Great. Our next company is Superior Group of Companies, and I've got our analyst, Dave Marsh, on, who can introduce Mike Koempel, who's the presenter. So, Dave, while Mike's getting ready, you could please introduce Mike and Superior.
Thanks, Chris. Yes, as Chris said, it's David Marsh. I'm the analyst on Superior Group of Companies. Superior is a very unique company. They are in three diverse businesses, but all very intriguing end markets. They're in the business of healthcare uniforms, branded products, promotion, generally speaking, promotional-type products, and also call centers. And so, without further ado, let me hand it over to Mike Koempel, the CFO, to give their presentation.
Hi, Dave. Thanks. Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear.
Great, great. Well, thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate your time and interest in the Superior Group of Companies. As Dave said, my name is Mike Koempel. I'm the CFO of the Superior Group of Companies. I've been with the business just over two years. Prior to SGC, I spent several years at L Brands, formerly a multi-branded retailer, in a number of financial and operating leadership positions. Again, I'm excited to share the highlights of Superior Group and our compelling opportunities for future growth. So with that, we'll move ahead. Here's our safe harbor statement, which obviously you can read at your leisure. And so, before going into the detail of each of the segments that Dave just briefly touched on, I'll give a brief overview of Superior Group.
Why do we believe Superior Group is an attractive investment? We have three attractive, diversified businesses which operate in large, profitable growth industries, as you'll see here in a moment. The industries in which we participate in are highly fragmented, with ample opportunity for organic growth, which is further enabled by our very strong customer retention across all our segments. All of our segments also have a history of growth and profitability, with our Contact Centers business representing our highest margin and fastest-growing business. And lastly, we have a solid balance sheet, driven by strong operating cash flow, and we've consistently paid a dividend since 1977.
In terms of the size of Superior Group, total revenues in our last fiscal year, in 2023, were $543 million, up from $346 million, in 2017, translating into a 9% annual growth rate. Our revenue growth has been driven by all three of our business segments, a combination of organic growth combined with strategic acquisitions in our branded products and healthcare apparel segments. Branded products is our largest segment, had revenues of $342 million last year, followed by healthcare apparel, with $114 million in revenues. And then lastly, our contact center segment, our highest EBITDA margin business, had $87 million in revenues. Now, let me go a little bit deeper, into each of our business segments.
Although Superior Group has been around for over a hundred years, you'll learn, as you get to know us, that we're a very entrepreneurial and equally opportunistic business. We've sometimes been referred to as the hundred-year-old startup, and it's that mentality that has empowered us to build three profitable businesses within a few different industries, which has resulted in Superior Group being a diversified business. The first segment that I'll discuss today is our oldest business, our healthcare apparel business. When you think of healthcare apparel, think of, you know, scrubs that are worn by the 12+ million healthcare professionals in the U.S., and other healthcare apparel worn by caregivers and patients. We are one of the largest and oldest providers of healthcare apparel in the country.
First, we, on this slide, you can see we have a synopsis of who wears medical apparel and how they get it. The first part of our offering is what is referred to as institutional apparel. This is what you might see as a patient when you're in a hospital or other acute setting: scrubs, lab coats, isolation gowns, pajamas, and patient gowns. These garments are laundered generally by the hospital's own laundry, or more often by a third party, who is our customer. The larger component of healthcare apparel is the consumer scrub business.
The consumer base for this product is made up of a broad range of healthcare professionals, such as doctors, nurses, and lab technicians, as well as a number of non-healthcare-type consumers, such as housekeeping, janitorial, and cafeteria workers, all of whom buy their scrubs through retailers or the many digital retailers, including us, and wear their scrubs home and launder them their uniforms themselves. Overall, the broad market for our products provides us with various avenues for growth. If we look to some of the key brands, you can see on the consumer portion of our business, we have two very strong brands. Wink, which is an internally developed brand that makes up the largest piece of our revenue.
On top of that, we complement that brand with an exclusive license that we have with Carhartt, which we all know is one of the world's most iconic apparel and accessory brands. On the institutional side of healthcare apparel, servicing healthcare laundries, and distributors, we have one of the oldest and most well-known brands in the industry, Fashion Seal Healthcare. Fashion Seal was founded over a hundred years ago and was our first brand ever launched. All of our brands have a solid reputation for quality, comfort, durability, easy care, and value within their respective markets. Now, let's take a quick look at a few of the high-level metrics of our healthcare apparel segment. It's easy to get excited because it's clear that although we are one of the top five players in the industry, there's a ton of market share out there for us to still capture.
We estimate the addressable market of our market to be over $4 billion and growing, and we've demonstrated strong sales growth over time. In this segment, you can see we had an EBITDA, a positive EBITDA margin in 2023 of 7%, with an overall history of profitability going back in time. One of the things to note, we now have all channels of distribution covered. In the second quarter of 2023, we completed our launch of a direct-to-consumer website. Up until about last April, our healthcare offering was wholesale only through specialty stores, e-tailers, retailers, laundries, and distributors. But now we've taken that one last step further to address consumers directly and digitally. We'll be talking more about that in the years to come, as it most definitely will become a more important part of our omni-channel strategy.
Overall, an interesting fact is that nearly two million people wear our healthcare apparel every day, and we've achieved 90% customer retention. And lastly, in our healthcare apparel segment, when you look at our impressive client list, you see that we have the privilege of serving a multitude of highly recognized companies. Our sales reach extends to some of the most prominent influential healthcare organizations across various industries. Among those that we are proud of to collaborate with are some of the leaders of the retail sector, as well as healthcare launderers, serving, servicing healthcare providers on a large scale. Our association with such influential brands and the privilege of having their logos, are a source of immense pride for us.
It really serves as a testament to the trust that these companies place in our abilities to deliver exceptional products and services that align with their standards of excellence. With that, now let's jump over to our second biggest business segment, which is branded products. This segment is the one that provides branded merchandise, also known as promotional products and branded uniforms, to some of the largest companies in the world. We build gifts that are used for employee and customer incentive programs, uniform programs, conference gives, giveaways, gifts with purchase, branded retail revenue producing merchandise, and pretty much any item in the world you can think of with a logo on it. Typically, when investors hear about our branded products, they immediately think of those little stress balls that you would, you know, often receive at conferences and likely never use or just throw away.
That is not our business. Our goal in this segment is to provide our customers with branded products that support their business. As an example, it could be employee gifting to improve customer... I'm sorry, employee retention, or branded products for consumers to establish brand loyalty or developing a buzz around a product or service that our customer is launching. We're incentivized to increase, we're incentivizing customers to increase their basket size, and we do this by making beautiful products that people actually want to keep, and by developing branded retail products that customers will actually pay for, and branded uniforms that employees are actually excited to wear.
Just to provide you with a range of sample examples here in the U.S., we make the uniforms for Taco Bell, but in addition to that, we also build out and merchandise their entire online Taco Bell Taco shop, in which we sell millions of dollars per year of fun, iconic items like the Taco Bell Onesie or the Taco Bell Beach Cruiser. For Dunkin', we design and source a number of retail items, like drinkware, that are sold in their actual stores. For Tesla, we produce their employee uniforms and a ton of other fun items that they use as employee gifts and customer gifts. For large retailers like Walmart, Target, and CVS, we make the uniforms for their employees that they wear to work every day. For gig economy customers, we make the new driver kits for Instacart and DoorDash.
And lastly, for large tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, we do millions of dollars of employee incentive giveaways to help them with their employee retention strategies. So hopefully, these examples can give you an understanding of just the range of products we produce, and again, the important customers that we work with on a daily basis. Now, looking into the numbers, most people are surprised to hear that the branded products industry sits at approximately $24 billion. Our industry has 25,000 companies as competitors, small and large, and is obviously highly fragmented. We have climbed from relative obscurity just eight years ago to now being the eighth largest in the industry. We produce tens of millions of branded products each year.
Another interesting fact is that over five million Americans go to work every day wearing branded uniforms made by HPI, which is part of this segment. So similar to healthcare, we are a top 10 player in an industry, but we have so much upside in terms of potential market share to grab. We have demonstrated, as you can see, over the last five years, really strong growth. We have solid five-year revenue CAGR growth. We have strong EBITDA margin that continues to improve as we move closer to our goal of double-digit EBITDA. And also, again, similar to healthcare apparel, branded products has very high customer retention. Now, again, touching on our customer list within this segment, as previously mentioned, our company proudly collaborates with some of the largest and most renowned brands across the globe.
Our ability to penetrate and thrive in such diverse industries showcases that we have an adaptability and expertise in which no such sector can go untouched, and furthermore, it is essential to highlight the extraordinary customer retention that we have achieved amongst these companies, which is true, again, across all of our segments. We have fostered long-standing relationships with many of these brands. It clearly signifies that we consistently deliver exceptional results, ensuring that our customers have a true trust in us by consistently providing true value and exceeding their expectations. Now, moving to our third and final segment is our contact center segment, which we operate under the brand called The Office Gurus. The Office Gurus is a group of nearshore contact centers supporting both inbound and outbound call services on behalf of a number of different brands across a variety of industries.
As you can see on this slide, in terms of who really needs contact centers and what are the uses, you can see a number of compelling reasons why companies outsource contact center operations. Many years ago, we faced a challenge of finding sufficient back office resources at a reasonable cost in the U.S. in order to support the growth of our business. So we expanded our production office in El Salvador and began to build a nearshore capability to not only meet our internal needs, but also address a growing need for U.S. companies to expand various call center activities. Outsourcing contact center operations enables companies to more quickly scale and gain cost leverage, both in terms of labor and technology.
Additionally, customer support is not always a core competency of businesses, and outsource providers such as us can deliver dependable, consistent customer experiences in multiple languages. There are a number of factors that make The Office Gurus the preferred provider among a large competitive base. Customers choose The Office Gurus because our clients prefer a nearshore capability that is more culturally aligned with reliable English fluency. By focusing on the small to medium-sized opportunities, we provide our clients with a high touch service as compared to larger engagements with thousands of agents, largely focused on more transactional type of services. Lastly, we bring a consistent proc... We bring consistent processes, and we leverage analytics and technology, which are all focused on improving the customer's experience for our clients.
As you can see here on this, you know, excerpt of a map, The Office Gurus operates from 10 offices across 5 nearshore countries, primarily in El Salvador and Belize, followed by Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and a small footprint here in the state of Florida. Our footprint provides access to various pools of talent to continue to support growth as well as mitigate risk. This is an industry in which quality customer service is of utmost importance, and you can see on this slide, we've been recognized as a leading provider within the business process industry, as well as being recognized as a great place to work within a very competitive labor environment.
Clearly, the current inflationary environment, combined with the proliferation of remote work environments, has accelerated many companies' outsource plans as they realize that remote work, workforces are the future, particularly in lower cost, nearshore locations rather than in the U.S. Again, also, looking at a few key metrics, again, we are a leading provider to an underserved market represented by small and medium-sized businesses. In fact, we get a lot of our businesses from customers who are outsourcing for the first time. Our growth is fueled by both new customers as well as seat expansion with existing customers. This is another large and growing market, which exceeds $100 billion in the U.S. alone, and our market share of the overall market is minimal, because again, we're primarily focused on onboarding clients that are smaller, that often have quickly growing needs.
This is, as I mentioned previously, our single fastest growing business, with a five-year sales CAGR of 26% through 2023, and a very attractive EBITDA margin of 13.6% in 2023, with customer retention of almost 100%. Again, just like our other segments, as you can see on this slide, our contact center business services a number of brands. These brands range from established, well-known brands to up-and-coming businesses. And again, our niche is the small to medium-sized opportunities that could range from initially as few as 10 to 100, to over 100 seats, with opportunities from growth upon initial launch. Again, for that reason, our service focuses on higher quality conversational service versus large transactional-based services with hundreds of seats that you might find in other industries.
Now, after that summary of each of our segments, I'll just move briefly into a few overall financial highlights for Superior Group of Companies. Looking back over a longer period of time at our sales history, you can see that over the last 10 years, Superior Group has grown significantly at an annualized growth rate of 14% through 2023. Again, our revenues in 2023 were approximately $543 million, which is about three and a half times our revenue in 2013 of $152 million. We expect revenues to continue to grow in 2024 to approximately $567 million, which is the midpoint of our sales guidance.
Again, SGC revenue has been driven by all three of our business segments, and again, a combination of both organic growth, combined with strategic acquisitions in our branded products and healthcare apparel segments. Turning briefly to our leverage position, as you can see from this slide, our leverage position has varied over time, due in part to the timing of investments that we've made in the business, both in terms of acquisitions as well as working capital. Our leverage position was elevated in late 2022, due to the timing of acquisitions, as well as working capital and the performance of our healthcare business post-pandemic. As you can see, in 2023, we made significant progress toward driving positive free cash flow and reducing both working capital and debt, driving significant improvement in our net leverage.
As a result, our net leverage ratio decreased by more than 50% since 2002, and you can see we achieved a net leverage ratio of approximately 1.7 times our twelve-month covenant EBITDA as of the end of our second quarter, which exceeded our goal expectations of 2- 2.5 times EBITDA. Looking briefly at our capital allocation strategy and priorities, our priorities are really threefold. First, we recognize the importance of our dividend as a return to our shareholders, and for that reason, we have consistently paid a dividend since 1977, and at certain points in time, we have raised the dividend rate. Second, we will continue to make the necessary capital investments to support the organic growth of our business.
Typically, our capital investments range from 1%- 1.5% in revenues, but there are times every four to five years, where we may make a more significant investment in the business, as we did in 2021, to implement further automation in our largest distribution center. And lastly, enabled by the strong financial position I just touched on a moment ago, we will consider strategic acquisitions that are highly accretive and complementary to our existing business segments. The underlying drivers of these priorities primarily relate to driving growth through market expansion with the large addressable markets that I previously mentioned, focusing on efficient working capital across all of our segments, and lastly, continuing to focus on expense management while balancing the need to make certain investments in our business to fuel growth.
Lastly, I'll just touch quickly on corporate social responsibility. You can find our report on our website, and certainly read that at your leisure. And in the interest of time, I'll conclude my presentation. And Dave, I'll turn it over to you for any questions that you or the audience may have.
Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for a great presentation. If you have any questions, please put them in the chat in the webinar. I will start until we get any other questions from the audience. So Mike, one of the, you know, one of the, I think the burning questions that people have is, you know, in the second quarter, you guys had a little bit of a slowdown, and you mentioned some, you know, some shipping issues, from some of your suppliers. And can you just talk about, you know, how that situation has been evolving, if, things have kind of cleared up on the, on that side, and, you know, if, if your business is gonna be more normalized in the third quarter from that?
... Sure, sure, Dave. So in the second quarter, as Dave alluded to, sales, we had timing of sales shift from the second quarter into the third quarter due to supply chain delays. We began to see during the second quarter longer lead times as capacity through Asia was being reduced and there was increased demand to some extent in anticipation of possible tariffs. So we have certainly made the operating adjustments in our business prior to the end of the second quarter to make sure that we take into account the longer lead times. We've done that, Dave, and we feel comfortable that we've made the operational and planning changes at the right time so that we can avoid any further disruption of activity in the third and fourth quarter.
And then, of course, given the delays that we did see in the second quarter, as we talked about in our earnings call, we certainly expect to see the benefit of those sales that we didn't achieve in the second quarter to come here into the third quarter. And as a result, we did reiterate our full year guidance on the basis that, again, we will capture those sales here in the back half of the year.
Great. That's very helpful. I guess the second question I have is, you mentioned, you know, kind of towards the end of your presentation, about a consistent dividend and, that over time you have occasionally raised it. Can you talk about, you know, what, you know, what would need to happen for the board to consider an additional increase in the dividend rate?
Sure. There's a number of factors you might imagine, you know, that you know, we discuss with the board and the board considers. You know, I think that, as I mentioned on our capital, on the capital allocation priorities, you know, there's a number of things that we wanna focus on that we believe can drive growth in the business and shareholder value. Part of that's the dividend. We wanna continue to invest in the capital expenditures of our business. And now that we have, again, an improved net leverage position, we're certainly looking for accretive M&A opportunities.
So when it comes to considerations around raising the dividend, it's obviously gonna be the performance of the business, but it's also gonna weigh the value of that relative, again, to some of the other, you know, potential uses of cash that we feel can drive growth in the business. You know, I think an example of the different considerations that we make would be the fact that just following the second quarter, the board authorized a share repurchase of up to $10 million, because we felt like that was, again, the right decision to make in light of, you know, the position of the share price.
And so, again, we made that decision from a capital allocation standpoint and felt that was a good use here post the second quarter. So again, a number of factors will go into that, and again, our history has been from time to time, we will increase it, you know, based on weighing various factors involved that I just previously described.
Very, very helpful. Hey, just, we have just a minute left, maybe just, a quick one on the M&A, if we could. Could you just talk about, you know, the environment, from a potential buyer perspective and, and, you know, what the environment is like right now, where you might be seeing some opportunities?
Sure. You know, even though, you know, when we are at higher leverage positions, even though the priority around M&A was much lower for obvious reasons, we've always maintained an open pipeline of communication for potential acquisitions. And in some of the prior acquisitions that we've done, we were in communication with those targets for months, if not years. So we recognize that it can take time to foster relationships, perform due diligence, and so we've kept that pipeline open. There certainly are opportunities out there. I think like a lot of, you know, companies and potential investors, we've got a very close eye on what the Fed will do in terms of interest rates, which will, I'm sure, influence the M&A market. So again, we're open to considering M&A activity.
I would say in our business, the most likely prospects would be within our branded products and contact center segments. We consider a number of factors, Dave, when evaluating a potential target, you know, including gaining new capabilities or talent, adding high-growth customers, or it could be entering new industries or geographies, and of course, we'll look to things like potential synergies and the ability to leverage our existing business, so a number of factors in play. Again, we certainly have our eyes open and we'll evaluate, you know, the appropriate opportunities as we search the market.
All right. Great, great, Mike. That concludes the Superior Group of Companies presentation. We're just out of time, so thank you for presenting. Do you have any final closing remarks?
Again, I appreciate everyone's interest in Superior Group, and I would just say that the presentation is available on our website. We certainly welcome you to spend more time looking through the presentation and we have an investor inbox. We're happy to take any additional questions if you have the interest.
Okay. Thanks, Mike. So that concludes the Superior Group of Companies presentation.