Welcome to the United Rentals 2025 stockholder meeting. Speaking for the company is Michael Kneeland, Chair of the Board.
Good morning. I'm Michael Kneeland, Chair of United Rentals Board of Directors, and I hereby call this meeting to order. Welcome to our 2025 annual meeting of stockholders. You'll find the agenda on the portal welcome screen, and the rules of conduct are at the bottom right under meeting materials. I'll chair the meeting, and Joli Gross, the company's Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer, Corporate Secretary, will serve as Secretary. First, we'll conduct the formal business portion of the meeting. Next, our President and CEO, Matt Flannery, will provide a brief business update, followed by a general question-and-answer session. The polls for each proposal to be voted on at the 2025 United Rentals annual meeting of stockholders are now open. To place your vote, click on the voting button on the web portal and follow the instructions. You can vote until the polls are officially closed later in the meeting.
At this time, I would like to acknowledge our board members who are joining us virtually today. I'd also like to take a moment to recognize and thank Bobby Griffin, who retired from the board as of today, for his many years of distinguished service to the board and the company. I also want to acknowledge Stephen Kohudic , who is with us from EY, our independent auditors. And finally, we have Catherine Wheaton , a representative of Broadridge Financial Solutions, who has been designated as the Inspector of Elections. And thank you all for joining us. As of March 10th, 2025, the record date, the total number of issued and outstanding our common stock of the company entitled to vote at this meeting was 65,332,089 shares. Under our bylaws, the holders of the majority of shares entitled to vote constitutes a quorum.
The Inspector has determined that based on the number of shares represented at this meeting, a quorum is present. Therefore, this meeting is duly constituted. As you will see from our proxy statement, there are four proposals to be voted on by stockholders. These proposals also appear on the meeting agenda. Proposal one is the election of 10 directors to the board. The nominees are Julie Grant, Marc Bruno, Larry De Shon, Matthew Flannery, Kim Harris Jones, Terri Kelly, Michael Kneeland, Francisco J. Lopez-Balboa, Gracia C. Martore, and Shiv Singh. Any other nominations for director were required to have been submitted in proper written form on a timely basis to the Secretary, as more fully described in our bylaws. Having received no other nominations, the nomination process is closed. Now, under our bylaws, all of our directors are elected for a period of one year with a majority of votes cast.
Our board recommends that you vote for the election of all 10 nominees recommended by the board. Proposal number two is to ratify the appointment of EY, our independent registered public accounting firm, for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2025. Our audit committee, which is comprised of independent directors and is charged with this responsibility under its charter, has reappointed EY, subject to stockholder ratification. Our board, upon the recommendation of the audit committee, recommends that you vote for this proposal. Proposal number three is the advisory vote on executive compensation. At our 2023 annual meeting, our stockholders voted in favor of holding an advisory vote on executive compensation every year. Accordingly, we are holding an advisory vote on the compensation of the company's named executive officers this year. Our board recommends that you vote for this proposal.
Proposal number four is to consider a stockholder proposal to improve shareholder written consent if such proposal is properly presented at this meeting. Our board recommends that you vote against this proposal. Pursuant to the rules of conduct, the stockholder proponent or the qualified representative will have three minutes to present proposal four. Operator, if the stockholder proponent or the qualified representative has dialed in to present this proposal, please open that line now.
Thank you. Proposal four, improve shareholder written consent, sponsored by John Chevedden. Shareholders request that our board of directors take the steps necessary to enable 10% of shares to request a record date to initiate written consent. Enabling 10% of shares to apply for a record date for written consent is reasonable because scores of companies do not even require 1% of stock ownership to do so little as request a record date. Taking action by written consent is a means shareholders can use to raise important matters outside the normal annual meeting cycle. This proposal won impressive 48% support at the 2021 United Rentals shareholder meeting. It is important to remember that it took much more United Rentals shareholders' conviction based on the merits to vote for this proposal than to reflexively vote according to the United Rentals board of directors' instructions.
The 48% vote likely represented a 50%+ majority vote from the United Rentals shareholders who have access to independent proxy voting advice. It is long overdue that companies take action on 50%+ majority votes from shareholders who have access to independent proxy voting advice. Please vote yes. Improve shareholder written consent proposal four. Thank you.
That completes the presentation of the agenda items. The floor is now open for questions and comments related to the proposal. If any stockholder would like to ask a question regarding any of the proposals, please submit your question through the web portal. I will read your question aloud and ask the appropriate company representative to answer it. I'll pause for a moment as we review any questions that may have come in. Having received no questions, that concludes the question-and-answer session related to the proposals. We will now proceed with voting. Please note that you must have signed in as a stockholder with a valid control number to vote during the meeting. Any person signed in as a stockholder who hasn't yet voted or who wishes to change their vote may do so now.
Click on the voting button on the web portal and follow the instructions on the screen. Stockholders who have sent in proxies or voted by telephone or online and do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. We will take a short pause now to allow for final voting. Now that everyone has had the opportunity to vote, the polls for the 2025 United Rentals annual meeting of stockholders are closed. I will now report the preliminary voting results. Based on the preliminary results reported by the Inspector of Elections, it appears that the stockholders have voted to elect by a majority of votes cast each of the 10 director nominees named in the proxy statement to hold office until the 2026 annual meeting and until their successor is duly elected and qualified.
It appears that the stockholders have voted to ratify the appointment of EY as the company's independent registered public accounting firm. It appears that the stockholders have voted to approve the executive compensation of the company's named executive officers. And finally, it appears that stockholders have voted against the stockholder proposal to improve shareholder written consent. The results reported today are preliminary. The final tally remains subject to verification and will be provided by the company in a Form 8-K that will be filed with the SEC within four business days. With the formal portion of the annual meeting concluded, the meeting is now adjourned. We will now proceed with an update from Matt, followed by a general question-and-answer session. Matt?
Thank you, Joli, and hello, everyone. In 2024, our team doubled down on being the partner of choice for our customers. Our commitment to safety, coupled with our unmatched focus on service, technology, and operational excellence, translated into another year of record revenue, Adjusted EBITDA, and earnings per share. We generated $2.1 billion in free cash flow, drove a return on invested capital of 13%, increased our quarterly dividend by 10%, and combined with our share repurchases, returned $1.9 billion of cash to our shareholders. On top of all of this, we added matting to our specialty business with the acquisition of Yak Access last March. Our specialty offering now encompasses seven distinct businesses that continue to exhibit very strong growth and differentiate United Rentals within our industry. 2025 is on track to be another year of profitable growth.
The year is off to a solid start, and feedback from the field continues to be optimistic, particularly for large projects. The momentum we're carrying into our busy season, along with backlogs and our Customer Confidence Index, are all supportive of our outlook. Furthermore, we continue to see growth across both our construction and industrial end markets. Longer term, our strategy is built on how we can competitively differentiate ourselves and outpace the market. We believe the combination of our general offerings and our unique specialty offering allows us to provide exactly what the customer wants: a one-stop shop. And by cross-selling, we could take our long-established relationships and accelerate growth by meeting our customer demands with an enterprise of solutions.
While we've had specialty as part of our business mix for many years, we believe this growth engine has a lot of runway ahead, supported by both geographic white space and additional products and adjacencies that we can add to our portfolio to continue to better serve our customers. Furthermore, we believe the sector will shift towards renting equipment, combined with reshoring in North America, and the significant investments being made across infrastructure, manufacturing, technology, and energy and power all continue to look favorable for our industry. We're very proud of the size and diversity of our end market mix, which means we're not levered to any particular end market. Our fungible fleet allows us to pivot where customer demand presents itself and to quickly respond to the ebbs and flows of different verticals.
Our incredible team gives us confidence in our ability to capitalize on all the opportunities ahead. We continue to see very strong employee retention and grew our employee base by 6%. We also invested in our best-in-class safety culture, resulting in another excellent safety recordable rate for the year, while also earning national recognition for our strong culture. Finally, our balance sheet's in great shape and provides optionality for the business, while our commitment to capital discipline keeps us positioned to support long-term shareholder value. Last month, we announced our board's approval of a new repurchase program. In total, we expect to repurchase $1.5 billion of our shares this year. When combined with our quarterly dividend of $1.79 per share, which we increased by 10% in January, we will return over $30 per share to shareholders this year.
In closing, we remain focused on being the best rental company in the industry. Our unique value offering, industry-leading technology, and our go-to-market approach, combined with our capital discipline, give me confidence that we're well-positioned for both customers and shareholders for the long term. Now, I'll hand the meeting back to Joli, and we'll take your questions.
Thank you, Matt. Any stockholder who wishes to ask a question should do so by submitting it through the web portal. I will read your question aloud and ask the appropriate company representative to answer it. Please note that we will attempt to answer as many questions as time allows and only questions that are germane to today's meeting. The first stockholder question asks, "Will tariffs have a big impact on profit margins, and what is being done to minimize the impact?
Thanks, Joli. We don't expect tariffs to have an impact on our 2025 guidance. We talked about this a little bit in our April earnings call. We'll have mitigation plans once everybody knows what the impact's going to be, and this is mostly with our vendors where we've got great partners and pricing set for 2025, so we'll keep an eye on it as everybody else is and inform people as things change.
Thanks, Matt. And we have a second question that will be for you as well. The question is, "Who are United Rentals' biggest competitors?
We're still in a very fragmented industry. So even outside of the RER 100, we have to compete with a lot of different companies depending on what product line we're talking about and what market. So even with 15% market share, our next largest competitor being 10%, this is still an extremely fragmented industry. So we have a lot of competitors, and you guys can see a couple of other public ones, but outside of that, a very competitive market.
Thanks, Matt. That concludes the general question-and-answer portion. Thank you all for your support and for attending our 2025 annual meeting of stockholders. We will now close the meeting.