quarter was really nice. There was a lot of buying activity. People were trying to get ahead of the tariffs.
There were a lot of foreign mills shipping metal into the U.S. to also get the metal here before the tariffs took effect. We had heavy buying. Carbon prices were going up. Customers were paying it. Prices for carbon peaked in April, and then they came down pretty quickly because everyone had already bought their metal. There was a lot of metal sitting at the U.S. mills, a lot of metal at the docks that had come in. Mills increased their prices, but there were not people there to buy it. We were not able to pass through the higher cost in the way we have in previous markets. Our margin got pinched a little bit. Still higher dollars. There have been some aluminum increases. They are paying the tariffs there.
We've been able to increase our prices on the aluminum and stainless price increases. Instead of being able to capture it all at once, we've had to incrementally step up our prices to catch up with the higher cost, which is a little different than the cycles we've seen previously. It is really because that underlying demand isn't there. As I mentioned, metal service center industry shipments are down 3%, which shows you demand's okay out there.
Obviously, global operation, global market. You had a good slide showing just the geographic breakdown of end markets. I wonder if there have been any changes, policy related to tariff or others that have changed this mix regionally in a material way or if you anticipate any changes looking forward just as it relates to business planning and how long these tariffs or other policy changes may linger.
Since we're at least 95% domestically sourced, at first we were wondering what all the craziness was about because we had our supply coming in on a regular basis. As less import was coming in, the domestic producers were raising their price and we're like, okay, there's something structurally changing here, which is a good thing. The steel derivatives keep adding and adding and adding. We're starting to hear from our customers more and more where we might have a customer who's globally located, so they're bringing more to North America and more to the United States.
Was that last year?
I think it was three years ago.
Maybe a few years ago, I guess.
Two or three.
Okay.
Two years ago.
My question stemming from that is just moving into more adjacent metals and other products, how that has been, I guess looking back and then looking forward, how that mix again may shift.
Yeah, so Reliance, I think our people are really good at running metal service center companies and doing more value-add, servicing their customers. We think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to grow both organically and through acquisitions in that space. We'll see some acquisition opportunities that are a little adjacent, a little outside of what we do. They're not that attractive to us. We've always said if something goes wrong, we need to be able to fix it. We need to understand the businesses that we acquire. We certainly do look at broadening our products and our product mix at our existing locations. We have our locations working together more now, so they have a broader depth of types of metal that they can sell.
I think it's really more in the value-add processing where we see continued opportunity to do more for our customers. The more than metal is really about the fact that we're not just like a commodity metal provider, that we are trying to provide solutions for our customers through the processing that we do for them, through the logistics, the just-in-time supply chain management. There's just more to it than just selling a hunk of metal.
How much of a change in your order book or pipeline, however you want to define it, have you seen from customers taking advantage of funds through things like formerly IRA, now Big Beautiful Bill, CHIPS Act, Infrastructure Act, different funds available through those programs?
They do not ever do it as fast as we would like them to. I think on the inflation reduction, when that was first announced, we saw activity under that bill quicker than we typically see and certainly than under the IRA or in CHIPS Act, there were a lot of announcements, a lot of starts. I think on the alternative energies that started, that was funded through tax credits. We saw activity faster, we think, because they did not have to wait for approval from the government. They were able to spend the money and then get the tax credit on the back end. The Infrastructure Act, we have seen some good bridge work, but I think there is still quite a bit there that we have not seen yet. The CHIPS Act, it has been there certainly is building going on.
There's been some stop and start and push-outs of projects. I don't know, Steve.
Yeah, and we've in 2025 saw more bridge work, more tunnel, more airport, a lot more activity. We think it's going to kind of continue into the coming years.
Sure. Maybe a couple. Please.
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We'd love to increase it and take it higher. We've had record CapEx the last couple of years, and we still have some of that coming online. Through acquisitions and our organic growth, we're continuing to grow both sides of our business. The non-value-add processing, the distribution, we're continuing to grow as well as the processing. With the volumes we have now, it takes a bit to move that number. The other thing on the value-add processing, our 50%, the best way we've seen to track it is number of orders. Some of the changes we're seeing is now with some of the equipment we have, we might be doing two or three different processes on that order, but it's only counting as one, or it might be more complex.
Hopefully we can charge a little more for that order, even though the 50% may not move.
Maybe a couple on capital allocation and just blending into 2026 outlook. I guess first just starting on M&A, which obviously has been a very important part of the story. Could you talk to the integration of any big larger acquisitions that have been more recent? And then maybe looking forward, your appetite for more, what type of businesses you would look for in that type of outlook, I suppose.
Yeah, so I mean, so far in 2025, we have not completed any acquisitions. We had completed four acquisitions in early 2024. I think they're all moving along well. I don't know, Steve, if you want to comment on any of those.
Yeah, in 2024, we were pretty active. In 2025, we've not seen as many good opportunities. I'd say that in 2024, we bought an energy company in Texas, Specialty Plate House, which that integration has gone really well. Bought a flat roll company outside of Cleveland, which that acquisition, as there's going to be some more mill capacity coming on board in that vicinity, will probably really ramp up in the next couple of years. In the Southeast and South Central, where there's a lot of growth, we bought a company with three locations, and that integration has been adding to some of our existing customer base. Sure. Maybe just the second part about appetite for more. It sounds like maybe there aren't as many near-term opportunities, but your willingness to approach more M&A.
We're always willing. We just have to see the right opportunities out there. We're continuously looking at the teasers that come in. We maintain relationships throughout the industry. It's really, when is that seller going to be ready? I mean, there are some companies, it's been over 30 years we've been talking to them, and they're not there yet, right? Playing golf with them next week, right? We're still trying to get there. We're seeing a decent level of activity. Again, we have to make sure it's the right company that fits Reliance, that fits our profile. There are companies maybe 15 years ago, we would have absolutely gone after this company. Now Reliance has a bigger footprint. A lot of our companies have elevated their gain.
Maybe that company isn't as attractive to us anymore as they would have been 15 years ago. Maybe we'll grow organically. We still want to buy good companies. We've got the balance sheet to do it. Whenever we find, and we'd like to find bigger ones, it's just our universe is made up of a lot of small and medium-sized companies, especially the ones that fit Reliance.
Sure. I think maybe a minute left.
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I knew somebody was going to ask that question. We're not webcast, right? I mean, I think for each of those companies, it probably makes sense for them to put together. We certainly do compete against each of them in certain pockets of our business. Generally, they're targeting large volume, national contract type accounts. They have gotten more into fabrication. They're going to do what they're going to do, and we're going to keep doing our thing. It might create some opportunities for us if there's disruption while they're combining.
I think we'll leave it there in the interest of time. Thank you very much, guys.
Okay. Thank you.