Sunbelt Rentals Holdings, Inc. (SUNB)
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May 1, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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CMD 2021
Apr 20, 2021
Hello, and welcome to our long awaited CMD. Many of you will remember it was about a year ago to the day when we had our CMD scheduled for Washington, D. C. And for obvious reasons we had to cancel that. But here we are virtual, but nonetheless excited to be here.
I'm certain that in the not too distant future, we'll return to the times where we can hold events that are in person, not just live. For those of you that have attended one of our previous Capital Markets Day, and I think the balance of you as you get through today. We understand that we certainly feel like we missed out on the opportunity for you and for our team, because when you have an event that is in person. You not only get the opportunity to cover presentations like you're going to hear plenty of today, but you get those breaks and opportunities to meet with the team, whether it be during the breakout sessions to learn a bit more in-depth about a certain specialty or product or sales strategy that we're working on. Sure, we're going to have some breakout sessions that follow this, but it's just different.
And then you get those casual or more casual settings, I should say, over dinner or on the ride to one of our locations, when you get to interact with our team. And the reason why I say that is because I think it's there that you get that full flavor of our culture as an organization and you see how the team interacts. All that being said, we're doing the best that we can in this particular setting to try to convey that, but we still look forward to when we hold these in person in the not too distant future. So anyway, here I am in our support office in Fort Mill, South Carolina. We have hijacked a few of our training rooms and we've turned them into makeshift sets or stages.
You're going to see 1 in the not too distant future in our London office where you're going to meet Michael and Andy Wright and Douglas McCluckkey as we turn to them in the stage. So our Chief side office on the 9th floor has been transformed as well. We have a full agenda today, which is going to be about 3 hours worth of presentations, but don't worry, we'll have a break in about the middle, which we'll signal to you for about 10 minutes. And then before we get into Q and A at the conclusion, we'll have another short pause. So in general, just to get you familiar with what the time might be, and you should have read that in Will's note as well.
Let me touch briefly to begin with the RNS that we put out first thing this morning. First things first, our general tool business, our specialty business in the U. S. Continued to perform encouragingly well. Our business in Canada and the UK are also performing well.
And that led us, of course, to say that we anticipate our results to be slightly ahead of what our expectations were just about 6 weeks ago along with our Q3s. At the same time, we shared our new buyback program. So a 2 year buyback program of up to £1,000,000,000 that we will begin at a pace of £75,000,000 per quarter. Before we get into the substance or the purpose, if you will, of what we came here today to talk about. I'd like to speak directly to our team members.
We've all been through a year like no other. And every single one of you, our team members, was impacted by this year's events beyond just COVID, both personally and also in your professional lives. I can't adequately thank you enough for all that you've done over this year, the way that you worked individually, your commitment to come to work every day with all of the potential distraction that was there. Something I'm extraordinarily proud of is the way that you as a team came together and you work together and you persevered together. Although we should all be proud of the many accomplishments we've made over the years, I think we could arguably say that this year may just have been our finest hour thus far.
So for that, Thank you very much. So let's get on to what we came here today to talk about. And in order to do that, I'm going to show you who you'll hear from. Don't worry, I won't introduce you to all of them now. But I put the team up as it's important to point out that not only have they been instrumental in our success thus far, this team and some others we're very much involved in the building process of the new strategic growth plan that we're going to roll out to all of you today.
And of course, as I remind them all often, they play a very vital role in the execution or delivery of that plan as well. So We find it best whenever you're going to embark on a new strategic plan, you should take a look back and see what previous plants have done, what you can take from them, what you should continue to do and perhaps what you might decide to change or maybe even amplify. So in order to do that, you'll see here on Slide 4, what we've done is we've gone and shared with you here our different periods of strategic growth plans, all following the great financial crisis. So the first thing you'll see on the left is one that we shared with only our team internally. As we got through kind of 2010 and we felt like it didn't seem like we were going to just go right back into recession.
We felt like we had some duration in terms of recovery in our end markets. We felt as though our markets were supportive. What did we do? First things first, very important. We invested in our existing locations before we embarked on our expansion.
And by doing so because of how quickly we could do it, you get that early mover benefit. And we theorized about that at the time and of course we proved that out over that period of time. Also, we were anticipating a step change from a rental penetration standpoint, because whenever there is a potential storm cloud on the horizon or even there has been a storm cloud that has recently passed and I would say 'eight, 'nine would qualify for even more than a storm cloud. It tends to be a favoring win when it comes to rental penetration. So that was part of what we anticipated.
And again part of what we sort of proved out over that period of time. We also very gently got our greenfield legs, if you will, under us because it had been quite some time since we had expanded that way. So that was the post financial crisis plan that we ran through the early part of 2016. Many of you will recall over that period, not many would have thought we would have gone from 2010 where the economy began to grow again and all the way through 2016 without encountering another recession. Well, we had and not only internally was the business saying, hey, what's next?
Externally, we were getting that feeling as well. And when we were doing our work in terms of what we thought the end markets may bear, we thought we actually had several years of ongoing growth ahead of us. So we rolled out Project 2021. There were a few things about Project 2021 worth pointing out. First of all, it was an external plan.
So the first time we would have taken a plan externally to the level of detail that we did. Of course, we had it internal as well. It was also a plan that was focused just on the U. S. You'll remember we had just entered Canada.
Shortly before that, we didn't make it any part of our growth plan in terms of location ads, clusters, etcetera, because we just didn't know enough about Canada at the time. And it was also absent anything relating to the UK. And through that plan, we started to not just exercise those greenfields I talked about earlier, but we significantly amplified our pace in in
terms of
greenfields. And very importantly, we began to really work in a cadence to our bolt on M and A, both in terms of closings, but also importantly in terms of forming what we call internally a ground game. People out in the markets, in the business all the time speaking with owners, doing due diligence on businesses, looking at the markets we want to go into and looking to see are there opportunities from a bolt on standpoint or purely greenfield? Those are some of the highlights, if you will, of 2021. Now on to the next strategic plan, which we will cover in far more detail, but I just wanted to talk about some of the nuance differences, if you will, very early on.
First of all, this is a Ashtead Group plan. So every one of our component parts, Sunbelt US, Sunbelt UK and Sunbelt Canada has a very specific component of our next plan. And you'll see that come through across the board. It continues to focus on our growth and expansion. And of course, thinking about and coming out and portraying the long term sustainability, the viability of our business model for many years ahead.
And whenever you're doing that, as in recent years, it has become far more, shall we say top of mind, ESG. And you're going to hear about our plans as it relates to the environmental, social and government aspect of our plan. And of course we believe and we will share this that there are significant increased structural tailwinds that will drive the all important rental penetration. So throughout all three of these plans I've just covered, there are some important things to point out. And one is that during each of these, our customers took notice.
They saw a tremendous investment in new fleet. They saw a different level of service that we were able to bring them. We brought to life that availability, reliability and ease that we talk about so often. And I'd like to look at it like this, share this with our team as often as I can. Our customers get the opportunity to vote every single day or every single transaction.
And what they've done through this entire period of time is they have voted with their purchase orders every single day, giving us more and more opportunity to service them. So when you do those things, what happens as you see across the bottom of the slide, revenue goes. So revenue has grown. And even though it's not illustrated, so did profit. So Let's take a more detailed look at specifically Project 2021.
And you'll see on the left side of this slide really gets to the design objectives, if you will, for Project 2021. And we'll start top, top, top there and work our way to the bottom. First of all, again, investing in our existing locations. It's something in any plan you can't forego. The second one was growing through our well understood and well worn path, if you will, of our expansion.
And it's really twofold, our greenfield program and augmented and added to by way of our bolt on program. Taking our Sunbelt brand into markets where we had no presence whatsoever. So although we had a reasonable footprint at the beginning of that, there were full markets that had no sum up rentals presence whatsoever, and that was very specifically targeted in Project 2021, and we'll share the results shortly. Establish a real foundation for our specialty business. I mean, let's face it, in 2016, sure we talked about our specialty business, but it was small.
It was small and it wasn't really of a level where it could do the things we wanted to like for instance, actually be that reliable alternative to ownership to actually perpetuate rental penetration drive or growth over a period of time. So that was a very clear objective that we laid out to. And all of those items led to that 5th point, which is strategically advance our clustered market strategy or clustered market approach. And why do we do that? Well, we do that because that overall diversifies the end markets in which we serve and by as a result of that, it grows the end markets in which we serve or the addressable markets in which we serve.
So on the right, you can see are the sort of headline successes that came out of that plan, but I'm going to go into a bit more detail in each and every one of them. So the growth that we delivered, as we said from the beginning, you'll see that we did it by way of existing location investment, greenfield investment and bolt ons. I think it's very important to see it sort of in this way in which is portrayed on the slide because what it tells you is every one of our growth avenues is significant. And every one of our growth avenues actually has the capability to produce some of that growth. And you can see what happened to from a revenue perspective on the left side there pretty much in thirds across our growth vehicles or avenues.
Now let's look at our actual foundation. So our brick and mortar organization of locations to service our customers. And if we begin with our general tool locations, you can see by the end of this year, we will have 5.94 locations. That's over that's adding more than 2 20 locations in just 5 years' time or 60% growth in our branch network of general tool locations. Then we look at specialty.
Over 200 locations added in that same period of time, which is a 150% increase in our branch network for our specialty business. And then of course, you'll see our general tool business growing from just over 500 to what will be, it's not quite, there's 1 or 2 to add between now and just a few days from now, 936 locations at the end of this fiscal year, which was overall kind of a plus 80% growth in our network. And that's where we're beginning from today. Then I had mentioned previously, markets with no presence was something about rentals. And look here, we entered 41 new designated market you'll hear us for the rest of the presentation refer to them as DMAs.
In these markets, we had 0 presence. I'm not so much trying to draw the attention on the 41 on this slide. Look at the $3,300,000,000 These markets have a known rental size of $3,300,000,000 annually. We've only just been in these markets for a relatively short period of time. And rest assured, we don't have our, how should I say it, fair share of the market in those, but rest assured we are growing as we continue to invest because those are now existing locations.
And furthermore, we will work to advance those clusters. Specialty, so I mentioned small of about $600,000,000 in 2016. Well, dollars 1,400,000,000 I would say forms the beginnings of a platform. So that's the revenue piece, but let's look at that platform in terms of business lines. So today we have 9 very well established, very well organized specialty business lines.
That's the key to the platform from which we will grow this business. And you're going to hear certainly a lot about this. There will be a few slides, 6 or 8 probably out of all these today that you will pull out and refer to many times. And I can promise you there are at least 1 or 2 of those in the specialty section when you hear from Francis Hassis, who we'll introduce you to shortly. This is really just demonstrating for you as it relates to greenfields, how this we call it a greenfield machine, how this greenfield machine has grown over time and the real regimen that we have produced.
So if we start on the left side of Slide 9, you'll see how we took it into that those two tranches or chapters of growth that I began with. So from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2016, we added 128 locations to a clip of about 25 locations per year. And then you'll see how we accelerated that piece, almost double that piece to 49 locations over the Project 2021 period. And to really put this in perspective in that when we get to the right hand side of the slide about this understood, tried and tested as we've listed there. I call that muscle memory.
This doesn't happen overnight. This happens through routine. This happens through exercise and that's precisely what our business has. And it's not something that you just turn on or turn off like a light switch. It takes a lot of work it takes a lot of understanding, it takes a lot of network in order to put that together.
It is worth commenting as we have on the slide that we're the only company that's doing this with any sort of scale or any sort of regimen. And it's something I think to be proud of, but it's also something to flag just in terms of our ability to increase that pace over time as our business in general grows and we have a broader customer base who is calling us to bring service closer and closer to them to of course do a better job taking care of them. So Kurt Kinkle, who is a colleague of mine who you'll meet in in a short while to go through our bolt on M and A. He loves to point this out, that $1,400,000,000 that we generated over the last 12 months with these greenfields that had just been opened over a relatively short period of time would be if they were standalone, the 4th largest rental business in North America. Of course, we would have created organically.
I think that's pretty significant. Here, I'm going to park on this slide for just a minute and explain the construct, if you will, of it. So again, we talk about DMAs. This illustrates the 210 DMAs in the U. S.
And and the 55 DMAs in Canada. And what we've done is we've kind of stratified those into these buckets if you will, and you'll see when we speak to the U. S, we have it in the top 25, then 26 to 50, so on and so forth. And it's worth pointing out a couple of things. First of all, if you just take the top 100 DMAs in the U.
S. That represents 92% of the known rental revenue in our market on an annual basis. So It's not a bad place to start when you're continuing to grow your business and you're thinking about achieving a cluster level. The next thing is you'll notice we've defined. So this is an internal definition of what we consider cluster.
And we've done that by these bands that I mentioned earlier. So the top 25, for instance, we would have to have 16 or more locations until we internally would consider that a cluster and that's kind of based on years' worth of work that we've gone through and kind of getting to certain levels of market share and certain makeups, you will, of revenue and customer base. So what do we take out of all this? Well, first of all, I'll bring you back to 2016. We had achieved cluster status in only 6 of the top 100 markets in the U.
S. And in 5 short years, we've taken that 6 to 31. So you could say in and of itself, that's a great sort of accomplishment. But I look at it more as to say, look how much room we have to go. We only have 31 of the top 100 markets in the U.
S. That are 92% of the rental revenue in the industry. And when we build clusters, not only do we drive structural change as it relates to rental penetration, but also the structural change in terms of the big getting bigger, which means we're taking share. So big runway for growth. Let's look closer at clusters.
I mentioned a moment ago, a few slides that you'll take away. This is what I promise you when we're all 1 on 1 at various points over the next year or so, we will be referring to this slide. We talk so much about clusters, remember what's the strategy, the strategies as we portrayed on the left, broaden our end markets, which ultimately create a larger addressable market. That's why we do clusters because or why we focus on advancing our clusters, because those two things will take cyclicality out of your business or reduce cyclicality in your business. It just gives you more opportunities.
So here's what we've done in the center and on the right hand side of the slide. We've compared in those same bands I went through earlier, light sized markets with one another and we contrast those that are clustered versus those that are not clustered. So we're not comparing market number 2 with market number 175 because you can't compare and contrast those. We're comparing markets inside of the top 25, inside of 26 to 50, etcetera. And here's what we found.
The revenue in the clustered markets, 30% of it comes from specialty, should come as no surprise. We add more locations, we grow our specialty business. That's what we should expect compared to 20% revenue coming from our specialty businesses in our non clustered markets. Now let's go to the right and talk about some of the metrics or findings, if you will, that come out of these same comparisons. First of all, customers, because in the end, it's what it's all about.
In the markets where we are clustered compared to those that were not, we have 2.2 times the number of customers. Now some people challenged me on this and to no avail, internally and externally. Well, of course, Brendan, you have more locations, you're going to have more customers. Well, if it was as easy as that, so to speak, you would say, well, I'll just have one big location right in the middle of a market and I will get the same number of customers. You have to actually add those locations to get those customers, otherwise you wouldn't.
So when I talk about this internally and the benefits of advancing our clusters as we're getting the buy in from the organization to understand how we operate. I talk about it like this, whether we're talking about plumbing, mechanical maintenance contractors, etcetera. What's better than having 10 plumbers that are actively renting from you. Well, the answer is 22 plumbers that are actively renting from you, because as you do go through cycles, whether it be at the top of a cycle or during really good periods of a cycle, you're going to do more business. But when you go into a weaker part of the cycle, you have more customers, you have that 22 because some will win some work, some won't win some work, you're going to be better off when you have more.
Not only do we have more customers in those markets, those customers do more revenue with us, 15% more revenue. And when you have those things, you get the benefits that you can see there towards the bottom. Time utilization improve, get a better rate, you have a better mix of equipment that's going to the customer base. And that all trickles its way down to profit as we're indicating here with EBIT at 4.5% higher. We call that cluster economics and you'll hear more about that.
So that's the end of looking back. From here on out, we look forward. What's next? Well, what's next? We call it Sunbelt 3.0.
I'll say that again, because it's not Sunbelt 3.0. There's a tech thing to it. Just hang with me, Sunbelt 3.0. And in a nutshell, Sunbelt 3.0 is built to deliver increased growth and increased resilience. Growth by way of ample paths to market and taking advantage of the structural change and even perpetuating that structural change.
And when it comes to resilience, certainly broadening and diversifying our end markets as we talked about, but also in terms of what that leads to from an ever diversifying end market and the financial capabilities and scale of the organization. All of those things strung together amount to opportunities for growth and even more resilience. So that's the overlay of the plan. So what do we actually do? So I'm going to go through the what.
And for the rest of today, the team is going to come through and talk about the how, and we're going to talk specifically about the what and the how when it comes to what we call the 5 strategic actionable components that comprised Sunbelt 3.0. And then underneath you'll notice are the cultural underpinnings of 3 very specific cultural underpinnings, which I'll also cover. So let me go through these in sort of summary form. Number 1, grow our general tool business by focusing on advancing our clusters. Our general tool business has incredibly long runway remaining for growth.
I know sometimes we talk so much about special and we love our specialty business, but let me make something perfectly clear. We love our general tool business as well. It by itself could be called specialty, but we just refer to it as general tool, ample, ample room. The next one is Amplify Specialty. I shared the platform that we now have.
And we have a platform that allows us to scale this business to the degree in which we've never done before, pick up that pace, also perpetuate, I've used that word a few times and she bring a true reliable alternative to ownership because what's so important about specialty to understand is, is it's all about driving rental penetration by giving customers brilliant service and products that otherwise they would have just bought. Then we have technology, advancing technology. Certainly, we have shared with you plenty that technology has been a key contributor our success over the years. Well, we'll rest with that. And it is going to be a significant contributor to our success during 3.0 and beyond.
What we're doing is we're bringing availability, reliability and ease ever more clearly to our customers that we think not only gives us an opportunity to get an even greater share of wallet in some instances, but also helps drive that shift from owner shift to rental. Our ambition within the technology team and within this plan is to go from being just a leader in our industry from a tech standpoint to go to a position whereas we're thought of as a leader in the broader industrial space when it comes to technology prowess. And I think you'll see in the plans our ability to do that. The next one, number 4, LEAD with ESG. And there's 2 things that are important for you to understand about that.
First of all, you're going to hear our commitments in environmental and social and governance. It's no secret that from an environmental standpoint, we've not told a very good story. We've not made incredibly clear how we're going to move forward and how we're going to prove overall our own footprint. You're going to hear that today. The other part to understand as it relates to ESG and in particular the ESG, We believe that the environmental focus today is a catalyst for growing rental penetration.
And we know that we are at Sunbelt vital when it comes to being a necessary component to a cleaner environment, particularly when it comes to equipment and the logistics that equipment. So it's something very important to understand that we believe is a structural driver moving forward. And then finally, dynamic capital allocation. One could say that is more of the same, if not more of the same. You're going to hear from Michael later.
It's not more of a scene because look at the position we're in. Look at the position we're in today from a free cash flow standpoint. Look at the position we're in today from a leverage standpoint and compare and contrast that to previous points in previous cycles. We're in a very, very different place and the scale of our business puts us in a very different place as well. Nonetheless, it has to be one of our actionable components because we have to make certain we're incredible custodians of how we invest, where we invest, so that we are coming through for all of our stakeholders when it comes to our financial deliveries.
So we go on to culture, there are 3. The first one is invest in our people. Now this is nothing new. We've always invested in our people, but we're going to the next level and we're sharing that with our team. We're bringing training and development even closer to our people to help them advance in so many ways.
We're in a skilled trade blue collar service business. And these days, there's not an ample or there's not an abundance of places where you can get people that already know what we need them ultimately to know. So we need to help them get there. And then we need to take it from that and show them opportunities in terms of advancing our organization, which I think you'll agree we have quite a history of people coming up through the organization, learning our culture and doing incredibly well for So that's a core part of our cultural element of 3.0. The next one, there's a bit of a difference to this.
You've always heard us talk about being entrepreneurial. Well, we're calling this entrepreneurialism with scale, and that's different. We definitely brand ourselves, even some of the marketing goes like this, local hustle national muscle. Yes, we want to be known as a local company who invests in its community. But we also want to make sure our people know that are local, that run a branch for a series of branches, that when it comes to 2 things, our people and our customers, they have to understand entrepreneurialism with scale.
Because if we have one of our team members that is living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, this happened not long ago, that wants to go to Las Vegas, Nevada, because the rest of his family had moved there in order to work. And he's a driver for us and he's been working for us for 5 years and he likes working here and he wants to go on even during this COVID period when we were, as you know, taking many new heads on. Entrepreneurialism of Scale is making sure that that driver gets moved to Las Vegas, Nevada and keeps wearing a Sunbelt shirt because he wants to. That may seem odd when I talk about that from a cultural standpoint, but that's important for a business like ours. Same thing goes for the customer.
Let's say we have a customer in Los Angeles, California that we've taken great care of. They have a need or even a problem maybe with Summit Rentals in Boston, Massachusetts. Our team in Los Angeles has to know entrepreneurialism of scale is helping that customer in Boston, Massachusetts. So that's what we mean by entrepreneurialism of scale. Yes, we are a local business, but they always have us as a total company for support and anything that they need.
And then finally, because none of this is possible without it, our customers. And culturally, we're going to take it to the next level when it comes to availability, reliability and ease, and that is going to be crystal clear at the end of this presentation. So Sunbelt 3.0 is more than just new locations, growth and expansion. Sunbelt 3.0 has other and material purpose. And if you understand business today, you have to understand that you can't just roll out a new plan.
You can't get sort of 18,000 people together across 3 countries and say, hey, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go grow and here are all the financial results that we're going to get as company. That's not good enough anymore. You've got to explain to your team why we're doing all this beyond just the financial success. And that's what we're attempting to do here on this slide.
But rest assured, it's part of it, our people. I spoke about the careers and the investment. We don't talk about jobs at Sunbelt, we talk about careers with our people. And you're going to hear a lot about that from someone called Sheryl Black, when she talks about engagement. So the purpose of our plan definitely has a true aspect of people.
Then of course, our customers. Our customers rely on us more today than they ever have before, whether it be maintaining, construction, responding events, our customers rely on us. We are more than a top up now. We are an instrumental part of what they do and we need to be there for them. They've seen our investment believe me, we're going to tell them a lot more about the investment that we have coming over 3 auto.
And I think you all know from an investment community standpoint, we always make sure that we are doing what you want out of us in terms of building and growing a solid business that is predictable, repeatable and will return the kind of results that you're looking for over the long term. So that remains very, very much Square and Square to our mission and very, very purposeful. And finally, our communities. I talked about that local business earlier. I mean, of course, we have big national philanthropic programs that we do, but we also have I couldn't possibly keep track of all the little league soccer teams that we sponsor by way of helping paying for some jerseys or light towers that we have on the practice fields in towns all over North America and the UK.
That's something that is vital and that's something that we're sharing with all of our team. And that's why when we roll this out, we call Sunbelt 3.0 ambition with purpose. I think it's something that's important to share with all of you and hence we've just done it. So what's all that look like from a brick and mortar standpoint, because I just can't resist sharing this slide with you. I mentioned earlier that we have 9 36 locations or will by April 30th.
That's what 936 locations looks like in North America. Well, what are we going to do? We're going to add 2 98 locations by way of greenfield. 2 98 comes to a really nice number, 1234, 1, 2, 3, 4, that I'm certain every single one of our team members will be able to recite. And I'm also comfortable that every one of our team members will be able to talk about the strategic actionable components in order to get that done.
So that's enough for me. Now it's on to the how and to do that when it comes to our general tool business and advancing our specialties is Brad Law. And in a moment, I'm going to bring Brad Law into the stage, I want to introduce him to those of you that haven't met. Brad has been incredibly instrumental in our business and very much in particular around designing and executing Project 2021. Brad's our Executive Vice President of Central Operations and believe me, he's had a vital role in the design of 3.0 and will definitely have a very big role in terms of the execution and delivery.
But we've got all the confidence in the world. And Brad, it's all yours.
Great. Thanks, Brendan. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining with us today. As Brendan would have mentioned earlier, I am going to kick us off here as we work through our first stage, if you will, our first component of Sunbelt 3.0, which ultimately for us
as an
organization is comprised of 2 elements. The first of that being the continued growth of our general tool business. You heard Brendan mention just briefly the prolific nature of that. I'm going to walk you through some further detail. The second part of that first component would be our advancing of clusters.
Brendan gave a great bit of detail about what that exactly means. I'm going to take you even further on that journey. So for the purposes of our time together here this morning and this afternoon, I say for the U. K. Team members, we will be walking you through, I will be walking you through our North American plan.
Shortly thereafter, you'll hear from Andy Wright, who will give you detail as to the UK business. So let me get moving here for our conversation. I think an important place for us all to begin the conversation is really taking a very brief look back over Project 2021, so that I can level set for all of you exactly what we mean by the strength and the nature of our general tool business. During the 5 year period of Project 2021, our general tool business grew revenue by 63%. That contributed to a massive portion of our growth during that period of time and puts us in a very, very strong position as we move forward.
But I think what I am most excited about as we look at this slide here is the fact that during that very period of time, our general tool business outpaced the U. S. Rental market by a 5 times factor. And in fact, when you compare us to the U. S.
Construction market, it exceeded it by 4 times. Now, while those might not quite calibrated to the way you're perhaps thinking. Let me demonstrate from our point of view what we think that means. We think very plainly said, we executed on gaining share in the marketplace, while lessening our direct tie to the construction markets. It's an important thing to understand as we began 3.0 because it is an indicator to our very intentional strategy and the success that we are gaining while continuing to advance our clusters.
So we're going to take a brief look at that here in a little bit. But let me go ahead and step forward to talk further about exactly what our growth plan is. This is the how during 3.0. So 55% of our general tool revenue will be driven by the existing locations that you heard Brendan mention.
As we have built up our business and
our footprint over time, we have found that the businesses we would have recently added to the footprint have given us an ability to tap into this latent capacity. So how do we do that? Well, it will take further CapEx investment to grow our existing rental fleets. At the same time, we have this awesome opportunity to really leverage the cluster economics that you heard Brendan mention just a little short while ago. So what does that mean?
You heard the conversation around 2.2 times more customers, improved rental rate performance, improved margin performance. Those are all things that will allow us to really lead from the front in these markets where we have advanced. But we can't do it simply by that alone. So where does the other 45% of our revenue come from? Well, quite honestly, we have gone back to what has been a proven opportunity for us as an organization and that is our greenfield expansion plan.
As we sit here today, you heard Brendan and you have seen on the slide where we have unveiled that roadmap of those 298 locations. Those are critical. And I cannot stress enough that we have dialed these in down to the zip code level. So let me talk a little bit about the general tool portion of that for a brief moment. We have 126 locations that we've plotted the course across all of North America with remarkable precision.
And the way that we're able to execute on that is by leveraging the years of experience that we have accumulated as an organization. But that experience is really deeply rooted into the analytics of the markets so that we make very informed decisions. So let's take a bit deeper dive into what I mean by that. So on Slide 24, there are a few things here that I'm going to walk you through. And if I start you on the upper left hand corner, you see there our current market share status.
Well, we are often asked how do you exactly do you calculate that at Sunbelt? It's pretty basic. There is the IHS rental market survey that would prescribe at a DMA, a market level, what the rental opportunity is assumed to we simply apply our current revenue in that market against the opportunity and we calculate our share. It's fairly common factor in how you analyze the opportunity. The second one of those is by looking purely at the forecasted construction start data that is published on an ongoing basis, on a quarterly basis.
It is a part of our decision making process. So we seek to understand what that means. But as we move beyond that, and we really think about a couple
of
statistics and metrics that we'll measure around, we believe these to be purpose built for Sunbelt Rentals. So by that I mean, we have begun to really take a very close look at a market level as to the general population of a market and we consider the fleet available through Sunbelt to service that population. And we did it because as we have continued to say time and time again, we certainly believe that in broadening the end markets in furthering rental penetration, we have to be present to serve the general population and we have to have the fleet ability to service that customer base, be that now or in
the future. The other part
of this that you know that Sunbelt really takes great pride in is understanding the amount of square footage under roof. In fact, across North America today, there's 100,000,000,000 square foot under roof, which we seek to serve and continue to drive that moving forward. So that's the analytical process. Once we've established what that roadmap looks like and what our thoughts and goals are around that. Now we have to pivot into how we execute at a market level with that growth plan.
And as you see in Slide 25, this is one that we have shared many times in the past. We have proven time and time again to have a very balanced approach to how we enter the market. So we look at the opportunity to serve, we look at the size of the market, our current footprint, all of those inputs do matter. But I think as you would have heard Brendan mentioned earlier, we've shown that greenfields and bolt on acquisitions our 2 pathways we're incredibly confident will service to bring us to a success factor that we desire. I'll give you a quick example of 2 markets over time where we had executed on this strategy.
The first one would be in Minneapolis, St. Paul. So 2014, we entered the Minneapolis market with 2 Greenfield locations. We quickly thereafter followed up with additional specialty businesses also through Greenfield, but we weren't done. So the opportunity presented itself for further M and A opportunity, which we bolted on to our existing footprint and we continue to execute on that today.
Another example of where this strategy has been critical for us and I will take you through a bit more detail here in just a little bit, but I bring your attention to Toronto. So in 2017, Sunbelt would have entered Eastern Canada in Toronto and effectively the Ontario province through the acquisition of CRS and we didn't look back. We immediately began to bring our specialty businesses to light while continuing to successfully bolt on a couple of acquisitions over time. So while that's all very exciting and might seem easy, I can assure you it is not. Brendan would have mentioned earlier muscle memory.
This is something we've built out over time with a great deal of rigor. And while many people look at it and say, well, gosh, anybody can do that. We would argue otherwise. And I point you to just really the ecosystem that we've built here in order to make all of these growth plans successful for both general tool and our specialty team members. And we do that by centralizing dedicated resources to enable this to continue to happen.
The how of 3.0 for general tool is very simple and for specialty as well. We will be adding at a pace of 2 locations a week over a 3 year period of time. That's twice the pace we would have experienced during the past 5 years. So in order for that to be a reality, this team that you see here before you has to be in place. In fact, today, our business development team is a group that is purpose built and dedicated purely to greenfield openings and the integration of our bolt on acquisitions.
That's not something that you see replicated across our industry. We're able to do the same exact thing with our HR teams and our marketing. This has to be there in order for this to be a sustainable ongoing practice within Sunbelt. So let me now take you through a bit more detail as to how that looks across our different geographies within Sunbelt. Level setting, this is where we reside today.
You'll hear me talk about our East territory, our West territory. This is the starting point for 3.0. So on to the East, This is a market all across the East Coast where Sunbelt has had its longest tenure and really finds its roots. We are called Sunbelt Rentals. So our strongest share is in the southeastern part of the U.
S. There are 16 markets today where we actually have exceeded 20% share in the marketplace. And while that's an impressive number, we're not stopping there. We will continue to advance our share and our presence and drive our clustered market approach forward throughout 3.0. And we turn our eyes to a couple of particular markets, the Northeast, for example, where we recognizably have opportunity to grow.
I'm going to give you some more color here on the next two slides. So following on to the example here of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland is an area that I'm personally attached to as paying large portion of my career serving and operating in that market. And it's the 26th largest market. It's one that we often reflect on as a model for other markets to follow. Quite simply, we have exceeded the 20% share.
We have, as you can see in the upper left hand corner to my comment earlier, a larger fleet per hapida to service the general populace of the Baltimore market with continued expectations to grow, I might add. But from a contrasting standpoint, if we look at Boston, which is the 9th largest market in the United States, we recognizably have room to grow. And we have intentions to do just that. Again, looking at the fleet per capita, our starting point from our customer mix that we have today. It is a much larger market than Baltimore.
And as I stand here today, I can tell you with confidence, we are growing that market and soon look forward to reporting on our updates there. So that's East territory. What does that mean for the other side of Sunbelt if I move the west part of the country, which is the largest portion obviously of our footprint. This is really where 50% of the addressable market would reside. And really and understanding what the opportunity means, 15 of the top 25 markets reside in our West Territory.
There is massive opportunity for us to grow and we have intentions to do just that. So let me show you the LA market. So Los Angeles is the 2nd largest market in the United States and it's one that over time we have taken significant steps forward with a long way to go. Brian leads our team in Region 8 and the accompanying team members have done a heck of a job over the last several years really growing. But right now, I will tell you that we have clear line of sight to what that could mean.
Look no further than the fleet per capita that's available to service that market. And it gives us a high degree of confidence of our ability continue to grow in the L. A. Market. We expect great, great things to continue to come out of the market for us as an opportunity within Sunbelt.
So that's the U. S. You heard earlier us talk about our opportunity to enter Canada. So I'm going to take you a little deeper into exactly what that means. We would have entered as Sunbelt Rentals into the Canadian market back in November of 2014.
And this is one that I'm personally attached to having spent a great deal of time with Chris and his team and they've done one heck of a job here for us. If you consider just for a moment that from our starting point in 2014 to our ending point of 3.0 of 2024. In that 10 year run, we will achieve 10% market share. Now I am approaching my 24th year with Sunbelt and that is where we are today. So there's just a very, very high degree of confidence from everyone involved in a high degree of optimism about the long runway ahead.
So let's take a look at Toronto to really round out what that means. Toronto is the largest rental market in all of today our starting point is noticeably lower from our fleet size in the market. We have clear line of sight of what that pathway will bring. And I think about really what's happened in that short period in the Toronto market. And back in 2017 when we began the journey with the acquisition of CRS Contractor Rental Supply, it was very focused on one customer segment.
We quickly have pivoted to grow that customer base. In fact, back in 2019, we had the unbelievable opportunity of joining William F. White, which is in the lighting grip and studio business, to Sunbelt Rentals. Immediately, the opportunities began to flourish. Our specialty businesses that have joined that footprint in Toronto continue to be highly, highly successful.
And so we have a great deal of opportunity and enthusiasm about how we will grow in that market. So I want to take everyone back just as we draw things to a close here on General Tool and bring your attention back to this Slide 35, where I will point you again to our banding of the markets and how we are advancing our clusters. You heard Brandon talk about 2021 and back in 2016, I would have been a part of the team to stand on stage and delivered a plan and our ability and our roadmap to execute. We started with 6, we are reaching a level of 31, but at the conclusion of 3.0, we will achieve 49 clusters in the top 100 markets. That's an unbelievable feat from where we began.
However, I will tell you that from the degree of conviction that this team at Sunbelt possesses, we're not done yet. That's a long runway with very wide open opportunity for all the team members involved. So final thoughts just to leave with you and then I will bring my team member, Francis, to the stage to talk about specialty. But I hope you really can hear from all of us here today how dialed in this plan is, how confident we are in our clustered market approach and how excited we all are and prepared to execute on 3.0. So with that, I'm going to bring Francis to the stage to talk to us about specialty.
Francis, it's all yours.
Thank you, Brad. Good morning, good afternoon, depending on where in the world you are. We have a lot to cover in a short time. I will personally cover North America specialty and you will hear momentarily from Andy Wright regarding our specialty efforts in the UK. Much of this information we have never shared externally.
Today, we will review several topics as it relates to specialty and Sunbelt Rentals, starting with what specialty means to us, how it works, what makes it unique and finally, an inside look at our 3.0 plans, inclusive of market sizing and how we are positioned to deal with white space. Let's begin with defining specialty at Sunbelt Rentals. What is specialty? We are probably best known for a few businesses, but actually there are 9 distinct businesses that make up specialty at Sunbelt, all of which are on the screen, including lighting, grip and studio, our newest specialty business, which goes to market as William F. White in Canada.
Each of these businesses fit our specialty charter, which is a product and service, which intuitively lends itself to a degree of rental penetration when a reliable alternative to ownership is available through rental. Sunbelt focuses on products with comparably low rental penetration in predominantly non construction facing markets. There was a very long runway of growth opportunity that exists only a fraction of which we will get to over our 3.0 period. While 3.0 targets our known markets by specialty business, it does not venture into white space. Within white space, we have 2 approaches, organically introducing products and services within these divisions and secondly, incrementally adding new specialty businesses that fit our specialty charter.
The 3.0 targets are defined for each of our specialty businesses and we will get to those details. What 3.0 does not take into account is the continued white space opportunity, which is the remaining non discovered space where a reliable alternative to ownership will result in rental market growth and opportunity. A great example of a white space born business would be Flooring Solutions. Flooring Solutions did not exist 5 years ago. And today, we have demonstrated that not only was there a need for this in the marketplace, the rental penetration continues to grow as the demand pushes us forward.
But before we get into market sizing, we need to spend a little time on these businesses and their infrastructure or platforms. Turning to Slide 40, specialty at Sunbelt Rentals is just not about buying products and attempting to rent them. It is about the establishment of unique platforms within each business unit, starting with our people. Our team members in each business have a unique skill set or intellectual capital, which is required to service our customers in their individual space. The customer has a problem, solution, expectation that less qualified individuals could not satisfy.
Our team members received unique and specific training related to their job and customer expectation. Quite simply, it is our customers' expectation that we are as good or better than any other participant in each individual space that we compete in. We know you need this structure to do so. If it wasn't for the need of this level of skill or intellectual capital, we would have 20 specialty businesses by now. All of the display boxes in combination from what we internally refer to as the power of Sunbelt.
This ecosystem provides us the distinct opportunity to out service and outperform those historic specialty providers who met one point dominated these markets. All of the attributes, our people, the interconnection with cross selling with our general tool business, our existing customer relationships system wide, along with our entrepreneurial spirit, robust technology, state of the art products, massive footprint and overall capabilities puts us in an enviable position to be no less than equal to, more likely greater than those historic niche providers based on bringing the power of Sunbelt to bear. Attempting this in a single location eliminates the intellectual capital and solutions model and is not successful long term. In a nutshell, the power of Sunbelt to all of us internally is simple. For general tool, the power of Sunbelt is specialty.
For specialty, the power of Sunbelt is connecting it all together, inclusive of General Tool. It is the unique opportunity for a seller in any line of business within the Sunbelt family to meet the customer's unique and broad needs by cross selling any solution Sunbelt Rentals provides and the access of both seller and customer to rely on a subject matter expert that brings solutions to the customer to accomplish their projects. To summarize, when you hear the term power of Sunbelt amongst the Sunbelt team, and you often do, it means we will always have a solution that we can offer to a customer and there is truly nothing we cannot accomplish when it comes to servicing a customer when we connect all of the dots. Let's dive a little bit deeper into our structure on Slide 41. We have taken a time tested and proven approach to serving our distinct markets.
Each one of our specialty businesses share the structure shown here. This structure not only enables each business to operate as a standalone embedded in the power sunbelt, but it also brings to each market an intense focus by product and service, further delighting our customers driving rental penetration in these underpenetrated markets and creating solutions from a product, service or engineering standpoint. This structure is in place to ensure and resource the opportunity that exists within each space serviced by our specialty businesses, but it is a key ingredient to our success that our teams work together. So great steps are taken that there is cohesion and relationships across businesses. This is seamless to our customers.
The customer sometimes asks the question, who am I supposed to call? Our answer is always call whomever you want, it is our job to make sure the right team responds to the request with the ideal solution and we are very good at making that happen. This sound infrastructure also puts us in a solid position to expand rapidly into 3.0 and beyond. If we were to just add specialty product to a general tool infrastructure, we would be missing the point of the expert solutions based model that the customer demands. I have introduced you to not only our charter, but also to the power of Sunbelt along with our model, which is where we are today.
Now I would like to detail where we are going from here. Let's focus now on 3.0 and its component parts. As late as last week, we struggled internally with sharing this level of detail, but realized in time that including this information for the first time was important to show how we have sized and validated these businesses along with their unique levels of rental penetration. Our platforms are robust, giving us the ability to springboard into the future with momentum. Turning to Slide 43, we have gone from virtually non existent to what you see on the left, from $600,000,000 just a few years ago in 2016 to an excess of $1,400,000,000 today.
This 2021 initiative was driven almost equally between existing location growth as well as greenfields and bolt ons. Our foundations are strong from top to bottom, as you see on the chart to the right. The current $1,400,000,000 in revenue is driven from 342 specialty locations in North America. Let us look just at one of these businesses journey. Climate control started in 2012 with $10,000,000 in revenue produced by 12 locations on the East Coast.
We possessed the intellectual capital requisite for a $10,000,000 business at the time. Fast forward to today, and climate control and air quality represents $233,000,000 in revenue with 88 locations that came both by way of greenfield in bolt on M and A. While this business has grown at an amazing pace, there is really no end in sight. Over the last few years, we've been investing significantly in equipment for air quality. This was a strong driver in Climate Control's plan before the pandemic and has been propelled even more so by the events of this year.
A combination of organic growth, greenfields and bolt ons coupled with an intense focus on training puts us in a position of exceptional intellectual capital, not only for existing footprint, but as well as for future growth. Speaking of growth, I would like to share with you our efforts to date on market sizing, rental penetration and market share, which begins on Slide 44. This is arguably our most important slide, not only because it provides details of rental creation and market share, but it also provides a glimpse of what we know will be a much larger specialty business beyond our 3.0 plans. We did a lot of work on the sizing effort from talking to industry experts and OEMs along with using publicly available information to an extensive validation process with a well known market research organization. This work not only gives these markets shape and size for the first time, it also fully supports our roadmap for growth in 3.0 and beyond.
Clearly there was a range of maturation amongst our businesses. Arguably as they cascade on the left, most mature would be Power and HVAC Business, Lease Mature, our ground protection business. Let me deconstruct this chart on the left for you using Power and HVAC as an example. The green bar represents where we are today. In case of power and HVAC, approximately $539,000,000 in revenue.
The yellow bar represents the 3.0 plan growth driven by existing locations and greenfields. The gray bar represents incremental illustrative potential gains, which will come by way of increases in rental penetration and market share. To the middle of the slide now to cover penetration and market share. Rental penetration is quite easily explained with the example of power HVAC. If there are 100 generators in the market and 95 are owned by end users and 5 are owned by rental providers, that would indicate 5% rental penetration.
Within that 5% population, we would peg our market share at 13 using widely available revenue numbers. We are confident as we further develop these markets and provide a reliable alternative to ownership, we see a clear line of sight to 15% penetration. 15 rented generators out of 100, along with our ability to expand our market share accordingly. We see a longer term business approaching $2,000,000,000 in Power HVAC. A good example of the gray bar or future state within power in HVAC space would be the standby or backup generator market.
Most commercial buildings today have standby generators in case of power loss. These standby generators are large, require run time and maintenance and are designed or spec to generally carry the entire load of the facility. We can see a future where that backup generator plan is altered by way of an ESG initiative, by CapEx or another force or by a combination of factors inclusive of a reliable alternative to ownership. Put another way, could that same commercial building be backed up by a significantly smaller, less costly generator, either diesel powered or another alternate energy source such as battery, complemented by a standing agreement with Sunbelt's Power and HVAC business to bring the property fully up to power within a predetermined number of hours and paying only for that exceptional use when needed. Please note these future state rental penetration and market share assumptions are not time bound.
Rather they are simply reasonable, if not conservative expectations for each of these categories, as a reliable alternative to ownership is introduced via rental. On average, we have concluded that our 9 specialty businesses represent a low 10% rental penetration. This compares to the broadly defined general rental market at 55%. Those yellow bars mentioned earlier are our 3.0 conclusion of $2,400,000,000 However, the gray bars give us a path to $6,000,000,000 with the combination of more rental penetration as these 9 businesses mature along with their market share gains. Let me break down 3.0 into its executable parts, that starts on Slide 44.
We will start with existing location growth. It is worth noting that the majority, about $700,000,000 of the 3.0 growth will come from locations that are already open today. So as we stand here today, this is underway. The fleet is ordered and landing at locations that are actually growing and gaining market share. We have covered our structure, our platform and our established locations.
We have not yet introduced the concept of latent capacity. We have we have 146 locations of the 342 that were opened or added via M and A in the last 36 months. We know internally that 36 months marks maturity and understand by specialty business what the ramp up is from month 1 to month 36. This latent capacity combined with further developing the more mature locations via product and service offering as well as leveraging our massive customer base by cross selling along with driving rental penetration. The other factor in our own execution of 3.0 is in the greenfield arena, 172 of which our plan with 102 coming from Climate Control, Flooring and Power and HVAC.
All three of these being our most mature specialties and ones that have a proven track record when it comes to greenfields. Of the 172, 54% will be in the top 25 DMAs, producing about $300,000,000 in revenue. In some cases, M and A will replace the planned greenfields in others, they will be purely additive. They have proven to be a key part of our SES and overall growth strategy across nearly all specialties. As a point of reference, from fiscal year 'sixteen through fiscal 2021, an average of 27 Greenfield locations were open per year compared to an average of 57 during 3.0.
I would certainly call that amplifying specialty. Finally, I'll look into our business development and white space engine. We have a long standing powerful culture of entrepreneurism. The basis of this R and D engine is a broad based multidisciplinary group evaluating new product and service ideas driven from the field via routine meetings where not only are the opportunities sized, but OEMs assessed and pilot programs put in place. These products and services end up in 1 of 2 buckets.
The first being a product or service folding into an existing specialty business or a pilot defined to be another standalone business unit. A good example of product based R and D output we'd be quickly adding electrostatic sanitizers to our offering and flooring solutions in response to COVID as they deal routinely with institutional cleaners. We are constantly reviewing products and dropping them into existing businesses and when it makes sense, splitting them out or creating them as standalone business altogether. Many of the specialty businesses you see represented here we're born through this exact process and all of these R and D engine ideas and concepts would first have to comply with our specialty charter. The R and D effort is specifically designed to unearth, quantify and execute on white space inherent in our markets.
Turning to Slide 47, we have been at this an exceptionally long time. We are now extremely comfortable with our overall abilities. We are primed and ready for this opportunity. Although COVID halted many businesses in the world, it did not have the same effect on us. We have a detailed by zip code roadmap by business.
We have sized our markets and more clearly understand white space. We are prepared to further influence rental penetration via reliable alternatives to ownership and we are well on our way to scaling our specialty businesses and feel confident that the ESG movement will provide ample tailwinds. These business models are difficult to replicate due to many factors, expertise, unique approach by business, robust platforms, but most importantly, the power of Sunbelt. A breakout video giving more detail to our specialty businesses and introducing you to a broader set of the team is available following today's CMD. An additional much more detailed video regarding our William F.
Lighting, grip and studio business will be available in June on our website. Thank you again for your time today.
Great, Francis, thanks for that. Thank you. While we transition here from specialty, I've mentioned early on that we're going to this is a group wide plan. So I'm happy now to introduce you for the first time today to our stage in London at our office on Chief's side. And here you'll see we've got Andy Wright.
Hello, Andy. I hope you're doing well today. Andy, of course, has done an extraordinary job over this year and beyond really transforming this business. I'm really excited for you to hear straight from Andy about all their efforts and our look to 3.0. So Andy, it's over to you.
Thank you, Brendan. Hello, everyone. My task today is to give you all a preview of what's in the UK breakout session, which will follow today's main event. Having assumed responsibility for the business in August 2019, I along with Phil Parker, our CFO, committed to undertake a thorough strategic review of the business in collaboration with the whole UK team. We knew that only by delivering a long lasting and sustainable cultural change across the whole organization would be able to make the improvements that we believe were necessary to make the UK business an attractive investment proposition again.
Trading performance at PEAT in 20 sixteen-seventeen with around a 15% return on investment and had reduced each year thereafter. As a consequence of the strategic review, Project Unify was born and through this we built a new plan to correct the course for the future and for the long term. We recognize the need to adopt a more joined up approach to removing excess and overlapping costs, but to also present a clearer go to market strategy for our customers. As part of reinventing the business, we also recognized the need to create a vehicle for this change to happen and we concluded that we needed to rebrand. It was not a difficult decision to become Sunbelt Rentals and this change is now largely physically complete and most people would agree that our new business now looks great.
But putting that to one side, the most important aspect of this rebrand is the way that we have been able to use this to re energize and reinvigorate our people and our teams, where we've done this by giving them something that they can feel very proud of. We've also through this process been able to challenge them to become the best that they can be and to step up and raise their game to meet the values of the Sunbelt brand. Having launched the new plan in March 2020, we were immediately presented with an opportunity to put the new unified business model to the test. Our opportunities to support the UK government's response to the pandemic through the Department of Health and Social Care and its COVID-nineteen testing site rollout plan has allowed us to demonstrate the combined strength of our business model. Building 500 bespoke testing sites from design to delivery to installation and now the ongoing operation of them has been challenging, but the team has delivered magnificently on this challenge, outperforming our competitors to such an extent that we have successfully completed 80% of the total sites built across the length and breadth of the UK.
We own and operate a unique range of products and services and when we join them up, we are very difficult to compete with. COVID-nineteen, very sadly, I suppose, has given us the opportunity to put our strategy into action and to demonstrate the full extent of its power. So as we transition our plan from Unifi to Sunbelt 3.0, the timing of which is a natural development for the UK as Unifi has become the way we do things in the business now. I will explain in detail in the breakout how we will do this across all 5 of the actionable components and how this will improve the UK's performance of the term of the plan. That said, I'd like to spend a short time now focusing on the 2 operational components of the plan and to give you a flavor of the opportunities that exist to improve the business.
Like the U. S, our business is organized into 2 distinct areas: General Tools and Equipment and Specialty Businesses. If I start with General Tools and Equipment and our plan to grow it, then the context that we find ourselves working within is one of a business delivering declining performance over time. The declining performance has been driven by rate reduction and because of too many small, subscale and suboptimal locations, unable to realize any scale benefits and through its decentralized organizational model, the fleet of rental assets has been underutilized and has operated inefficiently. We have a plan to address this declining performance.
And even though the UK market is at a different stage of its development to the U. S. Or Canada, if we operate General Tools well, we can create a business that makes solid returns and margins as well as playing a significant part in delivering the whole unique range of products and services that our customers are looking for. To do this, we intend to optimize our depot network, combining adjacent locations and building operations with scale, as scale helps us to improve margins. Through reducing our hire desks and logistics teams from around 100 to 8 regional teams.
We're able to better use and control assets, operate proportionately smaller rental and transport fleets, thereby improving utilization. We control price better and we've maintained our fleets to a higher standard through large scale engineering capability. At the same time, we're rolling out our One Best Way operational excellence program, which will raise the quality of what we do everywhere. In short, we're going to do more from less but better. Our second component within the plan is our intention to amplify Specialty.
As with the U. S, we have a range of specialist businesses. I'll go into more detail in the breakout. And these are generally growing strongly and delivering better returns than our general tool business areas. We intend to build on our current momentum, continue to build and improve our existing businesses as well as expanding our customer offer through organically launching new products and services through our existing operational footprint.
For example, over the last 12 months, we have been able to successfully launch a new Safety and Communications business, which we are now trading nationally from 10 existing locations co located with other businesses. Through this launch, we've been able to add significant incremental revenues over this time, but at a much lower incremental cost. This geographical expansion within existing locations of high returning products and services is a key part of the amplification of our specialty businesses. Through our various business units and as a result of the contracts we have in place with major clients, we have been able to extend these contracts to include the new products and leverage relationships that we have in place. It's a win win scenario because by extending the range of what we do for customers, we become much more easy to do business with, which is a key aspect of why they buy from us.
Our future plan will include more of this type of specialty organic bolt on expansion activity, allowing us to cross sell more, fill in more white space with our key customers and do this at the lowest possible cost through utilizing our existing network of larger scale facilities. As I have said, I will cover the other 3 actionable components as well as the cultural enablers that underpinned the plan during the breakout, but they are essential to delivering the overall strategy and to join up the key strands of the plan. We will be heavily leaning on the group structure and the great work that has been done already in the U. S. To support us in these critical areas.
So finally, what will the UK deliver over the duration of the plan? Well, Phil will go into more detail in the breakout, but in essence, the U. K. Will transform itself through the actions that we are taking and that we will take going forward into a business that delivers class leading, long term and sustainable profits, margins and returns. We will be cash generative and we will remain cash positive with all actions being self funded from our own cash flow.
Organic growth is at the core of this plan and whilst we'd be foolish to rule out any M and A activities, they are not the primary focus of this plan. We anticipate strong free cash flow post investments and we are confident that 3.0 will help us to build a business that consistently delivers returns in the 12% to 14% range, ahead of our cost of capital and to once again ensure that we become a positive contributor to the success of the group. This is a 3 year plan to transform the U. K. Business and through it we intend to build a business that we can all be very proud of.
Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you all in the breakout session. I'd now like to hand you all back to the States and to Brendan.
Great. Thanks, Andy. Well done. And I'll encourage, as you've mentioned a few times, that when you get a chance following the general session, take a look at that breakout, you'll learn so much more about the UK business and what the team's been up to. What we have reached that point, which I promised from the very beginning that we're now at a break.
We're going to take 10 minutes now. And when we return, you're going to see John Washburn on the stage to talk about our markets and our customers. We'll see you soon.
Welcome back from break. I'm John and it's good to visit with you again. I'm going to spend a little bit of time today talking about our end markets and our customers. Our end markets are incredibly broad and we are constantly working to expand these markets, whether it's adding new customers, cross selling deeply into our current customer base, introducing new products to rental or creating new specialty solutions. So here on the slide, you see an illustration of Anytown North America.
And we've shared this image with you in the past at previous Capital Markets Days. We've also attempted to highlight this range of our broad end markets in our most recent quarterly results calls. But that's conceptual. From a reality perspective, you don't have to look much further than our performance over the past year as a great case study to our ever evolving markets. There's no way that a company like ours could outperform the market and our peers without having incredibly diverse markets.
So now that we have a general understanding of the breadth of our end markets, Allow me to introduce yet another dimension of our platform that we feel is incredibly relevant to our success, and that's our diverse product offering and this is something that we don't talk about nearly enough. Our fleet is incredibly diverse. We have nearly 4,000 serialized SKUs or CAC classes to be specific. And the key to this diversity is the range of applications and solutions that these collective products enable us to deliver to our customers, which is truly limitless. It's this range of products combined with a strong go to market strategy, a highly trained sales force that creates something unique and we call this uniqueness the power of Sunbelt.
On this next slide, I'd like to marry the concept of our broad end markets that you see on the left hand of the slide. This is a very long list of segments and sectors, and I'm sure that we've missed a few, with the diversity and applications within just a single product SKU. So let's take an illustrative look at how a same product has applications that transcend across multiple tangible actionable markets here at Sunbelt Rentals. We have 4 TAMs here, non residential construction, maintenance, repair and operations, infrastructure and response. And the product we're going to dive into is a telehandler, of which we own nearly 22,000 of these assets across our company.
Historically, the telehandler was purpose built and designed to set roof trusses, to place material on the 3rd story of a building or to lift steel beams into the air. It really wasn't designed to lift concrete cauldrons that you see on the infrastructure example here or to move around pallets of food and water in a response situation. But our telehandlers do. And they do because we have built these conduits through our customers into our broad end markets. You can do this example with many of our products.
Yet another example that I might share with you from our specialty business line is an air conditioner, and it will play across these TAMs just as well. From a non residential construction perspective, every day across North America, we are cooling a building that is under construction, keeping the contractors comfortable as they finish that construction. Great example of MRO, which is probably the most common, is that any commercial property experiences problems with their main mechanical system perhaps failing and we can come in immediately and serve them with a temporary cooling system until that system is either repaired we're replaced. From an infrastructure perspective, what comes to mind for me is a manhole where we can bring clean and comfortable air to a confined space so that worker can work safely and comfortably in that manhole. And from a response perspective, I'll go right back to the slide and picture.
These pallets of food and water after they come off of this semi are going to be placed into a tent and that tent is going to need to be cooled. So these items don't perish before they get to where they need to. So it's really pick a product, any product of our 4 1,000 products and we'll be able to give you examples of applications across multiple sectors. It's because of our diverse products and having these different applications across these broad end markets gives us the ability to say yes to our customers much more often. It also provides our sellers the unique opportunity to highlight this diversity through additional cross selling opportunities.
We know this to be true because our customers are constantly seeking a wide range of solutions from a single provider. We have a plethora of internal cross selling metrics and statistics and I just wanted to share a few with you today. Now this is a level of detail that we don't often get to in a setting like this, so we tried to pull 3 really relevant powerful stats and we'll start with 72. 72% stands for the percent of rental revenue from our organization over the trailing 12 months from customers that are running from a General 2 location and 1 or more of our specialty businesses. To take that down a level, 39% represents the amount of revenue from customers running from a general tool location and 3 or more of our specialty businesses.
And I can assure you that 39% is increasing every day. The incredibly powerful stat to the right, dollars 47, stands for every $100 spent with our general tool business, the same customer spends $47 across the rest of the power of Sunbelt. Now that is cluster economics. Now this can't be done unless you're advancing clustered markets, as Brad described earlier. This cannot be unless you are amplifying the specialty businesses and entering white space like Francis detailed.
Now we have technology that backs these tools up and makes it ever easy for our sellers to share leads across our platform and reach our customers in different ways. And technology enables that greater and greater as we move forward. But there's one simple thing that we think we do really well that companies often forget about. To a seller, sharing is not something that comes natural. So we have to incentivize them to do so and engage their customers and their peers in a different way.
Sure, our compensation plans will change over time and we'll enhance them from time to time. But one thing remains core to any plan that we roll out. And it's that idea of making sure that we incentivize our sellers to cross sell. We not only compensate the seller that comes forward with the lead, but we also share that commission with the seller that actually closes the lead. And this really engages the sales force.
And we think who wins in this is the customer. It really enriches the customer experience,
full stop.
Speaking of the customer experience, the difference between an ordinary customer service and a world class customer experience may seem rather narrow, but it's incredibly more complex than one may think, particularly in the equipment rental industry. Now much like Francis would have said earlier, we struggled a bit with sharing this concept with you of the perfect rental as we've yet to roll it out to our teammates, which we're set to do next week. You've heard us talk about availability, reliability and ease and the customer promise and how both of these are core to driving rental penetration. The perfect rental was a commitment, a new commitment designed to take our customer experience to the next level. You can see we have it trademarked and you can see the criteria here defining the perfect rental.
Our teammates will surely rally around this. And I'm incredibly confident that it will continue to drive this flight to quality that we've seen from our customers over the last couple of years. Of course, something like this, the perfect rental, you can't pull it off without incredible people. And we have that, an incredible culture and their collective experience coming through for customer, but it's also part assets, tangible and intangible. It's about repeatable processes.
And it's a huge helping of technology, all harmonizing to create what we call the perfect rental. So in this modern world, technology is absolutely advancing and enabling sales in ways at a rapid pace different than the past. And I commit to you that our investment in technology will enable our sellers to sell more effectively, to increase order capture and to price more dynamically as we move forward. So let me introduce to you JP, who's newer to our organization. He will lead these advancements in technology and over the last 9 months I have worked shoulder to shoulder with JP and I've admired his professionalism, his insight, his vision and his execution has really been a breath of fresh air.
And I'm happy to call him my peer. So JP, I'd like to take it from here. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.
Good morning and afternoon, everybody. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you today. 9 months in and technology is again a central focus to our strategic growth. So no pressure. Our promise of availability, reliability and ease has fueled tremendous growth.
However, we're not done. In fact, we're far from it. Core to our 3 year old strategy, we're driving significant enhancements to how we operate, increasing speed and scale across the enterprise and opening improved paths to market. I joined this executive team to help accelerate these ambitions, building on the incredible expertise and experience we already have. To that end, we have recruited a talented team of experts and innovators with experience across industries and domains to complement our already talented and successful teams.
Together, we have a clear purpose, a mission and we are already executing on that. We're leveraging our collective experience and expertise, doubling down on our culture of entrepreneurism and deploying data to drive innovation. We're focusing on sustainability and scale as we fortify and expand our technology driven ecosystem, strengthening and advancing our omni channel e commerce experiences, making these more intuitive, at the same time generating new customers and creating greater stickiness with our existing base. We are driving enterprise wide improvements to our core value proposition of availability, reliability and ease while securing significant economies as we move towards a robust group wide platform with a shared set of applications, all the while ensuring world class security across the enterprise. The vision is set, the engines are firing.
Today, I'll provide a glimpse into how we intend to support the 3.0 plan from a technology perspective. Moving on to Slide 60. Earlier John introduced the idea of perfect rental. What drives the perfect rental? At its core, it's people and technology working in unison, internal systems, data, logistics, customer intel, pricing, order management, availability, all coming together in precisely the right manner to support our customers.
There are lots of parts and systems that need to work together to deliver the perfect rental. If you think and feel that it's complex, You're absolutely right, it is. However, the result is powerfully simple. The equipment our customers need at the right price when and where they need it. You know that when we focus on customer positive customer impacts to our customers, we can expect positive business outcomes to follow.
Now this is a concept I call Technovation. The right people coming together with the right strategy, operating with a sense of urgency to deliver a compelling outcome for our customers. And it underpins all we do to enable the perfect rental. Now as the CTO, I'm contractually obligated to show a tech stack diagram. I could talk for days about the details in here, but rest assured, I'm not going to do that.
What I'll say is that from a technology perspective, we already have of powerful foundational components and best in class technologies in place today. Further, the entrepreneurial culture is strong and thriving here at Sunbelt. This know how and the technology behind it already powers many purpose built solutions such as Kronos, VDOS, MSP, Command Center and many others. We have taken a collective intellectual property, dwelled over 20 plus years in the business and built robust market driven solutions. These are the proprietary capabilities that make us who we are and fueled our competitive advantage in the marketplace.
These are the difference makers. For example, Cronos, our proprietary available to promise and sourcing solution. It measures data and know how to solve one of our industry's most challenging problems, equipment sourcing and logistics. Kronos is live today and enabling us to say yes every time a customer calls us. And soon we are introducing new capabilities like Ray, a solution designed to empower our branch employees and peeled them away from the green screen user interface of yesterday, while we leveraged the power of our existing ERP solution.
Now Ray joins an already robust lineup of solutions, including Vida's command center MSP built on SUNK BEDS know how and brought to life via the modern technologies you see here. Let's switch to Slide 62. As you each know, Sunbelt Rental is already an industry leader in many areas, including technology. What you may not know is that by having fulfilled the equipment needs of over 7,000,000 plus unique customers over 20 plus years, we have amassed a critical competitive advantage, data. The data and know how we possess enables us to quickly innovate and continually level up our customer experiences and internal operations.
You've heard us talk previously about how Sunbelt is leveraging our data alongside with our culture of entrepreneurism to create a competitive advantage. By harnessing the power of emerging technologies and capitalizing on our data and expertise, we are creating new innovative solutions synchronized with an already established industry leading technology platform. Essentially, we are supercharging our intellectual property with ever more modern world class technology capabilities, all focused on our goal of driving the perfect rental.
Now let's switch to Slide 63.
To sum up this, it may sound ambitious, especially coming from a guy 9 months in his role. But that's how we do things here at Solvad. And I also have learned a few things in my 20 plus years of leading technology teams. One of those core lessons, technology isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets us to the thing.
And that thing is positive customer impact, embodied in the idea of perfect rental. We are generating positive customer impacts by empowering our employees with modern tools and solutions, transforming the experiences of our existing customers, opening up and activating new channels to new customers. That is what it is all about. Now I'll quickly take you through a few examples of focus areas within 3.0. First, customer experience aligned with our goal to power the perfect rental.
We are at work to level up customer experiences across the enterprise. You heard me talk about our goal for a stickier, more intuitive e commerce experience. Now as we move forward, we'll employ predictive analytics and leverage data and transactional history to deliver tailored experiences so customers can more quickly find what they need across all our channels. Each customer is unique and each will have a customized experience. We have already achieved critical wins in this area over the last few months.
Next, order capture and fulfillment. By empowering customers to do business with us in new seamless ways, we make Sunbelt the choice for equipment rental from our smallest to the largest customers. We're introducing powerful new tools and e commerce to conduct business 100% digitally for those customers wanting to do so. Our investment in modern omni channel solution is creating a wider funnel and opening new channels to previously untapped customer segments. And we are wiring these new experiences together with enhanced back office tools to streamline and optimize our ability to fulfill customer equipment needs, enabling greater speed, efficiency and self-service.
Last but not the least, dynamic pricing. We already have a powerful dynamic pricing platform. Throughout this pandemic, we have maintained our rates. This system and the team behind it have earned their stripes. Building on what has worked for us, dynamic pricing 3.0 takes us to the next level.
With 3.0, we will further develop and enhance our pricing strategy, optimizing based on customer history, incorporating new inputs, including demand, market conditions, permitting activity, weather data. Never has it been true or that the brand is the and the experiences of the brand. As technology evolves, the lines between physical and digital are getting more and more blurred. The point is, today every touch point in the customer journey is an expression of our company, from the first introduction to the last step in the supply chain. The digital business transformation we are driving is about creating multiple points of value across the entire journey for each of our customers.
Now I can tell you this company has an unrelenting competitive at Drive and the Drive has jump started our ongoing transformative journey. I'm grateful to have joined such a talented and dedicated leadership team here at Sunbelt. Now I look forward to updating you at the next opportunity. For now, I'd like to hand it over to my colleague, Katie. Katie Loewering will take you through a case study, an example of what we have talked about here today.
Katie has a critical role on our team. We work together to identify the areas of opportunity within our business where technology can have the biggest impact. She has the tough task of operationalizing technology solution to all our branches and employees. Now technology that isn't used isn't worth much. Technology that's tuned to a business need is adopted by our customers and employees can change and accelerate everything.
Katie?
Hey, thanks, JP. Hello, everybody. I am just so excited to be here with you today to share a story, a case study, if you will, about solving real business challenges with technology here at Sunbelt and improving our customer experience. So like with most stories, I need to start from the very beginning. As we got deeper into the last cycle, we got busier and busier.
And I know that you know that from a financial perspective, but what you may not know is how that looked and felt to our people and to our customers. It was lots and lots of phone calls between customers and our team members. So many urgent requests, but greater than 65% of orders coming in needed within 24 hours and a lot of manual horsepower and a make it happen attitude on behalf of our people. This is a person to person relationship driven industry. And we know that our customers depend on us.
Sunbelt's ability to provide a solution to our customers or not can be the difference in our customers completing their projects, meeting their timelines and providing for their employees and their customers. And despite our best efforts, the demand was just too great and it overwhelmed the process and the people we had in place. And there were many times that we hesitated and our customers felt that hesitancy, which means we know they checked elsewhere and we risked losing and even lost some deals. And we weren't making the best use of our time or our customers' time either. At the heart of this problem with our ability to quickly and confidently source equipment to meet customer needs.
Now this isn't a Sunbelt specific problem. Any company with mobile inventory with high, high levels of demand are struggling with this right now, but we've solved it. And our solution was to use technology to enable our teammates to Confidently say yes to every single deal. We decided that bringing automation to equipment sourcing and order fulfillment was the best possible way to solve this challenge. Now we call this thing Kronos even from the very start, because we wanted to capture the element of time.
Kronos is actually the Greek personification of time. And we wanted to give that time back to our customers and to our employees. So what is Kronos. At its highest level, it's custom developed software that leverages technology, including Azure Cloud Services, Redis cache clustering and KrakenD API gateways. Now I'll say all of that just to say that In short, it's a state of the art technology solution that acts in the vein of artificial intelligence to get to an outcome.
As our customers interact with our teammates or with some of the e commerce products, we are gathering the data that ultimately feeds Kronos. We worked through 4 main questions that give us some of the details that we need, starting with, what is your project? What work are you trying to do? What equipment do you need? Now we are equipment experts.
So we want to help our customers understand specifically, even within make and model, we have so many different specifications that lend themselves to different application and work being done. Let's get Customer to the exact piece of equipment they need, when do you need it and where do you need it. These data elements serve as the fuel to Kronos. So how did we automate sourcing? We took the best practice sourcing rules that our employees were using manually and turn those into digital rules and data to power a sourcing engine.
We connected the sourcing engine to our point of sale and logistics systems. And through this, Cronos takes away uncertainty around sourcing available equipment. Let me tell you a little bit about how Kronos works. As we enter order data into our order capture platform, Kronos, which is operating invisibly to our customers and our employees, ingest that data and within seconds, it routes the order to the best branch for fulfillment. So as an example, Kronos starts with the latitude and longitude of the place where our customer needs the equipment.
Kronos then builds out a predetermined radius around that pen and pulls in all front bulk branches within that radius. Cronos reviews the available inventory at those locations against For example, if our customer needed 2 19 foot scissor lifts, Cronos is reviewing that product level data along with the timing of the rental need and determines the somewhat branch closest to the customer site based on commercial motor vehicle routing with available inventory to placed the order for fulfillment. So Kronos operates as an order capture funnel. And if you didn't follow in the animation, here's another look at how Cronos works. Once the order inquiry is set into Cronos, Cronos we used the equipment.
Kronos was purpose built to make the most of our cluster economics. This market level review approach factors in All branches within a predetermined radius, taking into account the geography of the market like waterways or mountain ranges and uses logistics and employee data like driver schedules to determine the most optimal branch to fulfill the order. Our available to promise inventory check encompasses something we call alternate inventory suggestions, Meaning that we search for like equipment that may actually be better suited to fulfill the customer's needs. After all of this And some other secret sauce stuff too. I can't tell you everything.
Kronos displays to our teammates and our customer, the Subalt branch, who will receive the order and Captures that deal by routing the order to that branch for action. So keep in mind that just took me a few minutes to talk through, but Cronos is handling this entire thing in a matter of 2 to 3 seconds in real life. So after we developed Cronos and spent a while in testing, we had always known that we wanted to put it into a really good production pilot. And we really needed to put it through its paces in this pilot. Now Sunbelt's geographic footprint and culture are great for something like Kronos because we are a test and learn kind of company.
People raise their hands to get us to go test and learn with them. And I think that's really special. Me and my team, we need that level of ability to be able to experiment until we get something right. That's exactly what we did with Cronos. So our Cronos pilot included over 30 branches and close to $500,000,000 in fleet and 2 very mature cluster markets.
What we SAW was really interesting. So we had a 2.1% increase in utilization year over year in the pilot markets. We also established 2 control markets and the markets with Cronos outperformed the control markets utilization 1.9% during the pilot period. In the pilot, we also saw Kronos increased cluster performance, enhanced order capture and create time savings on the part of our employees. Another really important metric we tracked was available to promise or ATP responses from Cronos.
So in the pilot, we experienced 85% of ATP inventory checks coming back as readily available or requiring some minor action to make it available. 15% required more manual intervention to source the needed equipment. So after this successful pilot, we began a market by market approach to rolling Cronos out. We've had Cronos in in all North American locations since May of 2020. We continue to learn and validate a lot.
So you can see the ATP responses have improved since the days of the pilot with 91% of ATP responses showing inventory as readily available are requiring minimal effort to have it ready. We've been working on improving the logic over time with things like alternate inventory, which has led to some of these improved results. And of course, We're not done with continuous improvement of Cronos either. And while we certainly wouldn't have known what was coming our collective way, having Cronos in place during the COVID-nineteen pandemic was a contributor to our performance during that period. We outperformed and we strongly believe that Cronos allowed us to make order capturing easier than ever before And our customers felt that every time they reached out with a need.
So Kronos And what it represents is a way of life for us moving forward. And we are putting it to work in lots of different ways as you can see here, from supply chain to equipment service and logistics. So in short, we're just getting started and continuing to improve Perfect Rental and our ways of working within operations. Over the next 3 years, we've set our sights on increasing order capture, improving time utilization and rate. And we are more prepared than ever to successfully achieve these goals.
As you can probably tell, technology is just omnipresent in our business, including in our next topic of discussion, ESG. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Anthony Miller, who leads our SH and E efforts. Thanks everybody.
Thanks a lot, Katie. Hello, and I'm excited to talk to you today about ESG inside Sunbelt Rentals and how we feel we are moving the needle both internally and externally around each element of ESG. So we feel that we are positioned as a vital component when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint surrounding equipment. So today what we're going to do, we're going to discuss how we feel rental embodies the circular shared economy philosophy by the way we meet our customers' needs. We're going to cover 1 carbon emission impact study, where we look at the benefit of renting versus owning.
We're going to introduce our carbon intensity targets and then Douglas McLuckie is going to join us and talk about how we achieve those targets and we're going to close out with Sheryl Black, who's going to cover the social impact within the organization. I'd also like to make it clear that everything you hear today around ESG is about a group wide target. So we feel that rental is key when it comes to the principles of the circular economy reducing climate change. In fact, we feel rental and circular economy are synonymous in our view. So we are all on a path on carbon emissions in any way that we can.
And we really wanted to just address that in this particular slide. You can see the 4 buckets that we consider really the benefits of rental versus ownership and how rental capitalizes on each of these elements. And we'll start with the supply chain. And that works by working with world class OEMs who are focused on pulling the right materials out of the ground and making it more efficient from us to get the right pieces of equipment to our stores with the most low carbon approach, coupled with our operations. So operational excellence, making sure that we've got the most utilization out of a piece of equipment and also having making sure there are trained technicians working on that piece of equipment, coupled with getting it into the customer's hands.
And I can't stress this enough, it's getting the right tool in our customer's hand at the right time for the right amount of time. So the customers are not having to worry about maintenance or storage costs. And then that's the closeout when it comes to the end of life. So we know that we have one of the largest Tier 4 engine fleets in the world. And when we are finished with a Tier 4 engine, when we sell that engine back into the marketplace, a lot of times that engine replaces a Tier 0 or a Tier 1 engine.
And we know that for every hour, a Tier 1 engine runs, eating this 1.5 times the carbon as a Tier 4 engine. So you can see in each one of these, we feel that rental really capitalizes on those when it comes to the carbon benefits.
So what we're going to
do, we talked a little bit about the customer use side of the house. We're going to talk about one particular piece of equipment. This is a 2.5 ton mini excavator that was born in Pooler, Georgia. It was transported to sunny Birmingham, Alabama to one of our Sunbelt locations, where it's been worked on and maintained by a team of trained technicians. In that particular market that 2.5 ton Mini X is at 57% utilization.
Okay. So we know that this particular piece of equipment is rented 20 times a year to 20 unique customers a year. Okay. Now what we're going to do is we're going to reference a European Rental Association life cycle study for a 2.5 ton mini excavator. And we know that a 2.5 ton mini excavator, the embodied carbon, that's the carbon that it takes to create it and dispose of it is 3,200 kilograms of CO2.
Okay. So we do know that that 3,200 kilograms of CO2 is equal to the equivalent emissions of 7 passenger vehicles over 1 year. So now you're probably thinking, well, that's 1 year, that's 7 passenger vehicles that's one piece of equipment. So now we currently have 11,000 minutei excavators in our fleet in North America in the UK. And using those same assumptions, we know that the embodied carbon saved in the production of those 11,000 Mini Excavators has the impact of reducing emissions equivalent to 77 passenger 77,000 passenger vehicles in 1 year.
That's significant. That's doing something. So we're confident that this is a great illustration on rentals' ability to address our customers' carbon needs and will be a catalyst to increase rental penetration because this particular piece of equipment, the rental penetration is 35%. Just imagine 55%, 75%. So now let's transition from that to our commitments inside Sunbelt Rentals.
Between now and 2,030, we are committing to reduce our carbon intensity emissions by 35%. In addition to that, we are partnered with a Carbon Trust to capture our Scope 3 emissions and map those out. So now to talk to us about How we're going to do that, I'm going to turn it over to Douglas McLuckie. Douglas is the Managing Director of ESG in the UK and he's going to cover the how. Douglas, take it away.
Thanks, Anthony. Good morning, good afternoon. Here we can see how we intend to reach our goal through a glide path from today to 2,030 and beyond. We have reported on our Scope 1 and 2 emissions for over 10 years and supported the CDP. The principal components of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions arise from our delivery and transportation fleet and then to a lesser degree, our property estate.
To put this into context, we drive more than 250,000,000 miles a year delivering and servicing equipment and one of the largest trucking fleets in North America. We are addressing emissions from a delivery and transportation fleet from a number of angles, including greener vehicles, optimizing route planning, vehicle telematics and driver training. We are migrating to hybrid and electric for our smaller commercial vehicles. And as you heard from Katie earlier, we are looking to the next generation of Cronos and our vehicle dispatch software to enable more efficient route planning and vehicle loading, reducing the number and length of trips and hence reducing the number of wasted journeys. To visualize this, a 1% reduction in our 250,000,000 miles driven from more efficient route planning and vehicle loading would reduce our emissions by 1800 tonnes of CO2.
The use of telematics Also facilitates the reduction of vehicle idling and monitors driver behavior and efficiency. Our property estate makes up approximately 20% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and we are working hard to ensure we minimize our carbon footprint. This includes a mandatory environmental property standard for greenfields and refits and we're also looking to upgrade existing facilities. Alignment within our property state in relation to procured electricity and natural gas usage will support an ongoing decrease in carbon emissions. For example, the installation of ground and air source heat pumps and supporting the welfare infrastructure of our estate.
While we have a good understanding of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, we have not yet marked or quantified our Scope 3 emissions. In order to obtain a better understanding of Scope 3, we are working with the Carbon Trust to map these emissions and develop a pathway to a science based target. Moving out to the longer term, we feel that technology and natural enhancements in efficiency along with government legislation will drive OEMs in producing assets that support carbon reduction and our larger vehicle fleet and property estate. We know that battery technology for a large tractor trailer delivery vehicle is a long way off and we feel that maybe hydrogen or hydro treated vegetable oil known as HBO may have a part to play in bringing this forward. So on the next slide, we will show how we do this.
We are trialing electric vehicles in the UK and have produced a transition plan for light commercial vehicles that takes us out to 2,030. This would make this fleet 70% to 75% hybrid or electric by this time. And the shorter timeframe of 3.0, the pace of change can only be as aggressive as the manufacturer's capabilities and ramping up production, also being cognizant of the charging infrastructure needed to support both delivery and rental fleet. Within North America, we know the major manufacturers are improving their all electric vehicle options over the next 2 years and hence we will begin transitioning our North American delivery fleet to less carbon intensive alternatives as soon as manufacturers bring these products to market. Indeed, we are discussing with Peterbilt and Ford and how best they can support us on this journey.
On the previous slide, I mentioned what we are doing from a route optimization and vehicle telematics perspective. In terms of our facilities, we are exploring options for sustainable energy. We are currently evaluating the impact that a power purchase agreement can have within our U. S. Property estate along with the renewable energy guarantee of origin scheme here in the UK.
This along with on-site renewables such as solar to power our estate will yield long term sustainable benefits. In relation to water usage and waste, we are building a plan to better capture and analyze these impacts, thereby supporting objectives and targets and reduction as we grow. As I previously mentioned, we are working with the Carbon Trust on mapping our Scope 3 emissions. We see this program has been crucial and helping us understand the carbon efficiencies we can bring relative to our supply chain. This could include the way we procure, ship and receive assets for both rental and service.
We are very much aware that rental supports the transition to a low carbon economy. And in relation to our rental assets, we know that OEMs are beginning to push the boundary on new and innovative alternative fuel products within the marketplace. This push will not only support our customer scope 1 emissions, but clearly have a strong benefit to ourselves relative to scope The emissions. An example of this is the JCB 1.5 tonne electric mini excavator and the 6 meter electric telehandler that they have recently brought to market. Innovation within the powered access industry is also bringing benefits, newer battery technology that even removes the need for hydraulic fluids.
I shall now hand you back over to Anthony. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Douglas. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Cheryl Black. Cheryl needs no introduction with Inside Sunbelt. Cheryl is our Senior Vice President of Culture and Engagement for the organization. Cheryl, take it away.
Thank you, Anthony. Isn't it amazing to hear all of these opportunities Sunbelt Rentals has taken to make such a positive impact? I know everyone loves hearing about carbon tonnage in water metrics. But for my part, we're going to talk about the human aspect of what Sunbelt Rentals has accomplished, so feel free to put down your calculators. At Sunbelt Rentals, we always talk about doing the right thing for the right reasons.
But this year in particular, we've been able to show what that really means. COVID-nineteen has been a hurdle unlike any other, but Sunbelt Rentals' focus on its people and its communities throughout the pandemic has opened the door for the 3.0 strategy and beyond. In the very beginning of the pandemic, we were quick to make one thing clear. Our focus would be on 3 stakeholders defined as our people, our customers and our investors. With this core principle in place, Sunbelt Rentals led the way through all stages of its COVID-nineteen response and in doing so has earned an incredible amount of goodwill from our people and our Our team members saw that they worked for a company that did not require one layoff, while still respecting that some may wish to request a voluntary furlough.
Our team members got to tell their friends and family that they worked for a company that provided special paid time off for COVID related concerns to make sure that they were in no way penalized for having to deal with this At the same time, their company cared enough about their well-being that it brought in an infectious disease doctor to be a source for good Factual information. There were weekly conference calls so that everyone stayed informed of the latest information. Our team members saw their company pay 2 rounds of appreciation bonuses and provide its hourly team members an increase in pay because they didn't realize while we were protecting jobs, other people weren't so lucky. Our team members saw their company work hard to make sure that they had current accurate information about COVID-nineteen and to ensure that they were rightfully recognized as the essential service providers they are. Meanwhile, our customers saw uninterrupted service as Sunbelt Rentals owned its place as an essential service provider.
We changed our processes keep our customers and their workers safe by offering contactless rentals and curbside service. Our customers saw Sunbelt Rentals support first responders, hospitals and testing sites, and they're now seeing us provide that same support to the vaccination sites that will finally help bring us through this horrible event. All through this the whole time, our community saw that we did not waver in our philanthropic pledges, and we still provided hours of volunteer time and renewed our commitments to our charitable partners. So what did this value bring to the business? In January, Sunbelt Rentals had its 1st employee engagement survey in North America.
And let me tell you, the response was overwhelming. I would like to share the word cloud from our survey. It depicts the words our team members use to describe Sunbelt Rentals with the largest words appearing most often in the team member responses. Not only did they talk about safety, teamwork and family, But they use words like honest, fair and supportive. That's what our team members think of their company.
Our engagement score was 89%, Which by any measure is exceptional. And don't be fooled, this score is more than a reflection of our pandemic response. You don't get a score that high after only 1 year of helping your employees. What this score represents is proof that our team members recognize that they can count on us to act on their behalf consistently during good times as well as during challenging times. Also keep in mind that the score is especially good We're a blue collar company with 900 plus rooftops.
And we weren't alone in North America receiving such overwhelmingly positive feedback. Andy and team in the U. K. Conducted our 2nd engagement survey this year and earned a score of 80%. And that's in consideration of all we've been going through this year with rebranding, reenergizing and unifying.
I'm not alone when I say that we have no doubt we will see the same amazing level of engagement across the board now that we are 1 unified company. So what did we learn about this incredibly positive experience? Through our Express Yourself survey, we learned that 90% of respondents, that's over 13,000 people, said that they still want to be at Sunbelt In 2 years, 94% of our team members said that they care about the future of Sunbelt Rentals and 95% of them said that they know. They know that the work that they do helps Sunbelt Rentals achieve its goals. We learned that we have a very engaged work We're going to do it by reaffirming our value of safety at every opportunity.
We're going to do it by supporting our diversity and inclusion task to ensure that every person knows that they are safe and welcome at Sunbelt Rentals. We are making real progress in this area and will continue to do so from the boardroom to the branch. We're going to do it by taking team member engagement groups like our veterans program and growing it and then using it to build more groups such as 1 for women or the LBGT community. And we're going to do it by confirming, continuing to engage our philanthropic partners to continue doing what we do. That's the right thing for the right reasons.
So all this is why I'm so proud to say I work for Sunbelt Rentals. And like I say, I'm not alone. 91% of my teammates feel the exact way I do. Collectively, we are poised and ready to support 3.0 and beyond. This is the company I work for.
This is what the culture and character of Sunbelt Rentals is all about. Anthony, I'll turn it back over to you.
All right. Thanks a lot, Cheryl. So now let's bring it all home from an ESG perspective. We've addressed our long term objectives. Now let's address our short term objectives for Sunbelt 3.0.
1st and foremost, everything starts with safety. This past year, we have had our best safety performance ever in the organization, but make no mistake, our journey to safety excellence is continuous and is not over yet. 35 by 30 is our long term carbon intensity target, but we'd like to set a near term target of 15% by the end of 2024. You also have our commitment to distribute a group sustainability report in the spring of 'twenty two, including a roadmap to science based targets. And finally, 85 percent engagement rate across the group because we know that an engaged team is needed to deliver on Sunbelt 3.0.
Thanks a lot. I'll turn it over to Brendan.
Thanks, Anthony. Hello again. I've got Kurt Kinkle on the stage, who is our Executive Vice President of Business Development. Kurt's been with Sunbelt since 1995 and he has been instrumental in all of the M and A activity that we've done from our larger deals that you may know about that we've done over the years or the bolt on track record that we've had over the last several years, which Kurt is going to cover in a bit more detail. But before I turn it over to Kurt, you may not have met him, 1 or 2 of you may have when you've been through the support office, but rest assured he's incredibly well known in the organization.
But importantly, he's incredibly well known across the ownership landscape of the independent rental companies in North America and certainly from a broker standpoint. So the team earlier, most notably Brad and Francis covered our greenfield expansion plan that is incumbent in Sunbelt 3.0. They touched a little bit on our history of bolt ons, but not so much how that factors into 3.0. So all of that is what you're going to hear from Curt now. So Curt, over to you.
Thanks, Brendan. I'm excited to present my thoughts on our bolt on history and our strategy surrounding it. It all began in 1990 with that $2,500,000 acquisition of Sunbelt's 2 branches headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Since then, we've been active complementing our green field growth with over 130 bolt ons. The focus of this presentation today is on 2011 forward, which will separate into Sunbelt 1.0, 2012 to 2016 and Sunbelt 2.0, which is a 5 year 2021 plan, which sunsets in a little over a week here.
I'll preface all this by saying we don't budget for M and A, but it's been a compelling part of our growth story. On the left side of this slide is a short list of the variety of deals we've closed since 2016, and there's roughly 65 transactions in that bucket. We're looking for leaders in their markets or in their product offerings. Examples include Pride as an aerial market leader in New York City or William F. White as a product leader in the film and production phase.
We look to align the bolt ons with a robust greenfield roadmap you heard earlier from Brad. You'll see in the green we referenced to some of being the buyer of choice. This isn't meant to boast, but we feel like our approach is a little different. While cost synergies exist in almost every deal. We don't focus on them because the bigger costs in a rental business are the people, the facilities and the equipment, all of which we need to grow.
So we're focused on the revenue synergies, which create the follow on opportunity for Sunbelt in a successful transaction, but it also resonates with the sellers because it gives their employees an opportunity to continue to grow. Secondly, we do what we say we're going to do and it builds a reputation with the sellers and with the brokers. And third, there's a strong ground game here. Team highlights opportunities and engages with sellers. We've got an integration team.
Prior to every deal, we meet with each employee. We understand change is difficult. So we convert to the acquired business to our IT tech system, typically within 48 hours. And we stay embedded in these businesses post closing. We don't close in DASH.
We're waiting until the team is comfortable in their new roles. There's approximately 40 owners that have remained in influential roles at Sunbelt, their profit center managers, vice presidents, senior vice presidents or maybe even ambassadors, and who better to meet with a potential seller than someone who's been through it before. So that's the combination of why we feel like we're the buyer of choice.
We've done all size deals,
but as you see the smaller undercapitalized businesses have played a key role in our strategy. We closed on 96 deals less than $100,000,000 since 2011. In total, we spent nearly $2,900,000,000 on bolt ons since 2011. You'll see certain of the historical average metrics presented there on the right. And I think the takeaway there is simply we're disciplined in our valuations.
The EBITDA multiples, which often you see as the headline figures, they're more of an output and not the determinant of the purchase price for us. These businesses need to generate an attractive return on investment for us or we don't do them. So as you might expect, the larger deals have been slightly more expensive from a relative multiple standpoint. And interestingly, 3 fourths of the deals we're not run through a brokered process, which means a strong network of opportunities and a ground game are mandatory for the success of that approach. And the revenue for the success of this approach is on these bolt ons since 2011 represents 25% of our trailing 12 month North American revenue.
This slide shows our bolt ons by a year since 2011. These bolt ons have been a consistent component of our growth strategy. As our ground game and support infrastructure improved over the years, we were able to increase the pace. That first tranche, Sunbelt 1.0, averaged 8 transactions a year. And then moving to the second one, we averaged 16 a year.
And it tracked each one of these deals post closing. So you'll see the revenue to purchase price improves over time as the acquisitions mature we continue to invest in them. The ROI improves over time as well, both with and without goodwill. That trailing 12 month revenue embedded in these metrics has been reduced by the COVID impact over the trailing 12 months, nor does it reflect any cross selling benefit of the acquired businesses and the related Sunbelt specialty division, our general tool division. John mentioned the incremental boost we get from that.
Well, none of that's reflected here because the revenue stays with the profit center that owns the equipment. So what's our path forward? We took 10 months off during COVID, but we've returned. We've closed on 3 deals since February with an active pipeline. And with the relative deal sizes we do, our clustering bolt on strategy and the fact that it's a fragmented market, there's ample runway to continue here, both existing and white space opportunity exists to transition the ownership to rental.
And to sum things up, there's an extensive database of opportunities on top of the many existing relationships that will materialize over time. So, Brendan, I'll turn it back to you.
Great. Thanks, Kurt. I think you will appreciate that level of detail that we've just shared more than we ever have before. I want to emphasize that throughout this year, although we took that pause that Curt had mentioned in terms of finalizing any deals, we did not stop the discussions. Kurt and his team carried on discussions with owners, with brokers, etcetera.
The reason why I say that is, rest assured we're rubbing the engines up a bit. There's been a little activity as of late and I would expect some to come in the not too distant future, all of which are businesses that we've been looking at for quite some time. So with that, we're going to move on to the concluding slides of this, all in the manner in which we've talked about. And to do so, we're going to turn to the stage once again back to London and I'm going to turn it over to Michael to cover some of the financial implications of Sunbelt 3.0. So Michael, back over to you.
Afternoon, Brendan, and thanks very much. Good afternoon to everyone else and I guess morning if you're across the pond. You spent the last couple of hours listening to our plans for the business and what it means for our people, our customers and our communities. My task is to pull that all together and translate into what it means from a financial and a capital allocation perspective. We've talked about the development of our business over the last 10 years and this has seen a step change in its scale and capability, both operationally as you've seen, but also financially.
We are now in a stronger financial position as we've ever been, which provides a foundation for us to embark the ambitious plans we've talked about today. But before I talk about the future, it's worth just reflecting on where we are today and where we've come from. As you heard from Brendan earlier, after we came out of the 2,008, 2009 financial crisis, we generated revenue of £949,000 in 20 That year we made a profit of £31,000,000 and our leverage was 2.7 times. How different things look 10 years later? In a year affected by the pandemic, revenue is close to £5,000,000,000 profit is at a similar level to revenue in 2011 and leverage is around 1.5 times.
As you recall, we grew aggressively coming out of the last downturn and our intention is to do the same again. However, a big difference today is how we fund that growth. As we grew in the early part of the last decade, we were free cash flow negative as we spent on growth CapEx and invested in the platform. It was not until 2017 that we generated positive free cash flow after all organic growth. That's not where we sit today.
The scale, maturity and diversity of the business is fundamentally different. As a result, we're in a position whereby we can not only fund all our organic growth from cash flow of the business, but also a significant amount of bolt on activity as well. In other words, we have a lot of flexibility and optionality, which we will use for the benefit of all our stakeholders. So turning now to our plan for the next 3 years. After the turbulence of the last year, the economic backdrop, particularly in the U.
S, appears relatively supportive as economies return to growth, admittedly with a fair helping of government support. So taking our main market in the U. S, GDP is forecast to grow ahead of the long term trend at around 3% to 5% over the period with the jobs market recovering the jobs lost as a result of a pandemic by the end of 2023. The market demand for rental is more a function of GDP and population than any other factor. And you saw the opportunity this presents from Brad earlier.
Just compare and contrast the Baltimore and Los Angeles markets. Today, we have almost twice as much revenue in Los Angeles as in Baltimore, yet we have 60% less fleet per capita in Los Angeles. And that is true for many of our markets across the U. S. That said, we cannot ignore what is happening in specific end markets.
Let's take a look at our largest one, construction, although don't forget it's less than 50% of our business today. After the contraction last year, Dodge is forecasting starts to recover this year and reach pre COVID levels in 2022. Reflecting part of the falling starts last year, construction put in place is forecast to drop slightly this year before then recovering. However, a key driver of that performance is residential, which is only a small direct part of our end market. In contrast, non residential put in place is forecast to decline 10% this year and only return to 2019 levels by 2024.
It's worth noting that these forecasts do not include any significant contribution from the new U. S. Administration's recently announced infrastructure spending plans. You've heard about our detailed plans for each of our markets, which we believe will enable the group to grow revenue organically at an average annual rate of around 10% over the 3.0 period. Taking each of our markets in turn, In the U.
S, we're looking for organic growth unsurprisingly of around 10% a year. This is twice the forecast rate for U. S. Rental market with around 60% of that growth coming from existing locations and 40% from greenfield openings. However, recognizing the economic backdrop and lower non residential construction activity.
We expect a lower rate of growth in the early part of the plan, which increases as we progress due to more supportive end markets and those greenfields and same store growth deliver increasing returns. In Canada, our low 20s revenue growth reflects significant opportunity available in that market. We will take advantage of this through investing in our existing locations to access latent capacity in those stores and invest in Greenfields as we increase our general tool footprint and grow specialty, particularly our lighting, grip and studio business. Looking at the UK growth rate, you may think that looks rather anemic. Looks can be deceiving.
As you heard from Andy earlier, these headline figures hide a significant transformation of the business through 3.0. The relatively low level of growth is attributable to the record revenue performance this year and no reflection of our aspirations for the business. In short, we are looking to grow the core general tool in specialty businesses to replace all the revenue we've had this year as a result of COVID-nineteen, which we sincerely hope will not be a revenue stream in 2024. This year, we anticipate that our support for the national response to COVID will account for around 20% of rental revenue and 27% to 28% of total revenue. Turning now to drop through and margins.
We're looking for a U. S. Drop through rate of rental revenue to EBITDA in the mid-50s over the 3.0 period. This should lead to group EBITDA margins in the high 40s, say around 47% to 49%, which in turn should lead to an operating profit margin in the mid to high 20s, say 26% to 28%. Similar to revenue, we expect drop to improve over the 3 years.
There are a number of factors that will depress drop through in the 1st year. Some are a consequence of the costs we have cut this year such as travel, overtime and other discretionary costs that will come back into the business. Others are new costs that will come in as we invest in the business and then there are some items in the current year that will not repeat next year. You've heard from JP and Katie about what we're planning the tech space. That doesn't come cheap and the benefits take time to come through.
We also intend to incentivize our workforce to deliver on the 3.0 plan. These costs will be in the cost base after the 1st year, so we expect drop through to be higher in the second and third years, resulting in that average in the mid-50s over the 3 years. Many of you will hear me talk about our smooth fleet profile. We invested a lot of time and effort aided by a long gentle cycle to build that profile. However, while we have a smooth and predictable replacement need, they do increase over the next 3 years as we replace ever larger tranches of our fleet, one of the downsides of growing so strongly over the last 5 to 10 years.
Thus with this increasing replacement need and the spend required to fuel our ambitious growth plans, we will spend around £5,500,000,000 on the rental fleet, delivery vehicles, IT and other infrastructure over the 3.0 period. So turning the page, Applying these assumptions, you can see what this translates into in terms of financial performance. We are looking to generate rental revenue somewhere in the range of £5,600,000,000 to £5,800,000,000 in 2024. EBITDA around the £3,000,000,000 level and operating profit of £1,600,000,000 to £1,800,000,000 This strong growth in revenue and profit results in a mid teens growth in earnings per share at current tax rates. In terms of returns, we all know return on investment is a key metric in a capital intensive business and in particular return on investment through the cycle.
In the last downturn, our ROI bottomed at 5% in 2010 and then recovered reaching 19% in recent years. With the impact of the pandemic, we expect ROI in this year to be in the 14% to 15% range before it then recovers back to prior peak levels by the end of 3.0. Current tax rate is an important caveat given the proposals announced by the new U. S. Administration.
However,
there are
a lot of moving parts in those proposals, so I won't try to address So taking this level of performance and assuming a leverage ratio of 1.75, the middle of our target range of 1.5 to 2 times net debt to EBITDA, we would have around £3,000,000,000 of capital available to enhance shareholder value further, whether that be through additional organic growth, bolt ons or share buybacks. Now, while we don't know exactly how we'll deploy that £3,000,000,000 what we do know is it will follow our capital allocation policy. We have a well defined and clearly articulated capital application policy, which we have applied consistently over time and we'll continue to do so. Let's look at that policy in the context of Project 2021. Firstly, we look at organic fleet growth.
We invested £6,100,000,000 in the rental fleet and other capital items such as vehicles and IT. Secondly, we look to bolt ons. We spent £1,800,000,000 on bolt ons over 5 years. And thirdly, we consider returns to shareholders. We returned £1,900,000,000 to shareholders through our progressive dividend policy and share buybacks.
This has all been achieved while remaining comfortably within our target leverage range. Unsurprisingly, we will follow the Same policy in deciding what we do with this £3,000,000,000 I cannot stand here today and say exactly how we will deploy that will become clear over time. That said, our first port of call will be additional organic fleet growth if the opportunity is there. This would be the most accretive use of capital. Assuming that's not possible, let's consider 2 extremes.
Firstly, we could spend all £3,000,000,000 on bolt ons. So if we assume multiples of returns similar to our historical transactions that Kurt talked through earlier. Let's say we paid 2.5 times revenue, 5.5 times EBITDA, 10 times EBITDA. On acquisition that would give us an additional £1,200,000,000 of revenue, £545,000,000 of EBITDA and £300,000,000 of EBITDA over the 3 years. This would enhance earnings per share by about 4% plus a year.
However, that's on the basis of what we acquire. As you heard Kurt say, we only look to acquire good businesses with the opportunity to drive revenue synergies through operational improvement, cross selling and additional investment. That enables us to do better than the 4% plus of acquired earnings accretion. Another way to look at the value creation is from a multiples perspective. If we can buy business at 5 to 6 times EBITDA when we're valued at more than 10 times, that gives a significant enhancement to shareholder value.
Alternatively, we could use the whole amount to buy back shares. For the sake of simple math, let's assume we can buy back shares at an average price of £55 over the 3.0 period. On that basis, we could buy back around 55,000,000 shares or about 12% of our outstanding share capital, which would result in earnings per share accretion of 2% to which would say we should spend the whole amount on bolt ons. You've seen Brendan and Kurt's enthusiasm for bolt ons, but I think even they will sort of spend £1,000,000,000 a year. Thus, as you would expect, our deployment of that £3,000,000,000 will be a balance between further organic growth, bolt ons and share buybacks.
In terms of bolt ons and buybacks, the bias will be towards bolt ons as we stand here today. This should provide an additional 3% to 4% of earnings per share growth over and above the mid teens organic growth. Thus, in accordance with this capital allocation policy, this morning we announced a new buyback program of up to £1,000,000,000 over the next 2 years, starting at a run rate of around about £75,000,000 a quarter. That allows us plenty of flexibility to adjust during the year depending on bolt on opportunities and general, the general outlook. And so with that, I'll hand it back to Brendan in Fort Mill.
Thank you, Michael. Don't go too far. We're going to see you in just a moment for some Q and A. So as we move on to our last few slides. For some time, you will have known we've had a long term market share target of 15%.
Today, we're lifting that market share target, long term target to 20%. And the reason we're doing it, there are a few things. First of all, if you think back to Brad's presentation, he shared with you that we have many, many markets that we already have over 20% share. And what's important to understand in those markets, not only do we have that today, but we continue to grow. And we believe we continue to take share even in the markets that we have the densest levels of penetration or I'm sorry, share today.
Also, I think it's important to understand that we think that there are some of the structural drivers we've talked about for a long time that are becoming even more readily apparent. And we think particularly as it relates to ESG being a structural driver, there will be some that will benefit from that more than others. So we believe we will gain scale, whether it be what you heard Douglas McCluckkey speak to or what you heard Anthony speak to. We believe that those are opportunities for us to get to even higher levels of scale. Also, I think it's safe to say scale very much has its advantages and all indications are the big will continue to get bigger.
So we'll move on to our last slide here and put it out in a way that as clearly as we can. We have a plan that is not only clear, it's also understood. Today, you heard from a team, an experienced team who are passionate about their craft and also have a track record of delivering. They shared the what and the how in 3.0. If we go down each component part, we will grow general tool and advance our clusters.
We will achieve $2,400,000,000 in revenue in our specialty business. Technology will advance our customer experience to a new level. ESG, we will commit, deliver and drive structural change, all while we apply the strength of our financial position as best we can over the 3.0 period. Together, we think these actions create a compelling opportunity for all of our stakeholders that we look forward to updating you on in the quarters and years to come as we work our way through 3.0. Thank you very much for your time today.
And we hope that all or most of you will stay around just a bit longer for Q and A. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take just a short break to allow for some time to get ready for Q and A and you will have seen from Will's instructions this morning some specifics for those of you that do plan on asking a question. If you plan on asking a question, you're going to dial in through an ordinary line, not through the site that you shared today, just to make sure that we remove as best we can any technical problems that can happen from time to time. So you'll dial in. We're going to show a video before we go to that break, which I think you'll find worth watching.
So we will come back shortly after the video. If you are going to ask one of the questions, I would encourage you to dial in sooner, not later, so we can establish some sort of a queue before we come back on stage and Michael and I will together answer those questions that we have. We look forward to taking those. So in the meantime, enjoy the video. We'll see you shortly.
It was 5 short years ago. We introduced Project 2021 and we made a promise to ourselves, to our customers, to be the best, Plan to lead the way in innovation, service and opportunity. As we sunset a successful project 2021, We are proud of what we accomplished as a team by executing on our strategy. We are committed to preserving what we have created. Sure, we can look back, but our eyes, our focus is on the future.
We move forward with confidence in the end markets we And in our team's ability to fulfill our promise for growth. We were ready for the moment then, and we are ready for the moment now. So how does a company like ours grow? What's next? And how do we share it with the world?
The answer is simple. Our people. Our most important resource and their ability to execute a well defined strategy. We call it Sunbelt 3.0, an ambitious plan with purpose. At its very core, Sunbelt 3.0 is a detailed strategy to continue the growth of our general tool business, advance our clustered markets and amplify our specialty business to a size once thought impossible.
We will deliver this through a robust growth plan, Investing in our existing location network while expanding through greenfield and bolt on acquisitions, building an Evermore diverse group of customers and increased addressable end markets. This will further magnify the power of Sunbelt
The way technology plays the role in our day to day operations really, really helps us stay on top in real time. We can see where equipment is with the innovation of telematics in all of our our equipment, we're able to diagnose on the fly. We're able to get alerts when something goes down. And someone who's running a job site, we may be aware of before the news even gets to them and that helps us act and react very fast.
What got us here won't by itself take us where we want to go. Our industry simply does not work that way. We understand that better than most. In Sunbelt 3.0, we will invest in technology for our customers and for our people. Technology, experience And Insight will ensure that only Sunbelt can deliver the perfect rental to our customers every time.
We know that being the clear industry leader brings great responsibility, a responsibility to the environment, leaving it better than we found it. How can
we maximize our truckloads? How can we maximize our delivery routes? What kind of technology can we come up with as a company to maximize those things?
To challenge ourselves. We have committed to reduce our carbon intensity 35% by 2,030. We also have a social responsibility to deliver progress for all of our stakeholders, not just Our investors, but our people, our customers and the communities we serve. We take special pride knowing that as we advance 3.0, we will create career opportunities across the US, Canada and the UK. If it sounds like we're choosing growth again, we are.
We have clearly demonstrated the resilience in our business led by our teammates committed to advancing availability, reliability And ease for our customers, driving increased rental penetration. Our people and our culture are unique.
The culture has been amazing. Everybody's been quite welcoming and it's kind of cliche, but we're kind of a family. You're working for a good company, you're staying.
The entrepreneurial spirit in which we have grown this business continues to thrive It becomes stronger with scale. Make it happen is not just a push to get the job done. It's a belief. It's a mantra for our people, serving our customers and our communities.
Sunbelt Rentals always has my back. I absolutely want working for that company.
It's also a promise of support to always have your back, to have each other's backs. In these Our resolve is strong. Focus on our people, focus on our customer, focus on our future. That's ambition with purpose. That's Sunbelt 3.0.
And Sunbelt 3.0
Okay, welcome back, everyone. Apologies for the relatively short break, but we are conscious of time as we're approaching midday here in the States and of course 4 o'clock now, so toward the end of the day in the UK. One note before we turn it over to Q and A, you've heard a number of the presenters today mentioned breakouts. We have 3 breakouts that will be available at noon Eastern 5 pm UK time. We have a breakout on our specialty business, which will give you a lot more in-depth, if you will, update on certain components of our
specialty business. We have one on
technology and we have one on the Sunbelt We have one on technology and we have one on the Sunbelt UK business, as you heard Andy refer to. We would appreciate it if you did that. I think you'll find them worthwhile. During break, we were able to get the Q and A line all up and ready. So Dimitri, if you can hear If you could give some instructions and then we'll get right on to it.
And our first
I've got a couple of questions, please. Firstly, it was just around the uplift to revenue from CapEx. Doing some pretty shaky maths, I think maybe 70% of the uplift to revenue comes from CapEx and then that was just maybe the balance from utilization rate. Just Just wondered if you could give me any help there at all on that one and if you have any thoughts on what's happening with utilization rate. And then secondly, on M and A, just thinking about getting bigger, getting faster and doing deals.
Do you need the M and A for the greenfields? Can you talk about aligning them with the greenfield roadmap? Or would M and A then drive further greenfields? Thanks very much.
Yes, thanks, Will. Let me address your second first and I'll take a stab at your first and I'm sure Michael will chime in. Our plan is clear from a greenfield perspective, 298 location adds. Now, will there be some bolt ons along the way that will replace some greenfields, yes, certainly there will be. However, it is far more going to be augment and add.
So I certainly wouldn't in what you've seen from a financial standpoint that Michael would have covered and some of the revenue figures you would have seen from general tool and from specialty, none of those are requiring or even assuming bolt on M and A. So overall bolt on M and A is above and beyond. From a revenue growth standpoint, I mean, you hit on all the component parts. Keep in mind, overall, again, rough numbers from a CapEx investment standpoint, as you would have seen, it's about $5,500,000,000 That's going to be roughly fifty-fifty between replacement CapEx and growth CapEx. But that growth CapEx, part of what might be
leading to
the question is, part of that growth CapEx, of course, would be funding the greenfield openings. And certainly, part of that will be the LHI and other. But in general, it's going to be the growth CapEx. Yes, we do have assumed improvements in time utilization, and we have assumed improvements in rental rate over the 3 years. I don't know if that's clear enough or not, or Michael, you want to jump in on that at all?
No, I don't want to say anymore to it because they're the key drivers. And without going down to great levels of granularity, what we have Said obviously as time goes on, and you've only got to look at the profile that the level of replacement CapEx does increase as we move through the period, but That's to be expected, but no, I think that's fair enough.
Great. Thanks, Will.
Thanks very much.
Our next question comes from the line of Jane Sparrow from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi there, Brendan. Three questions, if I may. The first two are based on Slide 44, your specialty slide. You've made some assumptions there on rental penetration and your market share within that. And you've talked about your growth in market share and delivering that.
But Given the forecast you've got in rental penetration, it also looks like you're expecting quite a lot of growth from other players to contribute To that rental penetration growth. So can I just ask about the competitive landscape and who it is you expect to be driving that penetration alongside you? Is it Small independents, larger players, medium players, new entrants. That's the first question. The second question is the FY 'twenty four targets on that slide vary quite a lot by specialty line.
I'm not expecting you to go through all of them, but for example, not a lot in ground
protection, but pretty
high in lighting and but pretty high in lighting and grip and they're both pretty similar rental penetration today. So just wondering is that driven by sort of broader macro Crowe assumptions on those differing growth rates. And then the third one, just on the margin targets, you've talked today about technology, Good proportion of growth coming from the existing footprint benefits of clusters for margin. So it sounds like there's quite a lot of tailwinds. And while I understand the headwinds The drop through that Michael mentioned in the 1st year of this plan.
Just wondering what the longer term headwinds are that mean we wouldn't see margins get above Pre pandemic levels, eventually given those tailwinds.
Great. Thanks for that, Jane. And I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to get Slide 44, about since October in order to share all this information. So let me before I get into the specific of your question about that sort of varying rental penetration, what we're expecting from the competitive landscape and then the nuance around who gets bigger when. First of all, when we look at the 2,400,000,000 and the 6,000,000,000, I would characterize our specialty business in terms of those sizing.
That is a when, not if. We are incredibly confident with the work that's been done to establish levels of current rental penetration and our runway for growth in each of these nine specialty business lines. And just to put it all in context, when you think about the overall size, I appreciate that when we look at the slide, that may look rather big or grandiose, in particular the $6,000,000,000 But if you characterize it like this, which is what I would do, and we talk about this internally often, look at our specialty business in total, just these nine business lines today are just above 1,400,000,000 as you would have heard earlier today from Francis. That 1,400,000,000 from our North American specialty business is larger than Ashtead Group was in fiscal year 2011. Then if we fast forward to 3.0, so what we are expecting, which is the construct of the 2,400,000,000, if we were to just address the top 3 specialty businesses at the time, which will be power, climate and scaffold.
Those three businesses at the end of 3.0 will be larger than Ash that group was in total in fiscal year 2011. So just those points to make around that. When it comes to competitive landscape, what we're anticipating, one way to say it is, we would not be sharing this level of information if we weren't happy and even welcoming others to get into some of these spaces, particularly those that are really low on the rental penetration side of the spectrum and some of those newer businesses. So what will it be, will it be a mix of national and a mix of independents? Yes, but I think you may even see some newly emerging, because when you look at a flooring business, for instance, there's just no one else really out there doing that.
So I guess message to anyone listening, go ahead. It's not a bad thing, because it's all about driving rental penetration. And that is how we will grow. We're extraordinarily confident in us getting our unfair share, if you will, of the overall growth mechanism, so to speak. Some of the nuance around who grows more than others, it's got more to do with the foundation we have in those component parts and I'll reference the 2 specifically you mentioned.
So our ground protection business, you'll recall that came by way of our Mabee acquisition. And we've just not really taking it all that much further from where it was. And we're still trying to find our legs, if you will, overall from a ground protection standpoint. So that's why you'll see that. Lightning and Grip, 2 things.
1, make no mistake, our team in Canada that trades under William F. White is an extraordinary team and they were in a market leadership position when Sunbelt came in. But one thing you'll hear often talked about and you would have remembered one of Curt's slides that talked about multiples, etcetera, and what we buy some of these businesses for, we like to use this term, in many ways, these are businesses who are undercapitalized. They just don't have the CapEx. Paul Bronfman, who owned William F.
White, wonderful person, great business, but wasn't going to put 50,000,000 in CapEx in a year. Guess what we will do, gladly put 50,000,000 in CapEx in a year when Geron Josie, who runs that along with his team in Canada, asked for it. So we like to use the expression, add water and mix. That's exactly what we're doing when it comes to examples like William F. White, and let's face it, there's a bit of a extraordinary tailwind right now when it comes to lighting, grip, camera studio because there's a bit everyone has worn out all their Netflix shows they can watch.
So there's an abundance of filming going on right now. I hope that gets all of your questions. Jane, let me know if I missed any.
I'll take
that as Just
the one on the margin tailwinds and the
I'm sorry, I honestly did not mean to leave that out. I will say a word or 2 and Michael, I'm sure will jump in on this one. Let's not forget, this is a plan we're putting together, this is not a budget, and we are giving ranges of what margins might look like. We're giving ranges of what revenue growth might look like. Rest assured, you heard from Brad in particular, then you heard from JP and you heard from Katie about our investment in technology driving operational efficiencies and improved service to our customers.
Will we get it? Yes. Will it trickle down into margins? Probably Michael can be conservative from time to time and he put together those last couple of slides. So anyway, Michael, do you have anything to add?
I thought I might get the blame. I guess a couple of things. I'd just come back on the lightening grip one as well. Also, Jane, in that, remember that the current year, which we're feeding that off, is only sort of half a year because the whole thing was shut down for the 1st 6 months of the year. But then in terms of margins, as Brendan says, yes, it's a range, it's a plan.
There are significant investments in year 1, but there are significant investments in year 2 In year 23, and we've all talked about this. Would we what we don't want to do is to close a moat or reduce moat. We're looking to extend the moat between us and everyone else. And so there will be I'm sure there'll be opportunity there. But similarly, we're looking to drive share and penetration and that will all take investment.
Thanks, Michael.
Thank you.
Thanks, Gene.
Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Wilson from JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon everybody, I guess by this time. A couple of questions please. On the ESG agenda. I was kind of interested by some of the discussions you were talking about in terms of the fleet and potentially this sort of energy transition of the fleet. And just Kind of, I guess, would like a little bit more in terms of sort of how advanced are we in terms of the types of conversations that you're having with customers around both shifting, I guess, some kind of traditional diesel products mostly into potentially electric variants.
And I guess their appetite to invest in that, their appetite Maybe to use you guys more for that. And just how close are we to seeing that be a meaningful driver in the market? Or is this still something which We might expect to happen, but we're not really seeing on the ground yet.
Yeah, great. Thanks for that, Andrew. Can we go to slide 74, please? Look, first of all, I would characterize it as, and pardon the American baseball analogy here, we are in the early innings. However, there is growing momentum.
So here are the kind of conversations we're having with our customers, and it ranges. When we're speaking to some of our customers who the owner of whatever that may be, for instance, techs, think about data centers. I was with a customer 3 weeks ago Friday, 3 weeks ago Friday, who is building a massive data center that will begin in a town in the Southwest, I'll leave it at that. This is a 6,000,000 square foot build. I would say over our hour and a half conversation, once we got past rates was around ESG and how they're the owner of, not the general contractor, but the owner of is making that an incredibly high priority.
So that's happening already. You heard Francis talk about the power generation rental penetration, we don't need to go back to slide 44, but that was on slide 44 in terms of how we're seeing now. So let me give you an example of what we're talking to customers about in that space. So like for instance, you will hear in the specialty breakout, we've actually powered this entire thing. So this stage that we have here in Fort Mill, all of the production, etcetera, by 2 of our portable generators that are 100% battery powered.
The reason why I say that is, immediately next to those, our building, this should come as no surprise, we are Sunbelt Rentals after all. We have about 1.5 megawatts of diesel standby power. And we put that there when we did because we had to make sure our server rooms, etcetera, we're powered the right way, if we were to confront power loss, etcetera. We will be ones who will be getting rid of those big diesel generators that are bolted to the ground. They may be on a trailer whereas we can deploy them properly.
My point is, we will replace that with a far smaller generator that is here to turn on immediately when we lose power. And then we will call Sunbelt and Sunbelt will deliver the 1.5 megawatts of power it requires to run the full building, whether that be for a 6 hour power outage, or it be a post hurricane 3 day power outage as a for instance. Reason why I say that is we are talking to, how do I best say it, we are talking to large multinational grocery store chains, distribution warehouse sort of companies about doing the very same thing and were actually doing it already. So there are incredibly reputable big companies who are working with Sunbelt to actually improve their ESG footprint. That's a big deal.
You heard Anthony quote the difference between a Tier 1 and a Tier 0 versus a Tier 4 final. And those the generators that we have bolted to our building here, they run every single week for 2 hours just to exercise and they emit emissions. So those were things will drive it and it's happened already. Look at the mini excavator example on slide 74. This is such an important one.
So yes, we have this embodied carbon, 32,500 kilograms, which is you would have heard from Anthony, correlates with 7 passenger vehicles in terms of their emissions every year. But what's more important is this, and I think it gets to the point, the heart, Andrew, in what you're asking is, How does that drive, how does this perpetuate an advanced rental penetration? We didn't choose Mini Excuator for no reason. This is one of the products, and we have many that are kind of in the middle penetration range, so 35%. All of our 11,000 minutei excavators, of the many excavators manufactured and sold into North America every year, 35% go to rental companies, 65% are still purchased.
That will be an inevitable driver to increase rental penetration. And that's exactly what we're going to see. So some of these that frankly, in that middle band territory that I mentioned, like mini excavators, they've been stagnant for a while. They're looking for a reason. Now, oddly enough, you may think, we will actually drive it even with diesel mini excavators, because the very nature of the positive environmental impacts just by buying less, sharing more.
So buying less, sharing more. We are not the only ones who will benefit from this. Our larger US listed peers will be benefactors of this, as will some of the others. But really, it will have a there's a bit of an unfair advantage, if you will, to the big incredibly well capitalized, those that are truly going through R and D as we speak with our OEMs. So we are early innings, but the volume and the level of conversations are accelerating quickly is the way I would characterize it.
Yes, I guess that's kind of I guess that's what I was the risk is kind of asking a leading question. It just feels like whether you look at it in terms Sharewall penetration, it would feel like this can be a genuinely meaningful driver, whether it's by 2024 Over the longer term. But I guess what you're telling me is that you are beginning to see the benefits of that already?
Yes, we are.
And maybe sorry to my second question was slightly different. But I just it's kind of a question around specialty and then sort of I guess think about it in a slightly different way. But You sort of mentioned that looking at this white space and looking at different markets and sort of these pilot projects, if you like, to sort of explore where the opportunities are. Guess I'm interested in the areas where the specialty model has failed, why has it failed? What is it about those markets which doesn't lend itself or have you not failed, I guess.
I'm just interested as to sort of it's clearly been a great success story. I'm interested as to when it doesn't work, why doesn't it work?
What do you mean? I'm sorry, we're going to go to Slide 46, if we could. But when you say it's been filled, what do you mean, Andrew, it's been filled?
Failed, Brendan.
Failed, I'm sorry. Thanks for the translation, Michael. So we have had a few that have failed. I've mentioned before, we had a aspiring specialty business we called ToolFlex that we thought could grow into something all on its own and it didn't work out that way. There are some others that we have piloted and we discharged reasonably quickly that sort of get lost in mix.
But that's why it's important to understand slide 46 in terms of how we go through this process. And rest assured, before I go through the mechanics, we will, through 3.0, bring to light at least 1, if not 2, more specialty business lines. Of that I am incredibly confident of, because this team that you heard Francis talk about is constantly going through these motions. There are some incredibly, I think, exciting spaces that are left to be discovered, if you will. And now that we have the foundation and the scale that we do today, we're capable of doing that.
Those that fail are things that maybe we get a bit ambitious on. So we may say, hey, we could be this dynamic changer. There's a price point element to it as well, where if it's incredibly low, perhaps it's less palatable, if you will, because if it's something you can buy for $50 $100 or $200 maybe they're less likely to go that way. But let's not discount also in this whole conversation, how ESG drives this. Maybe not the generation that maybe is mostly listening to this call today, but there's a younger generation that probably will dislike waste even more than what the generation today, if you will, making the decision.
So I wouldn't discount any of those. But this is an important one to understand. This speaks to that entrepreneurial spirit in the R and D. And frankly, we talked about fall through in margin, etcetera. This is investment.
We really invest here and we test So I hope that gets at it, Andrew. If not, we'll catch up 1 on 1.
No, that was very clear, unlike obviously my accent. Thanks Brendan.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Rob Vertheimer from Melius Research. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Hello, everybody.
Hey, Rob. Hey, Rob.
I had Well, for 1, I like Katie's presentation on Cronos a lot. If I missed it, I wonder if you could discuss kind of where you are in the rollout of that, whether You progressed some pilots whether you've seen the full benefit. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the timeline properly. And then Brendan, I wonder if I could ask you a similar question to what Jane has just on margin and without trying to get too specific on the forecast, just what you see as opportunity over the next 3, 4, 5 and plus years for reinvestment. Perhaps you see a huge amount of tech spend that could come in the future and enhance your revenue growth opportunity for the next 10 years.
Perhaps you think you're adequately investing in more has a bias that drops through to the bottom line. Just sort of curious on what your philosophy is When you think about guiding the company, whether they're whether it's for drop through, whether there's a lot of investment out there and you can enhance revenue. So those 2 things. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Look, I'll answer the second first. Our focus as we try to make clear, it is on growing this business while generating strong margins and returns. It is not about, we are nowhere near the point where one may say, how do we to maximize every single possible point of margin.
It doesn't mean we take it lightly. It just means that, as Michael said, he answered it best. This is about keeping barriers to enter high and investing in opportunities to service our customers and differentiate ourselves ever, ever, ever more. So what Katy went through, which will not have been picked up on or maybe somewhat have missed, Katy and her team finished the rollout of Cronos across all of North America in April May. So it went from pre COVID where her team would be in our markets, inside of our locations, 2 or 3 markets at a time, about a week at a time rolling this out.
And at the very end, they went virtual because we saw the traction, we saw the benefits. Katie will have shared with you, if I recall correctly on the slide of comparing and contrasting the pilot markets versus the control markets, and there was about a 2% difference. So what can we expect? Well, that and more, frankly. So what's in the pipeline?
What are we piloting as we speak? All of the other things, Cronos was so important. That is a brain, so to speak, in my very layman way of explaining all this, that we were missing and in many ways the industry was missing. So what that team is so focused on today is the logistics element, an improved routing element, an improved pulling through the telematics, an improved shot process element of prioritizing all that and having it be far more instructive, if you will, in terms of putting all those pieces together. That is far easier said than done, I promise you.
We have brought in, I won't name them, but some of you will know the names of big tech companies who all they do are logistics. I don't mean FedEx, UPS, Xcel Logistics, XPO, I'll mention all of those because we tried all of them a long time ago and they all said, go fish. You have way too many parts, we're used to moving a box from one place to another place and never picking it up again, right? The others that we brought in that are becoming these e commerce sort of logistics experts, they really struggle. We're bringing them in saying, help us make our logistics better.
So my only point for sharing all that is, not that one of them may not end up joining, it's a lot of work. It's so much harder than the mainstream, if you will, logistics. So Rob, that's what the team is focused on now. We're in varying degrees of pilots within our markets. And we will absolutely see in the early periods of 3.0, Cronos rolling out into those other aspects that I've just mentioned, which will also be hugely instrumental in driving an improvement in terms of e commerce transactions.
I don't mean customers who just are on our site or customers that engage with us via e commerce. I mean customers that are in with us from an e commerce standpoint, from the inquiry to the request for quotation, to the purchase order, to the transaction, to the invoicing, to the service call, to the payment, the whole circle. And as we improve that, the stickiness of our customers, which we already have, will only get better. And of course, we're going to get the operational benefit from it. But Rob, we are most focused on growing this business again and again.
And Rob, just in terms of what Brendan said there, I think it's probably clear that when he said April May, obviously, it meant April May 2020. So the first version of Cronos was fully rolled out a year ago, actually, because we were going to talk about it a year ago. And so what's been happening in a subsequent year is AYA has helped the business through the pandemic, but we've been looking how do you move it on to the next level.
Okay. Thank you so much.
Great. Thanks, Rob.
Our next question comes from the line of Arnaud Lehmann Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Brendan, Michael and all the team. Firstly, my question is on the rental rates. I didn't really hear you talk about rates today that much. In the 19%, 11% organic growth forecast for the U.
S. Net group level, what is the underlying volumes and rates assumption? And overall, if you don't want to give a number of all within the plants, what's your scenario for rates? That's my first question. And my second question is coming back On your new medium term 20% market share, I mean, it's quite an impressive number.
I know in the past there have always been debate about What is the actual market? And I guess with the specialty developments, you're kind of pushing the boundaries of what you define as a potential market. So How did you come up with this 20% and how do you define the market these days?
Great. Well, let's we're not going to give you the breakdown between what we've modeled between volume and rate. But I will touch on rate in general. We are incredibly early in spring. And I would characterize what we see as encouraging, albeit subtle, sequential movement at this stage.
But I think more importantly, and of course, we'll touch on this more come June at our full year results and update. What's encouraging is, we've had incredibly good conversations with some of our larger customers, specifically about rate and our movement in rate that we have begun to put in place. And we've had the same sort of conversations on some of our most recent large bids. So I am incredibly confident in terms of our ability to drive rate improvement throughout the coming fiscal year. Now, What level will that be?
Time will tell. But I want to refer to while we're on that. We don't have the slide today's deck, but it was it would have been slide 15 in the Q3 results that actually addressed the supply and demand
element, if you will, in the industry. So that update
was from March, and we So that update was from March and where we are today, literally as of Friday, we still see the same delta, we still see the same difference. The rental industry today has 5% less fleet than it had a year ago. And as we've all seen, we are entering a period of construction start increase, and we think another sort of step change in terms of rental penetration. So the industry is in as good a position as one could be in, in order to improve rate, particularly when we have some of these inflationary items that are going on. The other thing that's important to think about that in terms of how long we think that could stay in terms of that delta, I think we have quite a ways to go in that, because if you look at lead times, and this is important, I was talking to just yesterday, making sure I would quote him correctly, but Brad Coverdale, you didn't see him on the stage.
Brad's incredibly well known across the industry with the OEM. So he manages our relationships with our largest suppliers, works through with his team all the negotiations from a pricing standpoint, etcetera. And his opinion would be that lead times today from manufacturers for non planned assets or as long if not longer than they were immediately following the great financial crisis. So here we are in a position where the industry has less fleet. We're seeing demand improve.
Obviously, everyone's going to have improved year on year utilization levels given we're now in that roughest comp period, so to speak, from a COVID standpoint. But it's important to understand our utilization was higher even before we reached that comp period. So we're in a position where there is a lack of availability of fleet. The proof you will also see has been in the second hand values. So it all hangs together, but that lead time is long if you've not planned.
Brad and his team plan differently. We're planning as we speak with our major OEMs for fiscal year 'twenty three and fiscal year 'twenty four. Don't worry, we're not cutting purchase orders and committed ourselves to CapEx spend 3 years from now. However, we are working with our OEMs to secure build slots. So it's yet another thing in terms of supply and demand, but also you can imagine that there are a few of us who are most likely engaged very strategically with our OEMs in a manner that will do that.
So all of that sets the stage for from a rate standpoint. And what was the second question? I'm sorry, I forgot.
Market share.
Market share, yes, 20%, which is why I was looking at some notes. Why are we confident in 20%? Well, I'm as confident in 20% as I am on slide 44, where we're going to have a +6000000000 specialty business, and I'd like to think it would be in my career, assuming you will all keep me for that long a time. But when I look at our businesses, Brad, well, you would have heard, would have mentioned the number of businesses just in the markets rather in the Eastern territory that already are at 20% or higher. But statistically speaking, if we look at all of the 210 DMAs, we already have 25 markets that are over 20% and we have an additional 46 markets that are over 15%.
So clearly 15% is one that we will achieve and we will go by. And as I would have mentioned, remember the sort of structural dynamics we're going through now. If we go back to Andrew's question around ESG and how it's driving that, that's a new element, that is a 3rd leg of the stool, if you will. Also, as we would have concluded in that slide where we referenced 20%, all of the evidence is stacking up ever more so that the big will get bigger. It's not easy to invest in ESG, it's not easy to understand ESG, if you will, in terms of those driving factors.
And further, I hope you listened and appreciated Sheryl's piece. ESG is more than the E. I know we are guilty of talking about the E very often in the capital markets. But that S piece is instrumental. Skilled trade people who are in professions that seek careers, they're not building those, if you will, like they used to.
We have to invest in that. And in order to invest in that with the learning, with the development, with the training, all of that comes through. I mean, we are in a room right now that sort of looks like a studio and we have great people that are behind the cameras, and we have great people working on all this tech. That's on the job training. I'm speaking for them now, but there aren't necessarily schools for all that.
So it's that sort of skilled trade that is so important that kind of as a world, if you will, we don't invest in the way that we used to. We're investing in that. So that's another reason why the big will get bigger. And you have to have that social level of engagement like what Cheryl talked about. So all those things strung together, 20%.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nusdi from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. A couple of questions around The tech presentation, please. First of all, in terms of dynamic pricing, which is potentially one of the biggest changes in the rental It was seen over many, many years. Do you think customers are going to be willing to accept the change towards dynamic pricing? And as this is rolled out, I presume you sort of expect the rate benefits to be towards the back end of the 3.0 Time line.
And thirdly, in terms of the tech development, which obviously seems to be largely initially in the U. S, How quickly has that been rolled out to Canada and the UK, please?
Sure. Let me get to Canada and UK and I'll turn it over. So you met JP. JP has been on for about 10 months now. And JP is working in conjunction with Andy, who you would have also met and Phil Parker, he mentioned, and Andy, our Head of Tech in the UK.
So those things are beginning. I'll give you a for instance, where we started may sound surprising. We started with our human capital resource management tool, Workday. So the first thing we're implementing that will be in lockstep with the U. S, Canada and the UK will be Workday because believe it or not, all that technology we talked about, particularly when I was answering Rob's question, the people component is huge.
You can't just build dispatch unless you have the people hours the right way, you have the Department of Transportation hours the right way, etcetera. So that's already beginning. It will look a lot more alike as we move through 3.0. With rate, I just can't help resist but to turn it over to John. I've got a few of the team on the stage now.
But before John picks up, you mentioned something about later in 3.0, we're expecting rate. Don't tell John that, because we've been very clear to the team, we're expecting it like now. But anyway, John, no pressure over to you.
Yes. Thanks, Brendan. Andrew, when you talk about customer acceptance as it comes to rates, certainly there are the inflationary parts that we discussed earlier that are at play and we're looking to do that. But we are also looking to unlock and exercise 20 years of data. We have tremendous history on our customers.
We know their rental habits better than they do and we're really able to play those back. We're not looking for wild incremental rate increase, rather subtle and steady rate increase over this time. So the tools that we're deploying to our field today to give the right rate to the right customer at the right time. We're seeing great stickiness with that as we move forward. Rental is a small portion from an expense perspective over a large project and the time that our customers spend sourcing rental should be equally as small.
So if we can continue to deliver availability, reliability and ease to our customers and just look for small but steady rate increase over time, we're incredibly confident that we'll be able to exercise that over this period.
John, if I could add, when will 100% of our markets
in North America have CSP rolled out? CSP is what we call customer specific pricing and that will be rolled out completely across North America next week.
Right. When did it begin?
We piloted during COVID. And much like Cronos, we saw an uptick in a very challenging time. And it just gave us the confidence to accelerate the plan. Look, it will evolve over time. The data will become even more rich as we exercise it and we'll be much more prescriptive as we move forward.
But we've had success so far. We expect to have success as we continue and it will be a big factor to our success as we move forward through 3.0 and beyond.
I had to turn that over to John because if I gave you too much detail, he would get really upset with me. That's all moving well. It would not be going from pilot to total company rollout as you just heard John talk about. I've mentioned to some of you over the quarters of the year, you will hear us talk about that thing, dynamic pricing as we've called it, but CSP specifically, unless it was working. Otherwise, we wouldn't have mentioned it.
Andrew, does that cover your questions?
Got it. Yes. No, got it. Great. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from the line Of Neil Tyler from Redburn. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes, good afternoon. A couple on the environmental Topic from me, please. First one is, do you can you provide any sense of the extent to which your customers can and perhaps do now use telematics to track their own asset utilization where perhaps relatively recently they weren't able to do that and how that plays into your thoughts. And secondly, on a similar vein, Knowing what you do about the average age and emissions of the owned fleet, are there any regulatory changes on the horizon that might trigger a sort of more step type change in The makeup of that fleet and therefore in potentially the rental penetration.
Great, Neil, thank you. First of all, on the customers, and I will caveat this by saying it is very different between our customers in the UK and our customers here in North America. So there's a much bigger uptake, if you will, from a telematics adoption, if it were, with our UK customers, who I can very comfortably say, are far more focused on the environmental aspect, because frankly, the UK is just governing it in a manner more so than the US is, absent maybe California. When it comes to the uptake on telematics in the U. S, it is very low.
Don't get me wrong, we have certain large customers who utilize the data that we provide them for telematics, they're looking for 2 things. They're looking for currently time utilization and they're looking for where the heck it is. So on a large maintenance project, let's just say fulfillment center post construction, they're looking for literally where is it on the job. There is a very early degree of uptake when it comes to hours run and therefore the carbon footprint that that asset puts off, but it's extraordinarily early. I think it's probably the best way to characterize that.
I'm turning to John. So that's where we are. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't do it. It's all about what we talk about in terms of availability, reliability and ease. We have to make that so much easier for them.
In that last video you just saw pre Q and A, in that video, you would have heard one of our team members talk about how we're getting pinged, we're getting notified that an asset is having a problem very often before the customer even notices that problem. So what they're going to get at in terms of that, they will be looking for just all of the data from us that says, here's your carbon emissions as it relates to that project. Now, I think there's a real potential that there will be a door open for rental, whereas certain geographies may say, if you rent, we give you the benefit of that rather than your ordinary carbon footprint. I wouldn't bet on that, but those are the level of discussions that we're into with a whole variety. In terms of agent emissions, first of all, know this, we have an incredibly modern fleet.
So there's 2 things to understand. Remember, in the our quarterly results, we always have in the appendix that smooth fleet agent profile. Even dating back to our oldest fleet, I use the word the term oldest lightly, the vast majority, 98%, 99% of our diesel engines are Tier 4 final engines. So those are the cleanest engines available in the markets that we serve. Will that go to Tier 5?
Will that go to Tier 6? Yes, is the honest answer. At some point in time, it will. What will happen? We will drive rental penetration further.
Because remember, we've been through this inflation thing before. We went from Tier 0, we began with our delivery fleet, our trucks, and we migrated all the way to where we were in the early days, if you will, kind of early 2,004, 2005, where trucks were full and final. So every truck we own is, of course, fully the latest and greatest engine emissions compliant. Then when you look at rental fleet, we went through that really from about in earnest, 2,004, 2005, all the way through December of 2019 was the last tranche or wave of certain horsepower bans that had to become Tier 4 final. During that time, we experienced a few things.
1, inflation in our OEC, which we documented well along the way, 2, increased rental penetration. That same thing will happen, whether it be driven by way of alternative energies, as you would have heard some of the team talk about, solar, hydrogen, electricbattery, that will be more expensive than the diesel assets that they will replace. And therefore, there will be more and more looking to turn to rentals. That's a good thing in terms of step change. Furthermore, if anything was sort of deemed had to go, you had that nice one seventh, one eighth of your fleet that you can cut off every year.
And again, in the end markets, if you look at what's holding them up, not just the supply and demand. Those engines are replacing very, very old engines that are out there. I think in general, that addresses your question.
Thank you. That's very helpful. Perhaps if I could just Charles, a follow-up on margin. A very broad question. But is my understanding correct that if And here's your words, you are firing up the engines at the moment to accelerate the pace of growth.
But Were we to encounter a scenario where the opportunities don't materialize at that pace, then The prevalence of more mature branches versus less would naturally improve the margin across the group.
Yeah, I think your math's correct. Something will have to happen significantly, touch wood here, in order to derail our organic greenfield expansion plan, this business will deliver 298 greenfields over the course of 3 years at about 100 a year clip.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Carl Green from Royal Bank of Canada. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes. Thanks very much, guys. Just a couple of questions for me. Firstly, back on the ESG topic and the transition to potentially Fleet. Do you think that down the line, the lack of access to grid power could be a hindrance to the deployment of those kind of assets.
And I suppose following on from that, do you think that there's a chance that fleets actually leapfrogs to hydrogen Solutions, I suppose following on from that as well is, do you see yourselves providing rental equipment to support those new technologies beyond the new the fleet types, so things like micro grids or hydrogen refueling technology. That's the sort of first question. The second one, just sort of much smaller, Just around Kronos and the procurement opportunities, which was described as one of the continuous improvements initiatives. Have you spoken to the OEMs about how they feel about the idea of AI driven systems making fleet or equipment orders and purchases? I mean, just given your comments about those very long lead times you're seeing at the moment.
So I'm just intrigued as to how that might work in practice. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Karl. First of all, you have broached on to one of our, we would either call it a white space or a bit of gray in terms of powering all the EVs that we're certain to see come our way. Yes, is the answer. The current transmission and utility will struggle to a degree.
I mean, look just at the demand that we're seeing from a data center space in overall pool or grid pool. I was on with a leading content data center, let's just say, company or tech company that utilizes, builds loads of data centers, just a few weeks ago with a couple of others on our team. And they were literally asking about how do they over time get off the grid. So we're part of that conversation. Furthermore, look, this is a individual and a personal bias.
I love fuel cell technology. I think fuel cell technology is a far better solution than is battery, because we all know the generators that are out back powering this, they charge overnight by the grid. So you can figure all that out on your own. You need a lot of alternative energy by way of wind, by way of dam or hydro and by way of solar to feed that grid, so there's an obvious challenge there. Fuel cell, I'm afraid to say that in mass, there is such a huge transition problem.
The fuel stations have to fuel or fill hydrogen and it is easier to fill hydrogen than you might think. Where hydrogen is likely to work would be for us in some of our very large clusters where we can have a transportation hub, if you will, you may just see 2 of these over the next couple of years, experimenting with how that might work as part of that R and D I mentioned. So whereas you could get the benefits of scale to actually have a filling station for hydrogen. And if that's the case, rest assured that white spacegray space I mentioned, I can tell you our power and HVAC strategic selling team is selling along those lines right now to equip certain facilities to actually be able to take on peak periods of demand when let's just say electric vehicles are back. And these aren't just big tractor trailers.
These will be all EV F-150s, EV transit vans, EV sprinter vans, all of those as they come, the grid, the utility won't just power, let's just say, a 10 acre site where you would be storing Sprinter vans. So what has to happen, we'd have to bring in our electric or even diesel power in order to charge those. So I would call that a very real reality. But hopefully, just you listening to all of us speak about it, it just shows the level of sophistication and understanding you have to have in all of this space in order to adapt and be agile, if you will, in terms of what's to come, because there will just be different things. They just so happen to favor rental penetration.
You would expect me to say nothing else, but add it up on your own, rental penetration will grow. And in the end, that's the part that is sort of at the crux of it all, which ESG also drives. Kronos, yes, we're working with OEMs on Kronos. The example Katie gave, which is a phenomenal one, she called it like final mile. So what that means is like, as we speak, we have, I don't know exactly what it is, but we will be landing quite a bit of few $100,000,000 worth of gear, new green sunbelt equipment that you saw in that video after the first break heading our way.
That new equipment is on Interstate 95, it's on Interstate 75, it's on the 10, etcetera. And all of those assets should be and they will be ultimately in Cronos, showing is available, even though we've not even received them at a location yet. So we've got an asset on the way to San Diego, California right now, I'm sure from McConnelsville, McConnelsburg, Pennsylvania. And if we need it in Kansas Missouri before it gets to San Diego, we needed to stop in Kansas City. So what our OEMs are doing now is they are enabling our telematics at the dock.
So rather than us enabling our telematics when it gets to our location, they're going to enable telematics earlier on. But yes, we work with our OEMs and a couple conduits that are in between, I'll mention 1 SmartEquip, who we use as a portal, so to speak, for us to procure from, from a parts and service standpoint with our OEMs. And I think that could play a role as well. So we work incredibly close with our OEMs from a technology and innovation standpoint.
Super helpful. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Karl.
Our next question comes from the line of Mark Kramer from Gluskin Shelf. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes, thanks for the question and for the great capital markets presentation, really enjoyed it. Specifically on Cronos, I'm very impressed with this. The question I have with respect to Cronos is, does it change how you incentivize your branch managers, your employees in general, because there was a change in how the equipment is cured and delivered to the customer?
Yes. Let me I'm going to go first though to the sales force to talk about rate. John would have mentioned over time, we will dial that in. So today, in the rental industry, it's extraordinary. The fairway or the width of a fairway that a sales representative has.
We have asset classes, individual which is why I argue with everyone that they are not commodities, where we will rent them for $800 a month to one customer and $2.50 a month to another customer. Our range is too broad for the sales force in the industry. So we will dial in that range when it comes to dynamic pricing. So their latitude could be $10 not $700 because we understand the customer with that $40,000,000,000 worth of revenue in our data that you would have heard JP talk to as well as John. When it comes to incentives, yes is the answer.
Our plans have begun migrating for years now from the branch to the market. This year, we put it over the top. So the branches, we call it profit share, some call it bonus. The profit share program for fiscal year beginning May 1, there is a component of which is their branch, all of that has to do with safety, people engagement and just so happens to say improving rental rates. Then the vast majority of their profit share opportunity ties to the district and then the market.
So the revenue and fall through targets around that. And then we've added, of course, I'm sharing this with you, and we've not shared it with our team yet. There is a 3.0 element in every single person's plan. And I mean from those that are on the stage with me, all the way down to our skilled trade drivers. Every single one has a deliverable aspect of 3.0, because you have an aligned team.
When you have an aligned team, call me old fashioned, think you get the results that you're looking for. So Cronos is kind of everywhere.
That's great. Thanks.
Our next question comes from the line of Alan Wells from Exane. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon, Brendan. Most of my questions have been asked already. Just a quick one on technology. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the Competitive landscape here and just how differentiated you think the technology platform, technology suite that you're Talking about today is versus, I guess, really the bigger players, I'm guessing it's quite advanced versus the smaller players in the market. Just keen to understand just how much advantage you think you have.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you. Look, we have some really good large national competitors. I will be too biased to say whose technology is best. We tend to one up one another quite often, new websites, new command centers, new dynamic pricing. None of us are too big in terms of egos to borrow a good idea from someone else.
How fast it drops off is almost inexplainable. Keep in mind, we see the businesses that we do all these bolt ons. You heard Kurt talk about, we have 2 more coming before April 30th. So we will have concluded 5 since February. And they are fantastic businesses.
I'll take you back to one that we just closed in just outside of Rhode Island, Eastern Mass, Providence, Rhode Island market that they cover. And I'm going to kind of get to a different question here while I'm answering yours. We target great businesses. And this business was owned by 2 really great people. Tom Farley was one of the owners and Jim Scanlon was the other.
And if you go to Providence, Rhode Island, their business was absolutely in the leadership position in that market for the product range in which they carry. And they did it through extraordinary customer relationships and a very long track record of doing what they said they would do for their customers and a great team that they did that with. Now, when we go in, one of the reasons why they would have chosen to sell was, they recognized that ESG was going to be a driving factor. They recognized that technology was needed to go to the next level. They didn't really have the capability to do that.
Not to mention, certainly Tom and Jim were looking for a few more years of work. But don't worry, we had Tom's son and we had Jim's nephew who have all those relationships as well. But the point is, we go in, you heard Kurt say, inside of 48 hours, he was being conservative inside of 24 hours, they're on our entire technology platform. I have literally, I was just up there, literally orders come across on that screen that you would have seen in some of those videos that we showed you from other locations that would have captured that order in Kronos or by way of our e commerce channel. So the technology just pales in comparison.
We will be innovating with the OEMs. We will have the early mover advantage. We will be the 1st to market in all of these things. The rental industry, Yes, it seems simple. And in many ways, it's a simple one to understand.
The moving of parts is more complicated than most industries. You may not quite realize that, but yes, it is a massive difference between the 2 or 3 companies or 4 maybe you can name and everyone else.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our final question comes from the line of Raul Chopra from HSBC. Please go ahead. Your line is now open. Hello, thank
you so much. I have a couple of questions on ESG and electrification. I think most of them has been answered, but just can you give us some recent experience in JCB in terms of the economics of skill, like basically the cost of running the pricing differential and the Total utilization rate versus the typical T cell counterparts. That's the first question. The second in terms of, I mean based on your current fleet, Can you give us the longer term impact, like what could be the sense of mix of fleet that can be electrified in the longer to medium term?
Thank
you. Sure. Thanks, Rahul. Let me get the first, we are experts in electric equipment. Our 2nd largest product SKU is electric sizzle lifts.
What do we own in OEC of electric sizzle lifts? Dollars 400,000,000 worth. And then we have a number of other electric product lines. So we are incredibly astute, familiar with the nuance difference between an internal combustion engine or a diesel engine and that of electricity. So we are part of, I think what your question was, what we've seen from JCB in terms of the mini excavators, electric mini excavators, And although they're innovating wonderfully, and we have a great partnership, as you know, with JCB, there are others that are doing the same thing.
And we're right there with them in terms of introducing these things. So the first machines, whether it be JCB's mini excavator or JCB's telehandler, or it be some of our compaction OEMs, or it be our aerial or platform OEMs that are taking all those to the next level. So bringing products to market that are electric. Now, what happens from a dollar utilization standpoint as it relates to that? Like most things, the newer they are, the early that you introduce them, the financial dynamics are strong when it comes to dollar utilization and rate.
We own a near exclusive run of a very new product within Ariel that is bringing a full electric solution, even to the point of having 0 fluids. When you deliver machines that have hydraulic fluid in order to move cylinders, and you put them on certain projects. And I say projects, I don't mean construction always, but you put them in hospitals, you put those in fulfillment centers that are running, you put them in data centers that are running. Those customers are incredibly particular about there better never be a leak. So my point is, we have 500 of a specific machine that there may be 2 or 3 other companies in all of North America that have any of them, and they would have dozens and we have 100.
So all of those things, I think I got your question there. Early on, yes, there's investment on the technology side and how we plug it all into our network. But there tends to be, at least for some time, because there's limited supply, the ability to get a nice, a good price, a fair price with our customers. I hope that did I address both your questions there?
Yes. I think just to follow-up on that, I mean, just before that. I mean, what I think in terms of if you look at the Volvo, they are completely phasing out compact equipment. So the longer term, I mean, again my previous question, How do you see the phasing going into larger equipment? And again, in terms of if you could also answer the question on terms of the fleet that could be electrified, just a bit of color that will be helpful?
It's going to be you're going to get into well, there's 2 categories. There is rental fleet, then there's the transportation. So the transportation piece on the bigger end, tractor trailers, etcetera, certainly there's a lot of work going on in that regard. And we will see that over time. You heard Douglas McCluckkey talk about that.
As that technology becomes available, we will put that in place. On the equipment side, and it's important, I think, to mention this in and around all the infrastructure talk that we're hearing. And actually, I'm going to answer a question you didn't ask as it relates to that as well. But when it comes to the electrification of some of the product we rent, it'll be on the small to midsize first before you get into big sort of earth moving. We are a long ways away from a bulldozer or a £60,000 hydraulic excavator being electrified.
No questions on infrastructure. So I want to touch on one thing that I think is important to share. We've obviously heard a lot about infrastructure over the last few weeks. None of that is baked into what we're putting out there because it's not in any real forecast when it comes to starts are put in place, but it's important to understand. If you look back, these are rough numbers, but you can take a look at them for yourself.
In total construction, if you look back over 5 years or you look at total construction forecast over the next 5 years, and you remove residential, which leaves kind of the non res construction, of course, and the non building. You're going to come up with about $475,000,000,000 worth of starts on average, both looking back and looking forward. You've heard the administration talking a lot about this big infrastructure plan. In fairness, you have to break it into 2 pieces. You have to break it into concrete infrastructure, which is what you would think about roads, dams, buildings to some degree, things like data, telecom, etcetera.
And then the other one, which I think is well named, it's called human infrastructure. That's a bigger number. That's probably say 1 point 3,000,000,000 and the other is going to be somewhere between 500,000,000,800,000,000. Rest assured, human infrastructure, there's trickle down to that. That is schools, that is daycares, etcetera, that leads to dollars in the economy.
So there'll be winners as it relates to that as well. But when it comes to that concrete infrastructure, I like to look at it this way, break that down over 5 years, because all of it would start inside of 5 years from that going through Congress. It wouldn't be spent in 5 years, but it will be started in 5 years. And if you look at project starts, let's take the 500,000,000,000, the smaller, it's obviously 100,000,000,000 a year. You put 100,000,000,000 a year on 475,000,000,000, that's a 20% increase in starts.
That is not small. If you take the 800,000,000,000, which has also been discussed, that's 160,000,000,000 a year, you put that on top of 475, and you're talking a third growth in terms of overall non residential construction starts. So just as you understand that and the reason why it sparked my thought to mention that during your question is, there will be ESG components very likely tied to that. These are government funds. We've seen government projects over the years that require certain things.
And it will be the E, but it will also be the S. Businesses will have to be doing, which we take pride in anyway, the right things for their people in order to be benefactors of that. Rest assured, our sort of 11% market share we have overall, we will take a bigger bite out of that incremental spend if it does happen to come. So anyway, I think Will has officially cut us off now, hence being the last question. If we didn't get to any of your questions and you were still in queue.
We've got that recorded and we'll or someone else will reach out and make sure that we answer any questions that you may have. Thanks again for taking all the time today. I know this was longer than the ordinary Capital Markets Day. I hope you have felt it's been a worthwhile time and we look forward to seeing you in June. Thank you all.
Have a great day.