All right. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Andrew Nicholas, and I'm the Business Services Analyst here at William Blair. I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that out of the way, I'm very pleased to welcome UL Solutions here today. CEO Jennifer Scanlon and CFO Ryan Robinson, welcome to the 45th Annual Growth Stock Conference. Really excited to have you here. I'm going to turn it over to each of them to give you an overview of the business. If there's some extra time at the end, we can discuss a few questions before moving to the breakout. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here. Our second year here, just a year and a few months past our IPO, last April of 2024. For those of you who don't know our story, although I guess I have to turn it over to Brian to do some safe harbor here.
Just general comments about the safe harbor disclosure. We will not go into this in great detail, and I'll turn it back to Jennifer to lead the discussion.
Excellent. All right. For those of you who do not know our story, you are going to hear five key themes from us today. The first theme is that we are a mission-driven growth company. Our mission of working for a safer world is important to our customers, and it is important to their customers. The great thing about our mission is that it operates in a large, fragmented, and growing industry, the testing, inspection, and certification industry. The second message you are going to hear from us is that we support that mission with a dedication to safety science. That safety science also matters to our customers. They know that we are going to help them apply science to the challenges of bringing their new innovations to the world safely, securely, with security and sustainability. The third message is that our customer relationships are long-lived. We were founded 130 years ago.
Many of our customers have been with us well over 100 years. We have over 80,000 customers across over 35 industries. We support these customers with disciplined account management, and it is reinforced by our global business model and the power of the UL mark that we will talk about in a few minutes. The fourth message: global matters. Global scale gives us operating leverage, and it helps us drive opportunities to extend our margin. We have used the scale to grow both organically and inorganically. Since 2010, we have invested over $1.3 billion in acquisitions to grow our business, and we have invested an equal amount in capital to extend our footprint. Finally, we are fiscally strong. We have a healthy balance sheet.
We have disciplined capital allocation methodology, and this gives us a lot of flexibility in the ways in which we deploy our capital to fuel our growth and target best-in-class shareholder returns. All right. The UL in a circle mark. Recognizable, billions of products around the world. We believe it's one of the most recognized symbols in safety and certainly in commerce, and we don't believe that it has an equal. The design of this mark can differ depending on its use, and it evolves as those customer needs and those market demands change. Certainly, that mark, it lets a regulator know or a consumer know that that product is safer and conforms to certain certification and regulatory standards. Now, with that background, let's talk a little bit about UL. As I said, we are a leading global business services company.
We test, inspect, and certify products around the world. Last year, we generated $2.9 billion in revenue, and the point of customer of that revenue is in the far right corner. 41% of our revenue comes from the U.S.. A quarter of our revenue comes from customers headquartered across Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan. The rest of the revenue is split pretty equally between Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia. We operate two businesses in three segments. Our first business is the testing, inspection, and certification business. One of those segments is testing, inspection, and certification known as TIC for ndustrial. The other is TIC for consumer.
Our third segment, which is our second business, is software and advisory services, where we unleash the power of the data that we have for those billions of products that we have tested and certified on behalf of our customers, helping them with regulatory supply chain transparency and sustainability reporting requirements using software as a service. On the next slide, you'll see we deliver that $2.9 billion in revenue across an integrated service portfolio. The first category is testing for products that need to be certified. When a product needs to meet an industry standard or a regulation that results in a certification, it then needs that second category, ongoing certification services for the life of that product being in the marketplace. As long as a single SKU of that product is manufactured, a single item, we will conduct ongoing certification services.
That's done by visiting factories four times a year to monitor that that product is being manufactured in accordance with the standards that we have certified. Our third category is another type of testing. It is non-certification testing. This is testing that still may be in support of regulations such as EMC wireless regulations. The amount of radio frequency interference is regulated by the FCC, but that does not require ongoing certification. That's why we separate those two types of testing. The first group leads to that 33% of recurring revenue. The second group of testing has a large amount of reoccurrence and long-term customer relationships, but does not lead to certification testing. And then our final category, software.
This is where, again, we have software as a service, about 10% of our revenue, that continues to focus on our 80,000 customers and servicing their needs around regulatory for their product compliance, supply chain traceability of those products, in particular, the chemical supply chain, and then the sustainability needs for how they need to report on the product's sustainability. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Ryan, who's going to take us through some more details and some numbers.
Thank you very much, Jenny. I'll provide some additional information on the markets we serve, how we organize the company in our segments, as well as some of the megatrends that are driving our growth. First, we're the world's leader in a large, growing, and fragmented industry of product and component testing, inspection, and certification. It's over a $240 billion market. A large portion is within manufacturers and their product development capabilities insourced, but roughly $99 billion is outsourced. Of that, that's divided between product testing, inspection, and certification, about a $38 billion total addressable market, and $61 billion, which is non-product. We focus in product testing, inspection, and certification, and we're the world leader. We typically work with large manufacturers, over 80,000 manufacturers in our customer base, helping make sure that their products meet regulatory requirements, product quality, safety, and sustainability standards.
Our over 15,000 employees offer that portfolio of services that Jenny mentioned to help them bring their products to market safely and then provide services to make sure they continue to meet quality and safety standards in the applicable markets where they sell their products. We organize into three primary segments. The largest portion of our business is testing, inspection, and certification. That includes our industrial segment that serves typically manufacturers in business-to-business markets, including the components that go into products. We also operate a consumer segment, which is typically products sold through consumer channels that end up in consumers' homes. We provide complementary software and advisory services to help our global customers achieve their regulatory requirements, their sustainability requirements, and their product compliance needs.
Our business across all three segments and all four of those product lines is driven by several megatrends that have led to high organic growth, not only over the last decade, but especially an accelerated pace in recent years. That includes the pace of energy transition, how electrical energy is generated, transmitted, stored, and consumed. There's a greater diversity of products that connect the electrical grid, and the aggregate amount of electrical energy and types of devices is growing rapidly. We're the world's leader in electrical product safety, and that's helping drive both our industrial and our consumer segment. Second, new mobility, whether it's pure electrical vehicles, hybrid vehicles, changes in the electrical grid, complementary energy storage capabilities for renewable energy generation, energy transformation around mobility is creating new types of testing needs. Third is sustainability.
There's an increasing global focus, and 59% of our revenue is from customers outside the United States. Global focus in reducing the total carbon footprint across a manufacturer's total product lifecycle. New technologies and digitalization. That includes the evolution of the product needs within data centers, within computing needs, and new product innovation in a number of different ways. Supply chain risks. As manufacturing continues to change locations and supply chain components and suppliers change, manufacturers are increasingly looking for data and alternative supply to fulfill their product manufacturing requirements. Finally, regulatory compliance. On a global basis, the majority of our revenue is driven by authorities that have jurisdiction that require products to have certain safety and compliance characteristics in order to be lawfully imported and sold in their markets.
These trends have been driving our growth for over 130 years, particularly on an accelerated basis in the past few years. With that, we thought we would open it up for Andrew for some additional questions and discussion.
Happy to. Thanks, Jenny. Thanks, Ryan. Maybe we start by diving in a little bit more thoroughly into the energy transition opportunity. The electrification of everything is something that you've talked about since you went public last year. Can you give a little bit more detail on kind of the underlying drivers there and how, maybe more importantly, how it ultimately results in increased demand for your services?
Yeah, I love this topic, and it crosses both our industrial and our consumer segments, but let's start with how important it is in the industrial environment. Depending on what survey you believe, we need to somewhere between double and triple the amount of electrical generation in this country and really around the world in the next 20 years or so. How do you do that? You have to change the way that electricity and power is generated, extending into renewables, considering cleaner ways to handle fossil fuels, extending into hydrogen, lots of different ways to nuclear, lots of different ways to generate. Each of those different means require different products, different components in those power plants. And then certainly, then the way that it's transmitted is changing. AC current, alternating current has a lot of leakage, whereas DC, you get greater throughput, but it's less safe.
Again, as products are being adapted to handle DC current, they have new product development, different testing. You then think about the way that energy is being stored, particularly if you're in renewables. You've got to store what's being powered by solar to produce electricity at night. Energy storage systems, batteries, large-scale industrial batteries are becoming extremely important in addition to batteries that are powering electric vehicles and not just cars. They could also be hybrid autos, but you consider agriculture or large-scale construction or even lawnmowers or jet skis. There's lots of electrical batteries that are powering mobility. Finally, just the ways in which on the consumer side of the business, the capabilities in consumer technology, the way that it's driving demand for this energy is increasing.
AI-embedded servers, AI-embedded into products, AI-embedded into everything in our lives is increasing the need for electricity and the electrification of everything. The built environment around those data centers, there's a lot of heat, a lot of thermodynamic issues. You have to think about fire safety in addition to that electrical safety. This megatrend touches every part of our business. It's real, and we're in the middle of it all.
That's great. Thank you. Maybe something a little bit more topical would be kind of the tariff discussion. As someone who's kind of intimately involved with product development, product innovation cycles, a lot of potential change going on in the global landscape right now, can you talk a little bit about what you've seen to this point from recent tariff enactment and maybe taking a step back, how you would expect something like that to impact your business broadly? It's been a really resilient company for some time, but all those topics would be helpful to cover.
I'll start with the second, take a step back, and then I'm going to turn it over to Ryan for the more recent puts and takes. For us, tariffs, we've never viewed them as a challenge to our business. They can have a short-term effect, either as a former manufacturer, when you see your costs going up, you typically swap out components, change your raw materials, maybe move your factory location. In all three of those situations, it is highly likely that product will need to be retested, recertified. For us, as we're by our customer's side, as they're making the very smart decisions that they're all making, and quite frankly, they have been making since 2017, when the first round of the Trump administration tariffs came into effect, we've been seeing this movement in value engineering products and changing locations of manufacturing.
For us, we'll continue to be by our customer's side as they make these decisions and help them through whatever transitions that they're making. We did see some short-term effects. Ryan, you want to talk about third and fourth quarter?
Yeah. On a short-term basis, we support our customers, and what we saw in the fourth quarter was we believe in anticipation of tariffs. We had an increase in some services as manufacturers accelerated the pace of product manufacturing and shipment, potentially to be ahead of tariffs. So we have a service line, ongoing certification services that Jenny mentioned, that through the first three quarters of last year grew at about 8%. In the fourth quarter, it grew 12%. The first quarter grew 5%. It appears that just some of that demand was pulled forward. In general, our services are not based on the volume of manufacturing or the volume of consumption. They're based on the pace of new product innovation and products coming to market. There is a small portion of our revenue that is volume-based that picked up in the fourth quarter.
In the first quarter, we mentioned an even more modest effect in our consumer business, where we could see in some countries that are more potentially tariff-affected a modest increase in revenue that we believed had a similar effect. As Jenny said, in the long term, our revenue is based on the pace of new product innovation, technological advancement, investment in redesign of new products. In the short term, there can be some disruption related to uncertainties of our customers.
Sure. We have seen over the past decade-plus very resilient growth across a bunch of different environments. Obviously, product innovation is consistently a part of the story.
Yeah. So just to build on that, thank you for saying that. And I'll give you a $5 bill at the end of the discussion. Yes, we have had resilient growth for a long period of time, averaging almost 7% on a compound annual basis. You can see through the first Trump administration, when some tariffs were administered, we still had mid-single-digit revenue growth. And then even in some relatively extreme shock periods like COVID, we had basically flat revenue growth in 2020, which is a testament to the resilience of the business model.
I see in the bottom right-hand corner here of the slide, you also show the expansion on the adjusted EBITDA margin line. Can you speak a little bit to the trajectory of that line, [and above], but maybe broadly the sophistication of the business over the past decade-plus? It was previously owned under a not-for-profit umbrella, really made huge strides under your leadership, Jenny. If you could just kind of speak to where you're at now, what the opportunities are and the levers have been in the past and in the future to drive that forward.
Yeah, absolutely. Prior to UL Solutions, I was in low-cost manufacturing. Prior to UL Solutions, Ryan was in retail. We both have, just in our complete DNA ways of operating, a focus on continuous improvement and margin expansion in every business. When I joined in 2019 into 2020, early days of COVID, Ryan and I looked at each other and said, how do we make sure that we, in an uncertain growth environment, that we really focus on profitability and margin? We managed, as Ryan said, held revenue was relatively flat, but we had an outstanding year with EBITDA and net income.
A lot of that just continued the trajectory of where do you consolidate, where do you centralize, how do you think about single instance of technology, how do you run a data-driven business, and additionally, how do we continue to focus on the value of the services that we deliver to customers and execute that through appropriate pricing moves, particularly in that new testing, those two service lines. I'll let Ryan comment. We've made commitments this year on our EBITDA progress and where we're headed.
Yeah, we're pleased with our pace of profitability improvements through the end of 2023. Just before we were becoming a public company, we had finished a year with about 21% adjusted EBITDA margin. We had set a target as we were becoming a public company of at least 24%. Last year, we did 22.9%, so 190 basis points of expansion. We felt comfortable giving an outlook this year for approximately 24%, to meet that 300 basis point target in our second year as a public company. We think there's margin expansion opportunity in all three of our segments. We're not going to be done there at the end of this year, but we're pleased with the pace of profitability improvements across all three segments.
I think one of the things that also helps with margin expansion is when your fastest-growing segment has an operating margin, rather an EBITDA margin in the low 30%. I often get asked, for those that are newer to the story, why it is that industrial is so profitable, maybe relative to some of the peers and also even some of your other segments. Maybe just for education purposes, it'd be great to hear kind of what's driving that and what makes it such a fantastic business.
Yeah. One of the primary things is we help our customers reduce risk and help them get their products to market on a timely basis, meeting regulatory requirements. That's a very valuable value proposition. In industrial, typically, the products are more complex, more highly engineered. They have many different components. They are in service longer once they're installed. They are often more regulated. In many industrial markets, the UL mark is an important part of how those manufacturers bring their product to market and communicate their quality and compliance to their trading partners. That assists in the profitability of the business through adding value to our customers and their risk reduction.
Great. I think we have some time for a couple more questions. I wanted to touch on capital allocation. Within that, M&A ambitions generate a lot of cash. You prioritized organic investment historically. Just kind of walk us through the priorities there and maybe spend some additional time specifically on the organic opportunity. You've built what seems like countless very large investments and labs over the past several years, as I've been following you, that have been very successful. If you could just kind of give people some framework for those investments as well.
Yeah. We are fortunate to have a very cash flow generative business. Our cash flow from operations last year was about 18% of revenue. We reinvest a large portion of that back into the business on the left side of this page. In organic capital expenditures last year, that was close to 8% of revenue. We have given a range for 2025 of 7%-8% of revenue. That has led to additional investments in capacity for testing services for our customers, customer-facing software, enhanced technological enablement to serve our customers better, and has led to high returns on invested capital. We complement that with accretive acquisitions to grow capabilities and capacity. Also, in the last couple of years, we have used excess cash flow to reduce some debt. We pay a cash dividend to all shareholders on a ratable basis.
Currently, that is at a pace of about $104 million a year. We are a newly public company, but over time, we would evaluate share repurchases. The primary allocation of that 18% of revenue and cash flow from operations is back into the business to grow organically and generate shareholders high returns.
Can you walk us through the M&A ambitions, size, areas of focus? What's on the checklist for you as you look to deploy capital that way?
Yeah. I think strategy, it's as important of what you say no to as what you say yes to. Our strategy is to focus on product testing, inspection, certification. If you go back to the overall addressable market that Ryan put up earlier, we're not interested in areas that do not further our footprint in product testing, inspection, and certification. That said, there are a lot of companies out there with a wide range of size: small, medium, large. We are fortunate to be in a position to have conversations with all sizes of prospects. In those prospects, we look for a combination of really starting with what's the distinct technical skill expertise that they have to offer that we couldn't otherwise build on our own?
What are either the existing set of services that they offer to their existing set of customers that we could extend more broadly into our 80,000 customers? What are some of the other kind of future needs that are being propelled by these megatrends? Across the board, we continue to be active appropriately of providing that we get good expected return on invested capital on those prospects. We've had a very good run of it.
Great. Maybe with the last minute or two here, we have not spent as much time talking about the software and advisory business. Can you give people in the audience a little bit more of an understanding of what it is that you do in that segment and why you are optimistic about accelerating growth there?
Yeah, absolutely. If you look at our software and advisory business, it came from a collection of about 20 of those acquisitions since 2010. What's been the unifying factor is software that supports our customers in product compliance, software that supports our customers in transparency, traceability of their supply chain, and in particular, chemicals in the retail supply chain and the way in which they're distributed, stored, sold, and disposed of. That ties into the future needs of scope one, scope two reporting because you've got to trace back through what's in your supply chain and follow regulations. We've created a single platform called ULTRUS that all of our customers now log into. It gives us a great opportunity to extend our wallet share and our footprint with our customers in software and advisory.
We're excited about the continued improvements in the growth rates of our software business.
Fantastic. I think we only have like a minute left, so we'll wrap it up there. For those of you that are interested, we're moving to a breakout session in Maher, which is on the north side on the second floor. Look forward to seeing many of you there. Thank you.
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All right. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Andrew Nicholas, and I'm the Business Services Analyst here at William Blair. I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that out of the way, I'm very pleased to welcome UL Solutions here today, CEO Jennifer Scanlon and CFO Ryan Robinson. Welcome to the 45th Annual Growth Stock Conference. Really excited to have you here. I'm going to turn it over to each of them to give you an overview of the business. If there's some extra time at the end, we can discuss a few questions before moving to the breakout. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here. Our second year here, just a year and a few months past our IPO last April of 2024. For those of you who don't know our story, although I guess I have to turn over to Brian to do some safe harbor here, huh?
Just general comments about the safe harbor disclosure. We will not go into this in great detail, and I'll turn it back to Jenny to lead the discussion.
Excellent. All right. For those of you who do not know our story, you are going to hear five key themes from us today. The first theme is that we are a mission-driven growth company. Our mission of working for a safer world is important to our customers, and it is important to their customers. The great thing about our mission is that it operates in a large, fragmented, and growing industry, the testing, inspection, and certification industry. The second message you are going to hear from us is that we support that mission with a dedication to safety science. That safety science also matters to our customers. They know that we are going to help them apply science to the challenges of bringing their new innovations to the world safely, security, and sustainability. The third message is that our customer relationships are long-lived. We were founded 130 years ago.
Many of our customers have been with us well over 100 years. We have over 80,000 customers across over 35 industries. We support these customers with disciplined account management, and it's reinforced by our global business model and the power of the UL mark that we'll talk about.