I think we'll begin. Good morning. I'm Sam Darkatsh. On behalf of Raymond James, I would like to welcome you to the Stanley Black & Decker presentation for today. With us today from Stanley is Don Allan, President and Chief Executive Officer. Also, Dennis Lange, Vice President, Investor Relations, and Christina Francis, Director of Investor Relations. Don, I think you mentioned that your presentation's, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes or so, which should give us a couple minutes for Q&A, but the majority of the detailed Q&A will be done at the breakout session immediately following this presentation. With that, Don, welcome back.
Thank you, Sam.
Morning, everyone. As Sam said, I'm going to walk through a few pages of her presentation around Stanley Black & Decker, and then we'll open up for a few questions at the end. And so, for those of you who followed our story over the last close to three years, we've been on a bit of a transformation journey to become a much more focused company. And it was really looking at a variety of different areas, looking at the portfolio of the company, looking at the complexity of the company in many areas such as functions, businesses, et cetera, and then also looking at our supply chain in a very different way with achieving certain outcomes and objectives that would allow us to interact more effectively with our suppliers and our channel customers. And so, when we sit here today, we have definitely become a more focused company.
And so, you see the profile of us financially around revenue, market cap, and dividend yield, very attractive. And we're really left with two businesses: Tools & Outdoor, which is the worldwide leader in the Tools & Outdoor space at $13.3 billion of revenue. And you see a breakout of the different parts and components of that with amazing brands, with the three really power brands in there of DEWALT, CRAFTSMAN, and STANLEY. And then we have other brands that serve certain niche purposes such as Cub Cadet, Black & Decker, Lenox, Irwin, and a few others. Amazing brands and amazing innovation machine, really surrounded by great people. The Stanley Engineered Fastening business is a business that came together when Stanley and Black & Decker merged about 13 years ago. It was with the Black & Decker company at the time.
It serves really three industries: the automotive manufacturing industry, aerospace manufacturing, and then certain select general industrial manufacturing categories. You see some of the brands that go along with that that are very well known in this particular industry. We think we've created a company that has two businesses that can differentiate themselves to our end users and channel customers in ways that are centered around innovation, centered around making folks more productive and efficient in whatever jobs they're doing, whether that job is a construction worker building a commercial building or a residential building, or whether it's someone in a manufacturing setting for our Engineered Fastening business that's building a plane or a car. We've also been transforming ourselves to really begin to accelerate the organic growth profile of these two businesses.
And so, when we embarked on this journey about two and a half years ago, we really wanted to dramatically reduce the complexity of our supply chain. Our corporate structure became too complex and focused on too many different things. And so, we wanted to streamline that. And we really wanted to look at our operating model as to how we served our customers and end users in a more effective way. And I'll talk about that a little bit later as to some of the organizational structural changes that we've made. At the same time, as we took all these different costs out, we need to really take a significant portion of it and reinvest it in certain areas to drive core organic growth.
Obviously, continuing to invest in innovation is incredibly important in making sure that we find the right core activities and product categories that we're increasing our investment in R&D. One of those things would be electrification. Electrification continues to become a dominant market shift in many of our businesses or product families. And so, although a lot of the power tools and handheld outdoor products have been electrified through battery technology, there's still many categories that are either done through electricity through a cord or through gas or other types of technologies to drive power. And so, there's more white space opportunity to drive across those product families. We've been a market leader.
We want to continue to demonstrate market leadership by gaining market share with these investments that we're putting in place, which is really investing in field activation activities, digital marketing activities, et cetera, that interact with the end user because our model needs to start with our end user and our T&O business and understand what makes them more productive, what makes them more efficient, provides them the highest quality tools, et cetera. Those are the things they're looking for from us. But to do all those things, we need a more responsive supply chain that meets the channel customers' expectations around service. And so, we had to dramatically streamline and make investments in there as well. It wasn't just about taking out costs. Ultimately, we believe this is how we enhance shareholder value.
As you see, our objective is to get organic revenue going two to three times the market. We're starting to see green shoots, especially in the DEWALT family, of that starting to occur in 2024. And as we hopefully enter 2025, we'll see a similar type of performance. Get our gross margins above 35%. We exited the year in the low 30s in 2024. And we're hoping absent tariffs, we're hoping to be close to 35% by the end of this year or it slips a little bit into the first half of 2026. Continuing to build upon our strong free cash flow track record of the last two or three years and making sure that we convert at 100% or better. Obviously, powerful innovation is key. And then meeting our customer fill rate expectations and driving improvement there.
Being a simpler, focused, purpose-driven company allows us to achieve these outcomes, and you can see the execution that we've achieved since 2022 through the end of 2024. To do all this, we need to revitalize our leadership team, and so, of the top 70 leaders, we have about 50% of those folks are in new roles. Doesn't necessarily mean they were all folks hired from the outside. There's a mix of folks hired from the outside, but also redeploying people with the right expertise into the right roles. Big change, but without that, it's hard to really get the outcome that you see on the remainder of the page. We've increased the profitability in that time horizon. As I mentioned, 30% in 2024 with a goal of getting to 35% and beyond in the next few years.
Stabilized our service levels to the point now where we're getting close to the mid-90 percentile around service levels with a goal of getting up to 98+ % over the next few years, simplified the portfolio, sold our security business, infrastructure business, and oil and gas business, and focused on the two remaining businesses that I mentioned earlier in the presentation, and I talked about prioritizing investments, about $250 million through the end of 2024 and another $100 million on top of that in 2025, and along the way, we were able to improve our balance sheet to the point where we've significantly reduced our debt and were able to get our debt-to-EBITDA ratio down to below four at the end of 2024, so strong performance so far, but we're not done. We have one more year of transformation of the supply chain.
About $500 million of savings are expected in 2025 as we drive more material productivity, more operational excellence across our entire plant system and distribution network, continue to reduce complexity. That can be a combination of SKUs, number of suppliers that we're working with, et cetera. It's also what we refer to as platforming, which is basically looking at different product families and saying, "Okay, there's going to be standardization of certain parts across those families, and then there's going to be a component that's unique to the brand, such as a DEWALT brand will have a higher functionality and a higher level of performance versus a STANLEY or CRAFTSMAN branded power tool." And then footprint rationalization will continue and will complete the vast majority of that into 2025 or over 2025 into early 2026. At the same time, we need to continue to accelerate organic growth.
Even though the market is relatively flat to modestly down the last year or so or longer, and likely will continue to be the case here in 2025, we need to be gaining market share. We think these investments we're making and the simplification of our company and portfolio allows us to do that, to be more focused on the pro and the market activation at the end user level, innovating to deliver the end user solutions and make them more productive, efficient at the highest level of quality, and then focused on electrification, as I mentioned earlier, and ensuring that we build the right organization structure that allows us to grow. An example of that would be our DEWALT. Our business in Tools & Outdoor used to be based on product categories organizationally. We're now based on brands.
We have a DEWALT general manager, a STANLEY general manager, and a CRAFTSMAN general manager. The organizational structure of product managers, engineering, marketing is all underneath those individual leaders. They can focus on what their end user needs and how they meet those needs and also meet the needs of our channel customers along the way. We've had to reorganize engineering and manufacturing and product managers as well around that. It's been a significant change, but we've already started to see the effect of it in DEWALT. Where last year, DEWALT grew 5% in a market that was relatively flat or modestly positive. We are seeing market share gains. This model and these investments is really getting the outcome we want. We're going to continue to focus on that because we do believe that ultimately is what drives shareholder value.
Now, over the long term, we think we're building a foundation, as I said, that allows us to gain share on a consistent, sustainable basis. But the thing that gets us really excited is that we are tied to industries that have long-term growth prospects. When you think about Tools & Outdoor being primarily heavily weighted to the construction industry, both in the U.S. and internationally, and you think about Engineered Fastening being tied to automotive, aerospace, and other general manufacturing verticals, these are all industries that expect to see growth over the next decade or two, potentially even longer, and you need to make sure you have a model like ours, which has a heavy focus on innovation, a heavy focus on the strength of your brands, and then surround it with the right organizational structure to achieve the level of effectiveness and outcomes you want.
These are very attractive markets where brands matter. And you are able to differentiate through innovation in delivering productivity to your end users and customers. And of course, you have the ability to achieve scale with these businesses as you grow over time, which is what really makes us excited, even though we're in a period of time where there's a lot of uncertainty in the U.S. markets in particular, but even globally, there's some uncertainty that we're all navigating through. But over the midterm and long term, these are the things that get us jazzed up and excited about the strategy that we're driving towards and allows us to achieve these types of long-term financial targets and goals. We laid out a vision financially back at our Capital Markets Day in November. And you can see a lot of the detail here.
We talk about 35+% , but our view is 35% is just another goal along a journey that we should be able to get to 36%-37%, and maybe beyond over the long term and get back to the right level of operating leverage as we grow mid-single digits and probably a relatively low single-digit market growth. If that market growth is stronger because interest rates are lower and other things play out, then we believe we can perform even at a higher level of revenue performance. You see the EBITDA objectives and CFROI, and then, of course, free cash flow conversion, with ultimately getting ourselves back to a leverage ratio of somewhere between two to two and a half times when you look at net debt to adjusted EBITDA. The assumptions are over to the right associated with that.
The foundational things that I described about the company that we have created or recreated over the last two and a half years will allow us to achieve these outcomes as the market gets stronger at some point, maybe in 2025 or in 2027 and beyond. And so, as I said, the journey's not over. We've made significant progress in the last two plus years to stabilize the company and build this foundation for future growth. Because we are a more focused company, and we've been delivering against the commitments that we've made over the last few years and want to continue to do that going forward for the subsequent several years. We're building a growth culture. We've had a growth culture in this company for a long time, but it was a mix of inorganic and organic.
We are really looking to build a strong, sustainable, organic growth culture that whether we do acquisitions in the future or not, which we will probably someday do small acquisitions again, that strong DNA will stay and be sustainable in our company. Ultimately, that allows us to create a compelling shareholder value creation opportunity for this company as you think about the next three to five years. Those are my prepared comments, and I will flip it over to you, Sam.
Terrific. Questions for Don and Dennis? There's an obvious one, which would be the tariffs. You've got a, I don't know, $1 billion of cost of sales exposure to China, maybe $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion with Mexico. Talk about mitigation options, what you're doing currently, what the potential effects might be from a P&L standpoint this year or next.
Yeah, so we have been talking about tariffs internally since probably about a year ago. And so we were looking at a potential scenario of President Trump winning the election and what that might mean if certain tariffs were put in place. And so we've been kind of building a roadmap for this over the last 12 months. We've been talking about it externally probably since September, October of last year in a variety of different settings. And in our earnings call about a month ago, we provided additional insights as to really the sourcing activities of where product comes from into the U.S. market. And so when you look at that pie chart that's out there, it gives you the numbers that Sam mentioned around China and Mexico. And then there's a large percentage, about 40% or so, that is actually made in the U.S. that serves the U.S.
And then there's another billion or so that comes from a variety of other countries around the world. And so as President Trump begins to propose these different tariffs, we've been very focused on mitigation activities at a variety of different levels. One, we have been working through our government relations and lobbyist organizations, my own personal interactions with a lot of different individuals in DC to educate them on our industry and our situation and the impact of tariffs within our industry. Also, to make sure they understand that we are a significant U.S. manufacturer and have been for a long time and will continue to be the case going forward.
And so when China tariffs came public about a month ago, the first 10% and then another 10% happened today or yesterday, we have basically been in discussions since December with our customers about the possibility of tariffs and talking about we would probably be likely taking some level of price action. And therefore, we've continued that. We're in an execution phase with our customers now around China tariffs for a level of price. And we're working through all those details with them and hope to have the vast majority of that completed in the coming months. And as usual, they have a very robust process that we need to follow and go through. And we're very familiar and seasoned with how it works. And we're really trying to partner with them to ensure that collectively altogether that we do the right things for our company to ensure success.
At the same time, we've been mitigating our supply chain from China in the sense of how much comes from China into the U.S. market. So for a little bit of data, we go back about six, seven years ago in President Trump's first term when tariffs began to emerge then for China, 40% of what we sold in the U.S. market came from China. That number was about 20%-25% about a year ago, and now it's 15%. And in the coming years, it's going to be almost zero as we continue to move manufacturing out of China that serves the U.S. market. We'll still have a Chinese operation, but it will serve other parts of the world. That's the kind of second level of mitigation that we are focused on. So I feel like China, we have a strategy.
We just need to look at it and say, "Okay, we're going to be dealing with some price increases for a period of time." Then we'll do mitigation efforts around manufacturing and assembly. And ultimately, we'll get to a place that I think is a reasonable outcome that protects our margins and allows us to offset the impact of these tariffs over the midterm and the long term. Mexico is a different situation. Mexico is something that's a little bit of a wait and see. We need to kind of see how this is going to play out. We do have a fairly substantial Mexican footprint, primarily for our DEWALT power tool business that serves the U.S. market. And so we'll see how the negotiations happen between the two countries and where this lands.
We have provided information to our customers as to what it could mean for a price increase. And if these tariffs stick, that's something we'll have to continue to have that conversation going forward with them. But we want to do a little bit of a wait and see and see how this plays out at this point.
I think we saw some competitive price announcements. I think I saw one from Milwaukee a week or two ago. What have you announced to the trade in terms of a quantification of what type of pricing is expected?
Yeah, we haven't announced anything yet at this point in time. We've shown estimates to our customers. It's the level of price that we're having a conversation with them. The communication will probably happen in the coming weeks. And so at this point, we really haven't disclosed that yet, Sam.
The objective is really to be able to offset the impact and protect our margins.
And if you remember back to the earnings call, Sam, one of the things we did communicate is that we knew this was going to be a dynamic situation. We wanted to let some time pass before officially putting things in place. And we're kind of getting to that point now.
Yeah. And your footprint, be it Chinese or Mexican, talk about it relative to your primary competitors?
Well, I mean, obviously, there's four big players in the industry. And all of us have substantial footprints in China. Ours is probably the least substantial because of our heavy shifting to Mexico. One of them has a decent-sized footprint in Vietnam. So they have a combination of Vietnam and China, and so versus our China kind of Mexico footprint.
And then the other two are definitely heavily weighted to China. And so we'll see how the competitive playing field shifts and changes over time and which countries have tariffs as President Trump figures out how to renegotiate all these different trade deals. So it's a bit of a kind of wait and see and navigate.
Questions from the room? Talk about tone of business. We've seen January and February commentary from the home centers. Also give us, what are you seeing specifically within your particular product categories?
Yeah, I would say, Sam, that we expected the year to be kind of slow to start. And so versus our expectations, the first two months are pretty much in line with those expectations. However, when you kind of look at the underlying demand and point of sale information, it's definitely been a slow start to the year.
And so some people are flagging weather as a possible driver of that, which I do think it is a driver to some extent. But all of us are watching consumer confidence. And ultimately, are we seeing potential for slower levels of demand because of concerns around the economy and maybe some concerns associated with the impact of tariffs? I'd say there's some yellow flags out there that we're all watching and trying to determine what it means. But it's far from a strong start to the year. It's definitely been a slow start to the year.
Any early indication of preseason sell-in for outdoor since we're right about that time of year?
Yeah, I mean, the outdoor preseason sell-in has been pretty much in line with what we expected. And so there hasn't been any really big shifts there. And that will likely continue through the remainder of March.
And then the season begins to kick in at the end of March and early April. Then we'll see what kind of replenishment happens after that. But we went into the year with an expectation based on our conversations with our major customers in outdoor. And they pretty much hit that expectation. In some cases, been a little bit better.
One thing we were able to do last year, in particular around the independent retailer network, is get the channel inventories in line with where they've historically been. And so our expectation coming into this year is that demand and our shipments are more in line versus the prior years where we were taking some inventory down on our customers. Yeah.
I think one of the things about the current dynamic in the markets and the tariffs, they're all things that we have to navigate and work through.
But the comments in my presentation around the foundation we're building for growth and the investments we're making to strengthen the innovation machine, to improve the cycle time around innovation, more field activation activities, ensure we're meeting the needs of the end user, achieving higher levels of service with our channel customers are all things that will position us to gain market share no matter what the market is. And so we as a team never want to lose sight of the fact that those are the things that make this operating model strong and allow us to achieve an outcome that's better than market. And nobody likes to have difficult markets. It's always something that you prefer to be in a stronger market.
But I actually feel really good about that foundation we've built that will allow us to achieve that type of outcome no matter what the market is in the short term.
So the primary KPI that investors should be focused on this year, would it be market share gains? Would it be gross margins? We're probably past the point where it's something like free cash flow generation or working capital drawdown or what have you. Which of those KPIs or are there others that you would really focus investors' attention?
Yeah, I think market share gain is certainly one that we want to. We've demonstrated some significant improvement with DEWALT. We want to continue that, sustain that, make it stronger. We also want to do the same thing with STANLEY and CRAFTSMAN and some of our other brands.
The second thing is we want to continue our progression around gross margin rate. And whether tariffs slow that a little bit here and there, we'll see because of the timing of price versus the implementation timing of tariffs. But that's an important metric as well, an outcome that we're looking for. And then the free cash flow is important. I think the conversion is important because we want to hit our leveraging outcome by the end of the year or at some point in 2026. We have said that it'll probably have to do a modest inorganic divestiture to get to two to two and a half times net debt to EBITDA. So those are all things that we're kind of having the forefront of our mind that all of you should probably be looking at to ensure that we're achieving the outcomes we want to achieve.
What are you seeing around the world, whether LATAM or Asia-Pacific, what have you, or Europe?
Latin America has continued to demonstrate strength, kind of ranging anywhere from mid- to high-single-digit organic growth. Europe had a period of kind of sluggishness, some inventory channel adjustments. But we have seen some improving trends in the fourth quarter there that we think will continue in 2025 because we have been making investments in the European market to stimulate growth. And then Asia, it's kind of been a mid-single-digit to high-single-digit performance, a relatively small base that I think will continue. And the U.S. market has been relatively flat to modestly down, depending on what category you look at.
Yes, question here.
How are you achieving the share gains?
I guess, do you feel like you're further along in competition on the electrification, or is it the go-to-market changes that's enabling the share gains? And I guess just trying to tell how you're going to replicate that with the other brands.
Yeah, so the question is, how are we achieving market share gains? Is it something to do with innovation, electrification, or field resources? Actually, it's all those things because we've made investments in innovation in certain categories of R&D. We've looked at different categories and said there's opportunity in white space around things like POWERSHIFT , which we did, which relate to tools around concrete applications and applying and pouring and applying concrete to large building construction. There's other categories like that around innovation that we're driving.
There's field activation individuals that are out there on the job site interacting with end users around the DEWALT products and why they perform better than certain competitive products or all competitive products, depending on what the product is, educating them on them, making sure they understand what the new innovations are, making sure we understand what makes them productive, efficient, and what they think about the quality of all the different products that we have and our competitors have. These are all investments that we're making that allowed us to achieve that outcome with DEWALT. And I think the organizational changes we've made have facilitated our ability to be successful with that because we have an organization now focused just on DEWALT, an organization just focused on STANLEY , CRAFTSMAN, and then another organization that's focused on the other brands.
And that has allowed us to ensure the right level of focus and less of a peanut butter spread. And as we accelerate these different things across all those different categories, those are the things that I think will facilitate market share gains against the variety of different competitors in this industry. With that, we're going to conclude, and we're going to.