Morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. This is the Swimm Presentation, Latham. Before we begin, I need to remind you that a complete list of disclosures and conflicts of interest is available on our website. I'm Ryan Merkel. I cover building products at William Blair. With us today is Oliver Gloe, CFO of Latham. For those that don't know the company, Latham is a leading producer of in-ground residential pools, specializing in fiberglass pools, vinyl liners, and pool covers. We believe fiberglass is gaining market share over concrete pools due to lower costs and faster installation. With that, let me turn it to Oliver.
Ryan, thank you very much for the introduction. With that, you have actually done half of the presentation already. Welcome, everybody, to Latham, the pool company. Over the next half an hour or so, Josh and I will give you an overview of who we are and what we do as a company. We will touch on some of the key growth drivers that we see. I will go through a couple of financial slides to reintroduce you to our guidance 2025 and give you a way on how to think about the capabilities of this business going forward. As Ryan has said, we are the largest manufacturer of in-ground swimming pools in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Within our product categories, we focus on growth, especially for fiberglass pools and auto covers. Both are products which are growing within their respective markets.
We have an especially we're focusing on the sun states, where both fiberglass pools and auto covers are underrepresented, while the sun states, we define those to be Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, represent the majority of the domestic pool installs. We are carefully balancing our growth investments with being disciplined on our cost base. We have done a number of coming out of COVID. We've done a number of restructuring projects to significantly work on our operating cost basis, increasing operating efficiencies, introducing programs such as lean and value engineering. If you take our opportunities for growth, the growth strategies that we're actively investing in, plus a disciplined approach on managing cost, that positions us for accelerated and profitable growth going forward. A quick view on our product portfolio. I'll start on the left.
About half of our product portfolio, measured by revenue, sits in the in-ground swimming pool category. That is a combination of fiberglass pools as well as package pools. 26% of our business sits in the cover category. That is the in-season automatic safety cover and the off-season winter safety cover, with about 23% represented by vinyl liners. In every category we compete in, we are the market leader. Most importantly, we have about a 50% share in the growing fiberglass category, whereas in the other categories, we still are the market leader with about 30%, 35%, 40% share. The majority, vast majority of our sales are domestic sales. 85% of our sales are here in the U.S., with the balance being between Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the middle of the chart, if you look at the in-ground pool sales, the vast majority, three-quarters, are fiberglass pools.
Now, why is that important? Within the U.S. market, 23% of all pools being installed is fiberglass. That number has consistently increased year after year, and we expect that number to increase going forward. Another stat is 17% of our fiberglass pools are in the sun states. Now, why is that important? Because, as I mentioned earlier, the sun states represent the majority of the U.S. in-ground pool sales. In the sun states, fiberglass pools are underrepresented, even far below the 23% national average. While all of the in-ground sales are tied to new pool construction, our liners and covers categories actually have a very healthy share. About half of the sales go into replacement.
You have a large install base of liners and winter covers in the market that, on average, need to be replaced every 8-10 years, therefore providing us with a very consistent annual stream of replacement revenue. A quick view on our strategic priorities. We have three strategic priorities that we're actively investing against. The first one, I mentioned already, fiberglass pools, growing category within the market, and especially in the sun state. Josh will touch on that in a minute. I would make a similar comment on auto covers. Auto covers, based on the benefits of an auto cover, increasing penetration in the market today, about 20%, a little bit more of all pools come with an auto cover. The tendency is increasing, and we are certainly participating in that growth.
Lastly, we have developed a revolutionary device on how to better, more efficiently, faster, and more accurately measure a pool for us to produce a vinyl liner and a safety cover. That tool, that device only works on our system and enables us to increase our market share within the pool liner and winter cover categories. We have been outperforming based on our growth drivers. We have been outperforming the market both in an upturn and a downturn. Together with our cost savings, disciplined approach on managing cost, lean and value engineering, we see significant long-term growth both for net sales and adjusted EBITDA. A quick overview of fiberglass pools and why this category is growing. Our pools are highly customizable.
We have about 60 pool models, different shapes, different sizes, rectangular, free form, that can be combined with features such as tanning ledges, lights, spillover spas. Our pools are very easy to install. Our pools can be installed in as fast as one day. An average pool install for a fiberglass pool takes three to four days. That compares to a similar concrete pool, similar size, that many times takes three, sometimes above six months to install, therefore reducing the disruption to the homeowner as well as increasing dealer productivity and installer productivity. Last but not least, on average, a fiberglass pool comes at a 25% advantage in terms of upfront cost versus a comparable concrete pool. Now, since our pools are essentially maintenance-free, we refer to them as set it and forget it. Other pools, like a concrete pool, need refurnishings, replacements, and costly repairs.
That cost advantage, initially 25% over the lifetime of the pool, can easily increase to 35% or more. Based on the advantages of fiberglass pools, as you can see on the top left of this chart, the share of fiberglass pools within the industry has consistently increased. In 2019, about 16% of all pools sold in the U.S. were fiberglass pools. That has increased year after year to today, 23%. We expect that to increase going forward. While that increase is great for us, in an international comparison, that's still a low number. 23% is far below where Europe is on average, 35% to 40%, or where Australia stands, being at 70%. The share of fiberglass pools within the pool market is increasing, and we estimate that to increase going forward. Let's talk about the market itself.
We believe that the market is today with 62,000 pools being sold in 2024 at trough condition. We believe that 25, we plan for a flattish pool industry, but we believe that it's at the trough, whereas the jump-off point before COVID was 78,000 pools, and the long-term average is 100,000 pools annually. Let me touch on auto covers for a minute. An auto cover has two main benefits. One is safety. The other one is cost savings. In terms of safety, we refer to our auto covers as essentially the garage door of your pool. In the morning, you open your pool, and after you're done swimming, you close the pool. Once you close the pool, nothing and nobody can fall inside. Therefore, providing the homeowner with the ease of mind that as the pool is unattended, your family is safe, your pets are safe, your neighbors are safe.
As a matter of fact, in an increasing number of jurisdictions, if you have an auto cover, that gets you out of the need to build a fence around your pool. Second key advantage of an auto cover is cost savings. It's essentially a very effective barrier between your pool and the atmosphere. You have less water evaporation, less chemical usage, and a lower heating bill. On average, we estimate that an auto cover has an ROI of about four years. With that, I would like to turn it over to Josh to dive into our journey with fiberglass in the Sun states. Thank you, Josh.
Thank you, Oliver. Thank you, everybody, for coming today. I do apologize if I move a little bit back and forth between here. I tend to be a walker, so this stage is not quite as big as I'm used to. Middle one. All right, today we're going to start with the opportunity for Latham when it comes to growing our market share and growing our product experience throughout the United States. You can see on the board we have 62,000 pools were sold in the United States in 2024. Of that, more than 50% came out of four states, Arizona, California, Texas, and Florida being the predominant state when it came to new pools in the ground or new permits started.
If you have a look at the final graph, you can see that Latham at the moment is incredibly strong in 22% of the market, with 83% of our pools coming out of that market. We only have 17% of Sun State share. That was at 1.15%, and the goal is now to move slowly up to 19% to 20% and continue to snowball that through. We really want to focus on our biggest opportunity, and the biggest opportunity is to get into the Sun States, create adoption, create an opportunity with our customers that allow us to be successful and give them the best value for money product.
The benefit we have with that is that when you look at case studies around the world, Australia, which is an incredible case study, and it's no coincidence that I come from Australia, so I've seen the rise of fiberglass pools in that market. Australia is 70% market share with fiberglass pools. The biggest factor that makes going into the Sun states very achievable for us is that demographics, climate, and market needs in Australia, where 70% market share has been achieved, is very, very similar in the four Sun states that we see here. We believe that we actually have a great opportunity to offer customers something that is very, very different as opposed to the gunite product that they've been used to for such a long period of time.
When you look at how you're going to grow and how you're going to develop as a company, you want to look at not where you're strongest, but where your biggest opportunities are going to be. No one in the fiberglass market has really developed a strong, solid Sun state strategy. How do we attack this and do it in a smart way? The first thing that we looked at is we need to increase customer awareness of our product. Our product has a lot of features and benefits that create a unique value proposition, whether it be smoother surface, the least invasive backyard renovation or backyard project you can do. We are in and out in sometimes three days.
We are a product that provides less money and a cost of ownership, and we are a product that has over 50 different choices that you can then customize to create an incredible backyard experience. We believe we're the best value for money. We need to start to get that across to the consumer in a market that has been predominantly focused on the gunite product. We do have a benefit that there is a lot of snowbirds moving from colder states down into Arizona, into Florida, into Texas, who already have exposure to fiberglass pools. That does give us a leg up that we already have that benefit when it comes to going after that market. The other thing is getting pool builders to understand the benefits of fiberglass to their business.
Now, COVID created a lot of backlog where pool builders were looking for ways to be able to be more successful in bringing their product to their customer. The beauty of fiberglass is, as Oliver mentioned earlier on, it can take anywhere between four, six months to get a gunite pool in. You can put three fiberglass pools in in the same time you can put one gunite pool at the same profit margin. It would only make sense that if you can do three times more and the same amount of money, it's a more profitable proposition, and now you have something that's different that you can offer to your customers.
Building awareness for the consumers to understand that this is the best value proposition or the best value for money that they can buy, but then from the builder's standpoint, this is actually the best revenue model that they can take into the marketplace, especially if they want to continue to diversify in a constantly changing market. The four pillars we put together to be successful in the sun states was expanding the pool dealer base. Now, when we talk about that, it isn't necessarily we need to get more pool builders to sell our product. We need to get the right pool builders in the right place, trained correctly, and allowing them to have the capacity to be able to handle this increased demand that's going to come from the broad awareness campaign.
When we look at standing up new builders, it is, do we have the right builders in the right place? Are they trained properly? Do they have the capacity and the growth and the drive? Also, where are areas where we have gaps that we can add these builders? That then moved into, we do not just want to go into a market and say, let's just attack Florida. Florida is a big place. Let's just attack Texas. Texas is a big place, and they both have different regional needs. We started to look at master plan communities.
These are live-play-stay communities that have been built in Florida and Texas predominantly, with over 34,000 new homes in 2024 were built in these master plan communities, and they make up 75% of Florida and Texas when it comes to new home builds and the development of these areas. We wanted to focus on diving into these markets and be very, very precision-focused with how we market to the consumers in these areas, how we bring builders into these areas.
It has actually been so successful for us that we have a lot of our President Club builders, companies that are our top builders that might be in New York, that might be in the Midwest, that have wanted to move their operations south and come into these master plan communities because they see the opportunity of bringing something different to the consumer and being able to take substantial market share. To be that successful, we followed the Australian concept, which was products need to meet market demand. In the past, we have built a product that suited the whole of the world. It does not work like that in Florida. It does not work like that in Texas. In Florida, you need pools that are 12 by 25 long, smaller pools, smaller backyards, smaller customers, tanning ledges, 14 by 30, a lot of spas, very, very, very popular.
We started to develop a product range that suited the regionalities of the Florida market. We also looked at Texas, which is a different market. Bigger pools, they're still very heavily focused on freeform pools. We started to create models that handled slightly larger areas, slightly more freeform models that modernized our range. Instead of it just being, this is the product you have, we are now pinpointing the products we put into those different markets. Squares are becoming very popular, but Texas is still very much a 50/50 freeform market. The final thing we needed to do was build broad awareness, build awareness, create interest. Interest creates a buying consumer. We wanted to highlight the benefits of fiberglass, which is faster installation. You could be making memories with your family substantially quicker than you can with any other product in your backyard.
I often say to people, how patient are your children? Because if you have a hole with no water in it in your backyard for six months, do you think your life's going to be very, very pleasant? What if I could have you swimming in 15 days? Does that sound like something that you would be happy with? That's the benefit of a fiberglass pool. We can get that product finished in a much shorter period of time, making memories with their family. We also talk about lower cost of ownership. How long do you plan to be in the home? A fiberglass pool will cost you virtually nothing long term, whereas you will have to refurb a concrete pool.
Sometimes when even talking to customers, we say things like, they say, oh, I have heard about fiberglass pools back in the day, and my friend had one. I respond with that by saying, in 2001, would you have bought an electric vehicle? In 2024 today, we have people buying electric vehicles all over the place. That is because it is not a fiberglass pool. It is a composite technology that is designed to be the most advanced product in the industry. The final thing is looking at the master plan communities in Florida, developing ground game. We are now part of the communities in these master plan communities. We sponsor baseball teams. We sponsor Friday free coffees. We sponsor different events. People now see us. Oliver had the pleasure of going down to Florida and seeing one of these master plan communities.
People turned around and said, I know Latham. They actually recognized the brand. The pool industry is not an industry where people recognize the brand of a product, and they were recognizing our brand. We were very successful in starting to build that awareness campaign. If we continue to do that, we're going to continue to have builders come to us who want to get on board and be part of this project. At the end of the day, do you want in your backyard for the second biggest investment in your life, do you want what cracks on the sidewalk, or do you want the product that's being sent to space? It's a very simple decision at the end of the day.
Finally, giving you an idea of some of the master plan communities that we are investing in and we're working into, you can see Mirada, Lakewood Ranch, Wellen Park, Babcock Ranch, The Villages, which is the biggest master plan community in the world. I think there's more golf courses in The Villages, 54 golf courses, I think, from memory than anywhere that I've ever been. The benefit is if you see the blue circles that are around there, there are a lot of smaller master plan communities popping up, which allows us to expand without having to move drastically and change our marketing programs, change our builders, and change our client experience. The biggest benefit is that the customer gets their pool quicker, the builder is able to make more money, and we have a laser-focused attack, and we're invested in these Sun states long term.
I'll now pass it back to Oliver.
Thank you, Josh.
Thank you.
A couple of slides on our financial performance. I already mentioned coming out of COVID, where you basically saw the market going from 117,000 pools to 62,000 pools today. We've done our fair share of relooking at our cost structure. We implemented a couple of waves of restructuring programs, and we significantly changed the cost footprint of our company. While at the same time, setting up a lean manufacturing and value engineering team that is going from plant to plant, implementing best practices, and on an ongoing basis, work on our cost structure. If you had followed our earnings calls, you have heard me saying on average about $2 million to $2.5 million is the contribution of the lean manufacturing and value engineering team on a quarterly basis. We did $9 million last year, and I expect another similar amount to come this year.
You've heard me saying we are outperforming the market, whether the market is going up or the market is declining. Our guidance for 2025 is based on an outlook of a flat market condition, 62,000 pools last year, about 62,000 pools this year. At midpoint of our guidance, net sales is increasing by 8%. Now, let me walk you through on how we where the 8% is coming from. The first 5% is organic growth. Again, it's the concept of outperforming the industry in any environment, which is continued conversion towards fiberglass, especially driven by the sun states, and then our other growth drivers being the auto covers, as well as Measure by Latham for vinyl liners and safety covers. About 3% is the contribution of our recently purchased CoverStar business.
We've done three acquisitions over the last 12 months, and this is the run rate impact of these acquisitions, about 3%. At midpoint, our EBITDA increases by about 19% versus 2024, which is the combination of our volume growth, the 5% organic growth, is the result of the contribution from lean manufacturing and value engineering projects, as well as the accretive contribution from our three acquisitions. Lastly, let's look beyond 2025 on what this business is capable of producing. Let me start off by, again, you'll see on the bottom right, market being at 62,000 pools in 2025. Again, our guidance is at midpoint, $550 million in net sales and $95 million in EBITDA. The last time this business was in a market with 60,000 pools was 2015.
Now, on the left side, you can see at that time, our business was $223 million in revenue and $36 million in terms of EBITDA, meaning over a decade, the market is at roughly comparable size, whereas our net sales and EBITDA has more than doubled. Now, if you take, let's say, the jump-off point, 78,000 pools before COVID hit, right, and run that forward, right? Once the market is back at 78,000 pools, once we have a couple of years of our growth strategies under our belt, we estimate that this company is about $750 million in size and about $160 million in EBITDA.
If you compare 2019 to 2000, and we call it the future, a couple of years out, right, when the market is back at 78,000 pools, our revenue base will have more than doubled, as well as the profitability of this company. With that, I think we have a couple of minutes for some Q&A.
Any questions? Okay, Alex, the 78,000, can you just unpack why that's sort of the number that you chose? And then the long-term average is close to 100,000. Why isn't that the number?
It should be. It should be, right? I think what we saw in the great financial crisis, we were at 175,000. The great financial crisis brought it down to the mid-50s. That's where we kind of have only cash buyers left. That's why we believe at 62 we had the trough, right? And you're absolutely right. The long-term average is 100,000. That's where the market should be. I think as we had fed a couple of years building up to 78,000 pools, that I think is the immediate next kind of three, five years out kind of plateau that we are targeting here. But you're absolutely right. The long-term average should be at 100,000.
You showed 23% share for fiberglass. What has been the conversion rate annually? What is the long-term potential of where you think the conversion could go?
We have been driving that 23%. Roughly, it's 100 basis points. It's pretty consistently 100 basis points per year, right? The 23 is a U.S. number, and that compares to an average in Europe somewhere 35% to 40%. Some countries are higher. Australia is at 70%. Australia has been at it for a little bit longer than we have, right? There is no reason why the U.S. shouldn't be on par with this in international comparisons.
Talk about tariffs. How is it impacting your cost? What are you doing with pricing, if anything?
Yeah, so tariffs continue to be a dynamic picture, right? What we disclosed in our last earnings call is that the unmitigated headwind is about $20 million for 2025, right? Good thing is our supply chain team has been at it for not weeks, probably by now half a year, right, to mitigate. And we mitigate in terms of, hey, we pre-board a lot of inventory. We nearshore, we value engineer us out of some situations where we buy materials that are exposed to tariffs. About 15% to 20% of our raw material basket is actually imported. So exposure is relatively limited, right? I would say where we stand today, about half, maybe a little bit more of that $20 million is mitigated on a supply chain basis, okay? We have actually announced and implemented a price increase to cover the rest.
Are you seeing any cancellations or delays due to the uncertainty? I realize the consumer will put down money maybe six, twelve months ago. How is that looking?
Exactly. I think, first of all, at 62,000 pools a year, you're basically talking about the cash buyer, right? The pool buying decision is a relatively long decision, somewhere 12to18 months, meaning the pools that are installed today, those decisions have been made a long time ago. These are families that have made down payments. They are scheduled for the install. They've made milestone payments. We don't see, and also in speaking with our dealers, we don't see an elevated level of push-outs or cancellations.
All right, we're out of time. Thanks, Oliver. Thanks, Josh.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.
Thank you.