Good morning. Wanna start on time. We've got a really packed day today. For those of you who don't know, we're actually running off after here to go over to the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate our hundredth anniversary as a company, and also what we think is a really exciting day here today. WESCO's, you know, it's our 2022 Investor Day. It's our first Investor Day since 2019, and the first Investor Day since the transformative combination of WESCO and Anixter. It's also our first truly hybrid Investor Day. Thanks to everybody who's joined us here in person as well as everybody online. We really appreciate your support and your interest in the company. For those of you who don't know, my name is Scott Gaffner.
I joined WESCO in the middle of June to head up investor relations. I just can't tell you how excited I am to be here and be a part of this company. It'll be an informative day, but I also think it's gonna be a day that's truly gonna highlight the investment merits of WESCO as a company and a stock. Before we get started, a couple of obligatory things here. I'd ask you to please familiarize yourself with the language found on page two regarding the forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Certain statements may contain forward-looking information and are not guarantees of performance, and by their nature are subject to uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. For those in the room, quick safety, we've got two exits in the room. Right over here on your left, there's an exit.
Go straight to the stairwell down to 50th Street. If there's a problem with that exit, go to your right. You go all the way down the hallway, and there's another exit over there. Turning to today's agenda, like I said, we've got a great agenda. It's two sessions with a break in the middle. The first session is gonna highlight our accelerating value creation and then also really the value-added sell of each of our segments for the company. The second session's gonna focus on our world-class operations that we're building, and we'll close with our CFO, Dave Schulz, highlighting the superior financial returns that we're driving in the business. We'll also have time for Q&A at the end, so please hold your questions till then.
Before we welcome John Engel, our Chairman, President, CEO up, we would like to set the stage for you. There's a brief video, which brings to life how we deliver ingenuity every day across our entire organization as we build, connect, power, and protect lives with our innovative supply chain solutions.
Most of us expect life to run smoothly, but we don't stop to think about what it takes to make that happen. Most of us don't have to. We forget about the people up and moving before our alarms go off, the people behind the innovation and logistics, the creativity, and the know-how, the people who connect rural communities with essential services, who work tirelessly to build, connect, power, and protect our lives. But the world isn't always predictable, and unexpected challenges demand creative solutions. We rely on those willing to brave intense environments and gather the resources that fuel our daily lives. We don't have to wonder about the ins and outs of life because that is what WESCO does. We provide innovative supply chain solutions every hour, every day, all around the globe.
Our people roll up their sleeves and help create a world you can depend on, focusing on the details, the challenges, and the unexpected so that you can live life uninterrupted. WESCO, ingenuity delivered.
With that, I'd like to welcome John Engel, our Chairman, President, and CEO up on stage.
Well, good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here. Welcome to our 2022 Investor Day. As Scott said, it's been three years since our last Investor Day, and an awful lot's happened in these last three years. Three years ago, or in the last three years, we've experienced the challenges of global pandemic, and obviously, Anixter was only a vision and a dream. You'll recall that three years ago, I told you that the bigs in B2B distribution had to come together, and that digital was gonna transform our B2B distribution value chain. We said we're gonna lead the consolidation of our industry and digitally transform our company. Well, it's now three years later, and we did what we said we're gonna do.
We put together two leading Fortune 500 companies of equal size and created a new company, a B2B distribution powerhouse, an industry leader with unmatched capabilities. We established the new WESCO. We've generated outstanding results thus far and launched an enterprise-wide digital transformation that's underway, and you'll hear about that today. We've already created significant shareholder value, but we've only just begun. The new WESCO is really a story of industry leadership, global scale, leading supply chain capabilities that are unmatched, and extraordinary strength. With significantly increased cash generation potential and an expanding balance sheet. For investors, we're an alpha investment. We're an alpha. As an alpha, we're focused on delivering superior results and value creation and ultimately achieving a premium multiple. Before we dig into our management presentations today, I want to highlight the new news.
There's three big new news, or let's call them our three big reveals. Number one, we have set a long-term margin objective for the new WESCO, 10%+ EBITDA margins. Number two, we've significantly raised our cash generation expectations for the new WESCO. $3.5 billion-$4.5 billion of cash generation over the next five years, which supports our $1 billion stock buyback program as well as supports initiating a common dividend, which is our plan and intention starting in 2023. Three, this morning we announced an agreement to acquire Rahi Systems Holdings, a leading global hyperscale data center solutions provider. That business is a terrific business. Bill Geary will talk about it.
It got integrated with our CSS business, and I won't steal your thunder, Bill, but just a terrific acquisition lined up in a very high-growth market. That's one of the key secular trends that we're now addressing effectively, and there's numerous ones which we'll talk about today. That's my opening. It's an exciting day. Great to have you here. Let's begin. In building our new company, and it is a new company, new vision, new mission, new set of core values, new organization design, new leadership team. Our vision is to be the best tech-enabled supply chain solutions company in the world, and the operative words are tech-enabled. Our mission is to build, connect, power and protect the world. Our values are shown in the middle of this page. One team. Always strive to be the best. Innovation. Winning with customers and suppliers.
That's all built on a foundation of our people, our greatest asset. Across the bottom, you see our foundational strategies, and we will, you'll see those brought to life and operationalized in the management team presentations today. This is our key messages page. Number one, we create a Fortune 200 leader with global scale. We have the broadest portfolio of products, services, and supply chain solutions in the industry. We have the leading customer value proposition, and we are the biggest customer. Notice I use the word customer slash channel partner for our key supplier partners. We're in the middle of this value chain and exceptionally well-positioned. We're building a strong track record of delivering superior results and beating expectations. Number two, we're uniquely well-positioned for the next decade and beyond. We're leading the consolidation in what is still a fragmented B2B distribution industry.
Remember, we've talked about this at length over the years, scale is what matters in distribution. We have fundamentally mix shifted our company into higher growth and higher margin end markets, dramatically reducing the cyclicality of our company and increasing the resilience across all phases of the economic cycle. Facing into a series of very attractive secular growth trends that we're confident will drive above market growth and superior value creation for the next decade and beyond. Number three, we had foreshadowed this, you know, over the last two years since we brought the two companies together, our digital transformation, we're gonna lift the covers on a bit today. It enables even faster share gain and accelerated margin expansion. The Anixter acquisition was a catalyst for our digital transformation. It was part of the strategic rationale for the combination.
It allowed us, in generating substantial synergies, to take a piece of those synergies and invest it into the new enterprise, and that's what we've been doing. Our digital investments are building new capabilities, and they're all focused on unlocking the power of our big data. It's the greatest asset we have that doesn't sit on our balance sheet, and we'll bring that to life for you today a bit. Why are we doing that? To drive fundamental competitive advantage and to accelerate our sales growth and margin expansion. Akash will take you through that in some detail today. The new WESCO is a global leader. New company, as I said, bigger, stronger and faster. This is our new leadership team, all of whom are in attendance today. I'd ask you to please stand real quick. Thank you. Thank you for what you've done.
More importantly, thank you for what you will deliver. Our lead director, Jamie Singleton is in the back. Please stand, Jamie. Jamie, thank you to you and the entire board of directors for your guidance, your support, your constant challenging, and it's really been a great partnership. I've been WESCO's CEO now for 13 years, since the great global recession in 2009. I must say, this is the strongest management team we've ever had by far. By far. This team is fully committed and highly confident in delivering superior results and generating exceptional value. Let's talk about WESCO. This is the new WESCO, where I said we're a Fortune 200. We're number 200 on the Fortune 500 list in the last rankings this year. B2B distribution powerhouse.
A substantial global scale, as I said, leading value proposition, an industry position, and an extensive portfolio of products, services, and supply chain solutions. We work with the world's leading manufacturers. They're our supplier partners in bringing supply chain solutions to our customers. I will tell you, it's increasingly important to understand that when you look at our supply chain solutions, we're very focused on improving the integrity of the supply chain, providing resilient supply chain solutions, sustainable supply chain solutions for our customers. We serve 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. We've got a blue-chip customer base and a blue-chip supplier base. Outlined on this page is our value creation engine, and it's really these five components comprise our growth compounding enterprise. First, we're absolutely positioned in the right end markets.
Three global businesses, all leaders within their own right, benefiting from these attractive secular trends, and also fueled by increasing infrastructure investments. We're driving market outperformance, leading scale, as I said, leading value proposition, unmatched capabilities, and outstanding cross-sell momentum. I'll talk about that in a few moments later. Operational supply chain excellence as a foundational element. We have proven integration and synergy capture, synergy delivery capabilities and a well-established margin expansion program and Lean continuous improvement program. I will tell you, the margin expansion program we launched in earnest post the combination, we're still in the early innings of this margin expansion program. Our Lean program, on the other hand, we're rounding out and closing out the second decade of Lean.
As Lean goes, it's continuous improvement, and we still have tremendous runway as a result of taking these two large Fortune 500 companies, both leaders in their own right, and in the combination, leveraging Lean across the new combined company. Still tremendous runway with our Lean productivity initiatives. I think that you see with margin expansion, which is number four, it's got good momentum, but what I wanna share with you is this is margin at the company level. We think about this as a nice balanced recipe with inherently gross margin expansion driving that, plus operating cost leverage. It's incredibly important that you understand that. We're looking at those two in combination, because those two in combination are what support the operating margin expansion for the company. Then finally, number five, the upsized cash flow.
That does support our strategic objectives, continuing to invest in the company for above-market growth and increasing our shareholder returns, which we'll talk more about. This powerful value creation engine's been operating and accelerating over the last eight quarters, and I think it's clearly showing the power of the new WESCO. I mentioned the new WESCO is a new company, and it's more resilient across the cycle. We've become a fundamentally higher growth company. I told you we mix shifted into higher growth markets. What's shown here is 2019 pre-merger, our total sales of $8.4 billion and the end market mix. On the right is our trailing 12 month sales, June of 2022, trailing 12 month basis. You can see we're 2.5 x larger on a trailing 12 month basis than we were back pre-pandemic.
What's really important to note, we're fundamentally addressing higher growth markets, and you can see that over 50% of the portfolio is in notably higher growth, higher margin markets. You're seeing that manifest itself in the results we've been generating over the last eight quarters. Each of these three SBUs are leaders in their own right, with size and scale advantages, and they work together in concert in providing our solutions to our customers. I think they're exceptionally well positioned to continue to capture share gains, deliver the margin expansion, and deliver superior value prop to their customers. They'll talk about that later this morning. Our attractive long-term growth drivers are outlined on this page. We've talked about this before. A series of attractive secular growth trends supported by increasing public infrastructure investment shown in the middle.
On the right is WESCO's uniquely strong position. Just exceptionally well-positioned, I think, again, for driving growth over the long term. I've talked about cross-sell. You know, many of you realize, and we clearly have realized, having done over 50 acquisitions since WESCO spun out of Westinghouse in 1994, that the most challenging and many times the most elusive synergy to capture is sales synergies. It's tough. I think all companies that have gone through acquisitions and combinations realize that. We focused on this and as a major breakout value creation move, and we've built a rigorous process. It's discipline. We backed it up with training that we've deployed across our three SBUs with the sales force. I could not be more pleased with our cross-sell execution momentum.
I will tell you, this has become clearly the most substantial value creation lever of the combination. When we initially set our targets in 2020, it was March of 2020. The pandemic had just begun, and we had not closed the acquisition yet. We closed it late, three months later in June. We had set an initial sales target as our three-year commitment at 1% of combined sales, which was roughly $170 million. Both companies were $8.5 billion in sales. As we sit here today, that target, which is a clear objective, it's more than a target we're executing against, has been raised sevenfold, and we now have a $1.2 billion cross-sell target across the first three years through the end of 2023. What's most impressive is we've already have $700 million.
Over $700 million's been realized in eight quarters since we've come together. I gotta tell you that cross-selling is more than a performance metric for us. We've built it into the underlying fabric with how we run our company, and we see unlimited upside potential going forward. Our digital transformation's well underway, and we're innovating across our entire technology landscape, starting with a new technology stack in digital IT architecture that's being developed and is being stood up. It includes best-in-class applications, digital applications, digital products, digital services that are integrated with our proprietary architecture. This is important to note, this is not a monolithic ERP implementation. Not even remotely close. We've taken an entirely different approach. This proprietary architecture with best of breed subsystems is built on the foundation of a world-class data lake that houses our big data.
Our WESCO big data is the unique data we have, everything associated with our products, our customers, our suppliers, but it also includes additional supplier and customer data that we've been extracting and building into the data lake. We have a new MDM construct, that stands for Master Data Management, and this is foundational to how we're gonna leverage digital going forward. The result will be improved business processes across the enterprise, as well as customer and supplier solutions that we're building, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning that are operating against our big data set. This is absolutely breakthrough for us in our industry and value chain and in B2B distribution. You've seen great examples of this in the B2C retail distribution value chain, and those companies will remain nameless.
B2B has some very different characteristics and drivers, so this is critical. We stated again back in 2019 in our last Investor Day that we had to digitally transform, and we intended to lead it, you know, put our company through this process. I will tell you, this is transformational with a capital T, and Akash will take you through it in much more detail. We're building a strong track record of success, as I said, for the new WESCO, and this page outlines our performance across the six-year period. It goes back to 2017, 2018. That is WESCO standalone. 2019, moving into 2020 is pro forma. You can see 2021 and 2022 is our results, based on our latest outlook, at the midpoint.
We're delivering a 23% EBITDA CAGR. 23% EBITDA CAGR from pre-pandemic pro forma 2019 through 2022 guide at the midpoint. Here's how I think about this. That result would be exceptional in normal times. It's even more impressive given the challenges that we've had of putting two equal-sized companies together, Fortune 500 companies together against the challenging backdrop of the pandemic over the last two years. Looking ahead, we carry very strong positive momentum into the second half, and our record backlog provides an excellent and strong setup for 2023. Most importantly, I wanna clearly communicate we've established a long-term EBITDA margin objective of 10%+ operating margins.
Given our leading scale, the strong secular growth trends that we're accessing, our execution success and momentum, and our digital transformation, in combination, given those things, we are very confident that we'll become a 10%+ operating margin company. It's not a target, it's an objective. Our stock price has performed well since the closing of the Anixter acquisition in June 2020, but I'll tell you, from our perspective, we're trading well below our expectations currently. Well below, given our results and our increased guidance. Today, we're substantially raising our key cash flow expectations for the combined company. This is the one metric, the one KPI that we had not raised so far two years post-close. We've had a series of beat and raises on sales, operating margin.
We delevered one year sooner than we had committed to. This is the one that we had not raised yet. We told you, we foreshadowed we would give you an update. We are substantially raising our cash generation expectations for the combined company. Those are sufficient to invest in our business for continued above-market growth, and most importantly, increasing capital return to our shareholders. We're very pleased to announce that we plan to initiate a common dividend in early 2023. That's in addition to the $1 billion stock buyback or repurchase authorization that we announced recently. This is important to understand. This represents our commitment. It's our commitment for even higher shareholder returns and our confidence in the ongoing strength and future performance of the new WESCO. Dave will take you through this in more detail.
I'm gonna wrap it, and in summary, we're a new company. We're the new WESCO, with leading global scale and capabilities and a fundamentally higher growth trajectory. Our strategy delivers above-market growth. We're clearly focused on growing faster and more profitably than both our competitors and our investor peers. Our upsized cash generation supports our strategy, increasing our return of capital to shareholders. We expect that our digital transformation will further accelerate our gains. Our expanding balance sheet supports our future M&A ambitions, and Dave will talk about that. Finally, the new WESCO, we're focused on continuing delivering superior results, generating that alpha I talked about, and achieving a premium multiple. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Bill Geary. Bill.
Thank you, John. Appreciate it. How'd you like guys like to follow that? That is a really tough act to follow. I'm gonna do my best to deliver in the same way that John did. Let me start by giving you an overview of the CSS business. We're roughly a $6 billion business. We have 1,600 sales and technical resources in over 50 countries around the world. Of the three BUs that you're gonna hear from today, we are the most global, with 22% of our revenue falling outside of North America. Just a snapshot of our performance. Between 2019 and 2021, we've seen double-digit growth at both the adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margin line, and we've continued that in 2022. I attribute this to three distinct things.
One is good top-line growth, good expense control, but really strong margin expansion. The combined CSS organization has had 17 straight quarters of margin expansion. As you can see, we've been able to deliver that to the bottom line. What do we sell? We're one of the world's largest distributors of network infrastructure, physical security, and in-building wireless products. We are an emerging global distributor on professional audiovisual and safety products. We participate in several different secular growth trends that I'll talk about here in a quick second, but I would tell you we're uniquely positioned because of our global position in network infrastructure to capitalize on the convergence of all of these technologies onto the IT managed network moving forward. Let's talk about those secular growth trends that we participate in. 24/7, 365 connectivity related to cloud computing and IoT.
We're also participating in a meaningful way in the new workplace of the future, which has hybrid work and on-prem workers as well. The 5G rollout and the in-building wireless systems that come along with that, we're participating in a meaningful way globally as well. Then the greatest secular growth trend that we've been participating in and enables a lot of these technologies that I just talked about is cloud data center growth overall, which is expected to grow at 21% compounded annual growth for the next five years, which is why we made the investment that we did in the acquisition with Rahi Systems. It's one of the leaders in hyperscale data center. We're very excited to announce the agreement to acquire Rahi Systems, a leading provider of hyperscale data center solutions.
This acquisition, the first since the transformational combination of Anixter and WESCO, truly highlights WESCO's continued investment in the long-term data center secular growth trend. With over 900 employees in 25 countries and a trailing 12 month revenue of $380 million, Rahi's global footprint and technical expertise, along with their customer-centric approach, will be an excellent addition to the CSS business. The additional Rahi product and services portfolio will dramatically expand cross-sell opportunities across the organization. Look forward to answering your questions when we get into the Q&A on this. Back to the CSS business. Who do we sell? A large portion of our business goes through network contractors, electrical contractors, low-voltage contractors, and integrators. We also sell to the large cloud data center computing companies as well as the global service providers and the integrators that support them.
We have a very unique position among the U.S. federal government as well. WESCO had a leading practice in the federal space. Couple that now with the Anixter global footprint, we have capabilities that are local, regional, national, and global. Drives a clear differentiated model for us long term in the fed space. Our largest end market vertical is data center, followed by financial institutions, and followed by healthcare. Let's talk about a couple of the applications our products fit into. I'll start with the commercial building. Now with the transformational combination of the two organizations, we have sales expertise, technical expertise, and supplier advocacy for every subsystem within a commercial building, starting with the switchgear, ending with the surveillance cameras or the access control. Same thing in the data center.
The combined organization where legacy Anixter was focused on the white space, the fiber and the data transmission, WESCO was very much focused on the electrical transmission in the path and runway. We now have global capabilities in the data center. An emerging area for technology for us, with the combination, is parking lot structures, where now we can sell everything from the lighting to the surveillance to the solar and down to the EV charging. We all know how big that EV charging opportunity is gonna be over the long term. How we go to market, to me, is the single greatest differentiator we have over our competition. Because of our expanded product portfolio and our supply chain resiliency and our technical expertise, coupled with our global capabilities, we can position product solutions and supply chain solutions directly to the end user.
The end user relies on our technical capabilities and our global capabilities to provide them an end-to-end solution. It comes as no surprise that our demand creation model lends itself to the highest level of value within multinational global customers, who again rely on our supply chain resiliency and our global sales operations to provide a seamless and frictionless experience anywhere around the world. We operate as a single and strategic point of distribution for them, reducing risk, ensuring compliance, and absolutely gaining efficiencies for them. This is a complex offense, right? You're selling multiple technologies across different continents around the world to large global customers. You better be technically proficient, and we are.
We've now brought the two organizations together from a technical capability standpoint, and we formed what's called our TSS group, Technology Support Services group, which has 70 engineers to support all these technologies we've talked about here this morning, and it follows the sun. It works for our inside salespeople, our outside salespeople, for our contractor customers, and for our end user customers. Through June, we've closed out over 10,000 technical cases for our customers selecting new products and getting them alternatives for their needs. One of the highlights that I'd like to point out today was something that John announced two quarters ago, which is a very unique product that's very much focused on the secular growth trend of really bridging that gap between hybrid work and on-prem work, which is AV as a Service.
All of you know that you've walked into a conference room, haven't been able to get the conference room equipment going or the remote workers, you know, microphone's not working. We are providing now a very seamless and frictionless experience out of the box, partnering with two of the leading suppliers in both audiovisual and in video conferencing to provide this around the world. Unique thing with this is for the first time in WESCO and in Anixter's history, we're providing this as an OpEx model or a subscription-based model, which gives customers flexibility that potentially didn't have the budget in the past to allow for this new workplace of the future.
With that all said, I want to talk about a highlight here, a project here that I think very much is indicative of the power of the new organization and is very much centered around secular growth. We were working with a state department of transportation who wanted to run broadband fiber 40,000 miles throughout their state. We were able to leverage the legacy WESCO TVC business that has been very much focused in on broadband, the legacy Anixter business, which could really work with the supplier on the very hard to get inventory and work with the broadband support group that we've recently stood up to capitalize on the broadband secular growth trend, all to formulate this in to win a $130 million project over the next three years.
This is a project that I can guarantee you neither WESCO or Anixter would have won on their own in the past. With all that said, we're very well positioned from a global standpoint, from an emerging technology standpoint, and extremely well positioned in multiple secular growth trends to hit the very aggressive numbers that John has promised here today. Very excited about the future. I am personally very excited to be on this team, and I think, we have a very bright future. Thank you. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Jim Cameron, who runs our Utility and Broadband Solutions group. Be careful there.
Oh. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you today. Appreciate the opportunity to talk with you a little bit about our utility and broadband solutions business. UBS is comprised of the legacy WESCO and legacy Anixter utility businesses, combined with the legacy WESCO broadband business and the legacy WESCO industrial integrated supply business. We serve utilities, broadband companies, communications companies, contractors, and selected industrial accounts throughout North America. This has proven to be a very complementary combination for us. When you look at the cross-sell opportunities and the expanded portfolio of products and services that we can bring to market now, our team has done a phenomenal job translating that into growth over the past two years. When you look at our trailing 12 month sales of $5.6 billion, that's up over 30% compared to our 2019 pro forma.
That sales acceleration is matched with a fantastic performance from an operational standpoint. We've effectively integrated our management team. We've integrated our branch network. We have everything functioning at the scale and capacity that we need from a North American standpoint. When you take that and combine it with the sales momentum we have, the momentum in our end markets and our market share gains, we've significantly improved the profitability of this business and have room to continue going forward. With that, I wanna talk a little bit about our addressable markets. We're incredibly fortunate to have very large addressable end markets that have fantastic momentum in each of them. The utility space has been an area of investment for a while, a period of time. We have significant investment in 5G and in rural broadband. Those investments are going to continue.
The governmental funding on critical infrastructure is going to continue for the future. We have years, if not decades, of runway in these markets. What I'd like to do now is talk to you specifically about three specific secular trends in the utility space, grid modernization, renewable generation, renewable deployment, and electrification. These are all interrelated in how they impact the utility space, but they're also very independent in how we're going to be able to address them within our business. Grid modernization is something that's been going on with a number of our customers for a period of time. That being said, we're just now really starting, and the acceleration of grid modernization and grid resiliency is proceeding at a much more aggressive pace going forward.
There are estimates that it's gonna require $1.5 trillion-$2 trillion over the next 10 years just to sustain the current level of reliability within the grid. When you look at that, and you look at the new funding that's coming through with the IRA, there's gonna be a significant investment in renewable generation as well. That's been ongoing for a number of years, and if you look in 2021, 80% of the new generation that was brought online in 2021 was wind and solar. That's gonna continue and accelerate. Electrification is going to have a huge impact on the grid. The additional capacity required to support fleet electrification is gonna put new demands on the grid that the grid has not seen yet.
One of our customers did a study on a very small part of their service territory, and they found that as you scale up EV within that space, they're gonna have to modify 60% of their distribution infrastructure to support the new capacity requirements associated with electrification. With that, we've got a couple decades of runway here. We've got trillions of dollars that are gonna be spent, and we're incredibly well-positioned with a compelling value proposition to help our customers build this critical infrastructure. Just talking about our businesses, our utility business, when you think of us, the easiest way to think of utility is we're the outdoor people.
We work at the generating station, through the transmission and substation network, through the distribution network, all the way to the meter on the house. If you're driving down the street, and you see a telephone pole, and you look at that, anything that's on that pole or attached to it, including the pole itself, it's what we do. If you're at a mall, and you see the green boxes out there, the pad-mounted switches and the transformers, that's us helping to support the build-out of the underground distribution network. With this, we've developed an industry-leading set of services that we offer to our customers to help them reduce their operating costs and improve their supply chain efficiency. Broadband is analogous to utility.
We're the outdoor people again, from the point of signal origination through the fiber connectivity, outside plant materials, to the endpoint on the premises where Bill takes over and builds the in-building network. One of the things that we're really excited about with our broadband solution is that we now have a fixed wireless solution that's a great opportunity for us to improve the economics as rural broadband systems are deployed. When you look at last-mile, and it becomes very expensive to send fiber all the way out to the last house, fixed wireless is a great solution for that. Our integrated supply business is an industrial indirect spend material management solution. We provide purchasing support. We provide on-site support. We're there to help our customers run their factories more efficiently, manage their operating costs, help them improve safety.
The key with this business is they develop very significant digital capabilities to support their customer engagements, and they have a very robust customer management platform that we use throughout the SBU to manage our large relationships. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what that looks like. When we're in a large customer relationship, we're there to help them improve their business. We're there to help them manage their cost. We're there to help them improve their supply chain resiliency. We're there to help them operate more efficiently. We can also help them improve their socioeconomic goals by bringing in diverse suppliers, and we can help them reduce their carbon footprint through a consolidated transportation and logistics network.
Our platform allows us to bring in 20 or 30 more suppliers into a single agreement construct that looks, functions, and feels as a single agreement for our customer. With that in mind, this platform is incredibly scalable. When we want to talk to a customer about what we can do for them, we can sit down, understand what their goals are from a supply chain standpoint, and create a customized program to help them meet their specific needs. Once we do that and get the agreement in place, there's tremendous value for the customer in terms of how they operate, and our ability to effectively execute on these large agreements is a compelling differentiating factor for us in the marketplace. When you're in the utility business, you're also a first responder.
It's incredibly important for us to be able to support our customers when they have challenges related to weather events and other emergencies. With the combination of our two companies, we have increased scale and increased capabilities to support large-scale restorations. Our team came together incredibly quickly and was tested very quickly with these capabilities. If you go back to 2020, at the time we came together, four months later, we were involved in one of the most active storm seasons that we've ever experienced. At the end of October that year, four months after the integration, we were supporting wildfire restoration on the West Coast, we had several people on the ground in the Southeast supporting the reconstruction of the transmission grid after Hurricane Laura.
We had people in the Midwest supporting an early-season ice storm, and we had people in the southeast in another area supporting a late-season hurricane. The ability to support our customers in these situations is absolutely incredibly important, and it's a differentiator for us and the value that we provide in our large relationships. I wanna give you an example of a cross-sell. Bill had a wonderful example where we were able to work together and write a very large order for West State DOT. In this example, Nelson and his team worked together with the UBS team to help create a solution for a solar farm. Nelson's team had a historical relationship. They were selling wire and cable to the customer. They'd been doing it for years.
The customer had an issue with how to figure out how to get the transmission and substation online. They came to us. They brought us in. We were able to help to create a solution for the transmission and substation. While we're doing that, we figured out how to sell the entire capabilities of the combined organization to support this project. Because of that, we wrote an order for $30 million to support one solar farm project. Prior to the merger, either of our companies would've been happy to write an order for a quarter of that. Again, a great testament to the power of this combination. Wanna talk about what we're doing from a digital standpoint in the business. We've talked about the rural broadband deployment and how important that is. We're involved in over 100 rural broadband projects right now.
Our broadband support center is the hub of that activity. All of our businesses are able to use the broadband support center to help them get the supplier support, develop bill of materials, develop the whole program for different projects that are coming onto the market. When you're working on 100 projects, how do you figure out how to manage them in a constrained supply chain environment? When we were trying to solve this, we worked with Akash and his team to develop a digital tool and platform that we can deploy out at the endpoint, at the branch level, so our team can work with the customers to forecast, to plan demand, to plan their construction schedules, and basically have an effective tool to facilitate project management at the local level.
We then take all these individual projects, roll them back up, and we aggregate them at the SKU level. Now we can look at long-term material projections by month with our key suppliers and help our key suppliers figure out what they need to do to support this portfolio of projects. It has an incredibly significant impact on their operating platform and how they operate their facilities, tremendous value for the customer, and this capability is gonna position us to significantly continue to be a very significant player as the rural broadband is developed through the next decade. With that, we think we're in a great place. We have a fantastic team. We've got great momentum in the business. We're operating incredibly well. We are digitalizing our business, and we've got great end market momentum.
We're very excited about the future, and we appreciate the opportunity to share that with you. With that, I'm gonna turn things over to Nelson to talk about EES.
Hey, it's great to be with you again today. Last time I was with you was 2019. Still living in Canada. We had a great five year run up there, but have since repatriated, and so I've lost my mandatory Canadian beard as a result. You know, we've had a very good story. But today, I think we're telling a great story. For EES, it's really because we've got three key takeaways, three things that are really driving how we operate every day. One of them is that we are already taking advantage of secular growth trends that are accelerating and will continue to accelerate from here. Second, we've significantly increased our capabilities through the combination with Anixter. We'll give you examples of that today, but we've really unleashed a much more powerful, much more scalable organization.
Last but not least, even though we've delivered some really solid results, we're still very much in the early innings of being able to create and deliver value. Almost every day, we're unlocking more opportunities as a result of the combination. Give you a little bit more of an overview of the business. I go straight to the $8.4 billion, which is essentially as big as either company was on its own. It is just reflective of the momentum that we've been able to gain since we've come together and the results that we've been able to deliver. We're now in 50+ countries because of the combination. We've got 2,900 sales and technical experts in the field every day interacting with customers and growing the business.
By end market, you can see that we've got a good balance between construction, industrial, and OEM. We're accelerating growth in each of those end markets. From a geographic standpoint, we're in a good combination of stable and high-growth markets that's, again, been further expanded because of the combination. We've got a great story to tell in terms of our profitability. If you go back and look at 2019 on a pro forma basis, which of course was the last year before the pandemic, in 2022, compared to that, we're on track to almost double our EBITDA at very good margins, at expanded margins. It's really because of a few things. We took a very thoughtful, holistic approach in how we are gonna combine the two businesses. We put a good blend of management from both teams on board.
We leaned the organization out, literally and figuratively, starting with me. We've continued to focus relentlessly on being a strong local business, 'cause you've gotta be local in distribution, coupled with world-class scale and world-class capabilities. We're gonna just continue to go onwards from here. What we're excited about, and you've heard this already from John, from Bill, from Jim, is the addressable markets. These are annual addressable markets in our three key areas. Virtually unlimited opportunities for us as we go to work every day. The secular trends around electrification, green energy, and automation, our capabilities that have been enhanced by the combination line up very well with all of these, and I'll talk more about that in a second. Here we are. Accelerating secular trends.
On the left side, these are all existing secular trends that are all in the process of accelerating, largely due, at least in the U.S., because of nearly $500 billion of specific investment that's been green lighted, but very little of that, if any of that, has been spent so far. There's similar trends up north in Canada, in Europe, and around the rest of the world. I'll focus you on electric vehicles. This is the expectation is there'll be 48 million of them on the road by 2030, a little over seven years from now. A 21x increase in electricity demand.
Jim spoke about that all of this work in terms of capacity and transmission needs to be developed to enable this. A 20x increase in chargers to enable this, and nearly a $100 billion investment just to support this piece of it. That does not contemplate everything that's behind that gets power to the source. Just one example of an accelerating trend that we're already capitalizing on, and we've got great growth opportunities ahead of us. Dive a little bit deeper now into how we've segmented the business. Again, we're focused on construction with, you know, EPC and general contractors, industrial in the traditional markets that we've continued to call on, and OEM solutions.
I'll highlight that for a second to say a big part of what we're doing there is not just in the clean room, but it's outside the clean room in terms of investments that are supporting OEM manufacturers, that are helping Intel, Applied Materials, et cetera, build for the future. We are directly involved in that through contract manufacturing, and we're an important part of the food chain there. If you look at what we're bringing, it's really these items below, the differentiated value. It's the vast product portfolio. It's these great relationships we have with key suppliers. Our scale, the technical capabilities that Bill talked about that we're leveraging across the whole corporation, expanded services and the sales synergies, and we'll touch more on that in a moment.
Bill had a similar slide up here, and it's because we've got an absolutely comprehensive offering as we look at construction solutions. Not just the traditional offerings that we've had for decades, but it's also now an expanded wire and cable capability. More lighting, more safety, more security, more controls and, of course, renewables. We're taking advantage of all these and working with customers that wanna build smart buildings to bring the best-in-class technology to bear. The case study I wanna highlight is where a customer brought us in to do product and material management. What I would tell you is what we're helping these customers do, especially in construction, where their number one challenge is labor, is let them do what they do, outsource the rest, and let us do what we do to drive savings, labor productivity.
We supported a very tight timeline in the midst of all the supply chain challenges that are out there by working with suppliers, holding them accountable, and allowing this customer to deliver on time, ahead of budget or below budget, and in a safe operating environment. A great example that we've continued to expand from. Manufacturing solutions. What I'm excited here about is that you know manufacturing in general is really going through a renaissance that's gonna last for the next few decades. As factories modernize, more capabilities are put in place, more artificial intelligence, more IoT, more connectivity, et cetera. We're at the forefront of that, providing not just typical solutions, but we're underpinning it with greater digital capabilities to make our customers more efficient, more capable, and allowing them to scale up.
My example here is where we leveraged automation in an AI platform to actually bring in the capability to analyze what was going on in this factory. They were suffering engine breakdowns, costing them a lot of money. In about a 90 day period, starting with the first 30 days, we analyzed over 6 billion data points. We were able to basically allow the customer to do predictive maintenance. Understand when they needed to retool, shut something down, and significant savings by avoiding real-time events, $4.5 million in a very short period of time. This is scalable. It's underpinned by our digital capabilities, our access to automation platforms through our partnerships, and it's something that really has almost unlimited scale from here. We've talked a lot about cross-sell, so I get to talk about it too.
It's very exciting. In this case, this is a customer where we addressed 1,400 locations in 19 countries, totaling 84 million sq ft under management, and essentially helped them deliver on energy improvement goals, early stage compliance with ESG. An acknowledgment that they needed to save money, become more efficient, take advantage of technology and scale. Not only did they work with the EES business, but we also partnered with Bill and the CSS business to bring solutions and essentially bring a kit that could be implemented at each of these sites around the world. The net result was about a 40% average savings in energy usage per site. Excellent results, something that we can continue to scale up, and as you look around, almost unlimited opportunities to do that.
Our value proposition that we talk to customers about every day, we wanna increase your profitability. We wanna improve your productivity. We wanna mitigate your risk. Enabling these customer goals is giving us access sooner in the decision-making process. It's creating sticky relationships with customers, and it's really driving differentiated growth that we've been enjoying, and we expect that to continue well into the future. As I talk about this, the electrified future, we're very excited about what the future holds for us. We've been able to deliver very good results. As I said, we're still early in the ball game. There's huge opportunities for us that we continue to unlock every day. As John showed, that we've increased our synergy target 7x. We've got a significant pipeline that continues to get bigger and bigger every month.
We expect to be able to deliver on this for the long haul. I've told my team we're gonna be talking about this 10 years from now because it's still going to be a component of how we operate and how we continue to provide value. We're still unlocking the value of the combination. Yeah, it's been over two years, but we continue to learn more, do more, experience more. I had a question just before we started, and the question was around culture. I'll share with you what I shared with him, and that was 30 days into this, and of course, we're running the business on Teams. We're all used to that.
Thankfully, we're graduating from that now. We had gotten to the point where the lines had blurred already so much that it wasn't which legacy company you were from. It was more around, okay, here's a customer opportunity. We've got to jump on it. We got to create a solution. The lines were already blurred. What it continues here is the remarkable level of enthusiasm that we have. Again, we've got a lot of opportunity over the long haul to better leverage more services, take advantage of the TSS, the Technology Support Services that, as Bill said, follows the sun. There's somebody talking to a customer 24/7, which is very exciting, and we continue to scale that up to support the new WESCO. Again, early innings, great combination that we're still unlocking value.
Last but not least is this secular growth trend that we're already in the middle of, but we're continuing to see every day more opportunity. It's very exciting from that standpoint. As I said at the beginning, we had a very good story. We've got a great story now because we're creating growth opportunities that are sustainable, that we believe will continue to deliver superior results for the long haul. With that, it's great to see everyone. Great to be with you today. Thank you. With that, I'm gonna have Scott come back up for some housekeeping items.
Thanks, Kelly. All right. In a world of supply chain challenges and logistics, we're delivering ahead of time on budget. We're gonna keep it that way with some great content. We're gonna come back in the room at 11:20 sharp, and head out with supply chain operations to start. Very exciting after the break, but be back here at 11:20, please. Thanks.
Room just got quiet. I guess everybody realizes it's close to 11:20 A.M. We'll give it another minute. Okay. Now that Diane's in the room, we can get started. Outstanding. All right, let's just get started. Thank you again, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, we'll wait for the slides to show up, I guess. Okay, fantastic. All right. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today to share the progress we've made since two strong companies merged to form the new WESCO. This is a great time to be part of WESCO. I've been with the company now eight years, and really part of the B2B supply chain, and I'm excited about the company we're building, but also very excited about our future. As I have stated to you before, scale matters in distribution. This merger has been a force multiplier.
We're now a new company focused on the vision that John laid out for you to be the best tech-enabled supply chain solutions provider in the world. Let me give you an overview of our scale. Supply Chain and Operations team has over 5,000 professionals. My leadership team was handpicked from both legacy companies, and over the last two years, we've hired some of the best talent from within and outside the industry. Our employees are in over 50 countries and serve the needs of over 100,000 customers globally. We are the number one partner to our largest suppliers. While we do business with over 30,000 suppliers, our top 100 make up $10 billion of that spend.
Customers, as you heard from Bill, Nelson, and Jim, love our global footprint and the fact that they have access to over $3 billion of inventory same day, next day. We also offer over 150 services that add value to their supply chains, lower their cost of ownership, and then that indirectly strengthens their relationship with WESCO. You know, with scale and market leadership comes responsibility, and we're working hand in glove with our suppliers and customers to build an interdependent ecosystem. You know, supply chain disruptions, especially since the pandemic and the need for supply chain resilience, you heard all of the WESCO execs talk about that, require all stakeholders to work closer together than ever before. You know, the transformation agenda for supply chain and operations is simple.
It's enabling Bill, Jim, and Nelson to grow their top line and use our scale to deliver operating leverage for our shareholders. You know, the building blocks for our strategy, number one, shift spend to our preferred suppliers. Number two, design a customer-focused network. Number three, expand our value-added services portfolio. That is a differentiator. Number four, use our ESG framework to be the lighthouse in B2B supply chain. In the center of the strategy is SIOP, which is sales, inventory, and operations planning. The key enablers of our strategy are investments we're making in inventory optimization, automation, AI, ML, RPA, and enterprise systems like warehouse and transportation management. The new WESCO will have one integrated operating model. Over the next few slides, I'll give you some more insights on our key strategies and the enablers.
Let me walk you through a specific strategy we executed right after the merger to centralize the spend and shift more of our combined spend to our preferred suppliers. As you can see on the left, both legacy companies had inefficient buying behaviors. You know, a lot of our spend was with non-preferred suppliers, and purchase orders were being cut locally. We brought together a tiger team representing sales, category management, inventory management, and operations to define and execute on a strategy to centralize spend, starting with the wire and conduit product categories. Over the last 18 months, as you've seen in the results, we've seen significant growth in sales, billing margin, and supplier volume rebates. You know, our share with preferred suppliers has increased as a result.
Significant benefits have accrued to our suppliers as well, specifically above market growth, share gains, and operational efficiencies, as we're now in a position to buy truckload quantities from them. Some of our preferred suppliers, because of the strategy, have seen triple-digit growth versus their sales with WESCO in 2019. Customers have benefited as well, as we now have deeper, broader inventory and higher fill rates, and we continue to expand this strategy to other product categories. You'll hear more from Akash on our overall digital strategy, but I'm excited to share a digital product we've been working on since early this year. This AI-enabled digital product is a product recommendation engine. It's designed to help our sales team. You heard from Bill, Nelson, Akash, and Jim about our sales reps.
This product gives preferred supplier recommendations along with price, margin, and inventory data at the time of point of sale. We're also integrating this product with our CPQ or configure, price, and quote process. This digital product, in my opinion, has the opportunity to be the next killer app. We're piloting now and with plans to deploy this across the entire enterprise. If you're wondering why the focus on preferred suppliers, you know, our preferred suppliers are more profitable and disproportionately invest in innovation, in driving end user demand, designing products to meet the needs of our customers and training our employees. We have a very large network in North America and with the ability to serve 99% of our customers same day and next day, but it is sub-optimized. You know, historically, our focus has been on optimizing only the flows between our hub and our spokes.
We have a significant opportunity to improve the physical flow of product from the first mile, which now starts at the supplier, and the last mile, which now ends with the customer. You know, our team of industrial engineers and data scientists have built a digital twin of our network, and we're now using optimization algorithms to design the most efficient product flows across the network. Going forward, we're engaging in conversations with suppliers and customers, and we'll optimize the holistic network, you know, factoring in product origination nodes of our suppliers and the customer destination nodes of our customers. This work, as you can see in this chart, will increase the sales per square foot. We expect to get better inventory turns. We will see a reduction in transportation costs as a percentage of sales.
Our OpEx as a percentage of sales will go down as well. Net-net, it's good for the environment because we will lower carbon emissions. This is another example of how we're building an interdependent ecosystem with our customers and suppliers. While the last slide was actions we're taking outside the warehouse walls, I wanted to showcase for you today some of the automation investments we're making inside our building to increase efficiency and speed. Starting on the left, we've installed IoT sensors on some of our equipment and the data from the sensor, similar to the customer example that Nelson shared, we're getting insights that will drive productivity, uptime, and quality and service. We're using warehouse simulation technology to simulate and optimize product flows.
Earlier this year, we made a huge investment on a brand-new distribution center in Phoenix, over 400,000 sq ft, and we've leveraged this technology to optimize the physical flows of product in that building even before the lights have been turned on. Now we're using this technology to design and engineer processes as well. The third one is very exciting, and hopefully, as you visit some of our sites, you'll have an opportunity to see this technology in action. We've deployed autonomous mobile robots to automate repetitive work and eliminate non-value-added activities. We're seeing the financial benefits, and we've also identified a lot of use cases across the network globally to deploy these solutions. You know, on the very right is a goods to person solution that we're working on right now. This technology is optimal for small part picks in high volume locations.
Once we deploy this technology, we will see an increase in productivity that is 10 x higher than the manual picking that we're doing today. Very, very exciting. All of these investments will drive operating leverage to our bottom line. You heard about services from all the three SBU leaders, a big part of what we offer, the value in terms of value to our customers. You know, customers come to WESCO because of that, because of our value-added services offering. It's more than just the product play that we have. We customize these services in collaboration with our supplier partners in many cases, and we present custom solutions to meet the needs of our customers, right? Our services offerings vary from wire cutting, product labeling, kitting, VMI to more complex services like designing and building server racks for our hyperscale customers.
Our portfolio of services is continuously evolving, and WESCO has become a trusted technical partner to our largest customers as they look for our expertise to enable their own digital transformation, leveraging cloud-based solutions. This is an exciting slide. Personally, I'm a tree hugger myself, and I can tell you, our core five values guide our actions on ESG. You know, we're committed to the UN Global Compact and its 17 sustainable development goals, which are a call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. You know, as a distribution company, we've prioritized these five goals, and I'll highlight some of our accomplishments. Starting on the left, WESCO is very proud of our safety performance. You know, we benchmark ourselves with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors.
We're 3x to 5x better than the companies that we benchmark with. Very exciting there. In terms of sustainability, we are the largest distributor of affordable and green energy products, and we'll continue to do so as you see these secular trends play out. In 2021, we enabled our customers to install about 221 million kWh of renewable energy. You know, our WESCO Energy Solutions business that is part of Nelson's overall business completed over 5,000 energy management projects, helping customers become more energy efficient. You know, innovation is another core value of WESCO, and at the heart of our digital transformation. You know, work done by our teams has also been externally recognized. We've been recognized three years in a row by Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine for top supply chain projects across all industries.
You know, in terms of reducing inequalities, that is at the core of how we do business. You know, I have a fundamental belief that companies cannot survive in societies that fail, and Bloomberg has recognized WESCO in their gender equality index now for the fourth consecutive year. We've also joined the NMSDC, which is National Minority Supplier Development Council, and we're focused on increasing our spend with diverse and small businesses by partnering with our suppliers and our customer partners. You know, I told you earlier on, with scale comes responsibility. Sustainability is one area where we intend to use our scale to hold our suppliers accountable to making progress. We have set clear sustainability goals for 2030. Our aspiration is to meet and exceed these goals before 2030.
As you can see from the pie charts at the bottom of the slide, we're making good progress against these goals that are now public. Wrapping up. You know, I've been fortunate to be on the board of ISM, Institute for Supply Management, for the last four years, and that opportunity has given me a front row seat to see how world-class companies and leaders are thinking about the future of supply chains. You know, chief supply chain officers that I talk to are really shifting their focus from what used to be historically purely cost-based negotiations to building more resilient and sustainable supply chains. At WESCO, we intend to lead the value chain on both those fronts. You know, suppliers are also partnering with WESCO to lower their cost to serve, just given our newfound scale.
Our new scale puts us in a unique position to build a model that enables cradle-to-cradle product management. You know, my first Investor Day, I talked about the seven Rs of supply chain. The mandate for my organization is still the same. It's right product, right cost, right price, right place, right quantity, right quality, and at the right time. You know, as Scott mentioned, WESCO recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, and I wanna share a quote I wrote in our internal newsletter to our employees: "Welcome to the youngest startup in industrial distribution." With that, thank you for your time today. I'll now hand over the podium to Akash, who will walk you through our IT and digital strategy.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Akash Khurana. I lead the technology function for WESCO as a CIO and Chief Digital Officer. Really excited to be here. You have heard throughout the presentations this morning the importance of our digital transformation, how it's a common thread across our business strategy as well as functional strategy. I'll unpack the details of our digital transformation, how we are approaching it. I'll cover three key elements as part of my presentation. The first one is going to focus on why now, the timing and the need for digital transformation. Second, the value proposition. What's in it for all of us? Third, I'll provide you details on how we are approaching our journey, why it is so unique, and why we are so excited about the competitive differentiation that it will bring for our company.
As we jump into the why now, you know, we look at some of the macro trends that are impacting our sector. There are five key themes that we are noticing and monitoring. These themes are putting digital transformation front and center for us. Let me unpack these themes for you. The first one is around the need for a resilient supply chain. With all that we have experienced over last two years, including the pandemic, we are seeing an increased prioritization of a reliable supply chain by our customers and the end markets that we serve. WESCO is already well positioned with its robust portfolio of products, services, and solutions to give that assurance to our customers.
Now combine that with a strong backbone of technology, that really changes the game for us, and it elevates and amplifies the confidence that we can give to our customers. Second is the digitalization itself. We are noticing significant acceleration in terms of introduction as well as adoption of digital technologies, including platforms, cloud computing, data, and AI across our ecosystem. That includes our customers, our supplier partners, as well as our own operations. The third theme that we are noticing is around our people. People is one of our core values. They are the most important assets. We are noticing this across our ecosystem that there is an ever-growing expectation to have a highly engaging experience that our employees expect. This experience is further propelled by the right and the simple digital technologies that our employees are looking for. Again, a significant need for digital transformation.
Fourth theme that we are noticing in and around our industry is the growing threats from cybersecurity. This calls for modernization and upgrade of our back office and infrastructure, all things related with digital technology. The last component, which also links from the cybersecurity, is the risk profile that exists in our sector, where we continue to have fragmented systems landscape, as well as localized operations. All of that calls for a centralization and a footprint that can be led by a combined digital technology landscape. Now, as we look at the WESCO and the transformational combination that we went through with Anixter, the scale it has, we believe we can bring right technology, right innovation to create new operating models, build new business models, and change the competitive landscape. This positions WESCO to be the leading technology-enabled supply chain solutions company across the world.
Now let me transition to what's in it for us. What's the value proposition? We have identified as part of our digital agenda, five very clear strategic planks that enable value for us in terms of revenue growth, cost efficiencies, as well as margin expansion. The first focus is on the revenue growth. The way we look to achieve that is by strengthening and modernizing our omni-channel experience, which will allow us to connect with our customers in a completely different way with complete solutions. These capabilities will also allow for our suppliers to do business with us in a much easier manner. While this footprint also gives us a capability to innovate new business models that bring in the incremental revenue. Second focus for us is margin expansion. This is where we are focused on building capabilities that bring operational excellence.
The way we are approaching that is by bringing end-to-end integrated supply and demand planning capabilities, right inventory optimization, as well as warehouse and logistics automation. This is where we are also leveraging our data and analytics to really bring the environment which drives dynamic network optimization, so we are aligned with the market trends. We are also focused on bringing productivity and cost efficiencies by making our back office, the transactional capabilities, highly efficient and agile. These are the levers we are going after. Now, let me share some details on how are we going to make this happen. Folks, our digital footprint is based on a very robust foundation of highly disciplined enterprise architecture, focused on maximizing the value from big data that you have heard throughout our presentation today.
Focused on leveraging the advancements that we are all seeing around hyperscale as well as cloud computing, with an unwavering commitment towards cybersecurity, right controls, as well as making sure that we have a structured governance mechanism. This robust foundation allows us to have three very focused verticals that enable the value that I talked about. First vertical is focused on creating a lean core of enterprise systems and transactional capabilities. This is how we will run our business. Second is focused on omni-channel experiences. This is highly intuitive digital experiences that we are building for our customers, our suppliers, and our own organization. The last vertical is focused on digital products, digital solutions that are specific to the secular trends and the needs that drive competitive differentiation for our organization. Our implementation approach is anchored on a very core principle, which is speed to value.
The way we are achieving that is by leveraging Agile methodology, completely Agile, which allows us to continuously and iteratively build capabilities, quickly put those in hands of our users, and seek feedback. Now let me unpack what does this pillar include. Starting first with enterprise systems. Let me make it clear, this is not a one big box monolithic ERP. Our enterprise systems, which include front office, mid office, back office, is being built with best-in-class, best-of-breed solutions that are available, with a proprietary way of stitching them together. Front office includes the capabilities that will drive commercial excellence. It will allow us to tap into the market opportunities, it will give capabilities for targeted sales along with the right product, pricing, and availability information, enabling us to create a superior experience for our customers, as well as driving sales effectiveness. Our mid-office is completely focused on operational excellence.
We are stitching together from market demand, supply, inventory, our warehouse distribution capabilities, as well as our logistics capabilities in a seamless experience that's powered by our data and analytics engine. This will allow us to be highly responsive to our customer demands while making sure that we are optimized in keeping our footprint and inventory positioning, as well as providing the right analytics and right capabilities for our suppliers. Our back office, this is where we are leveraging cloud-based ERP solutions. This is a proven technology. We are bringing this in specifically two areas. One, to strengthen our financial backbone, making sure that it's integrated with our One WESCO framework. Second, an integrated human capital management system, which allows us to attract, retain, and grow and develop our workforce.
Our data, our big data, is being amplified with a very unique operating model that allows us to bring the right engagement at the enterprise level. It allows us to make sure that we have the right governance structure, focused on quality and integrity, and enables us to create a very unique architecture that creates new solutions real-time for our market. Omnichannel is again a set of best-of-class capabilities. This is not a catalog that we are putting on web. This is a set of capabilities that we are building for our customers, suppliers, and our own operations, enabled by a very unique search capability that is context-based and allows us to position our products in a highly competitive manner. Our digital products and platforms are also focused on the capabilities that are required by our business units, our customers, and some capabilities are specific to our products.
All of this is being brought to market in a one integrated WESCO digital platform that also allows us to build new offerings that are aligned to the secular trends that you heard today. Again, our enterprise systems is not one big box ERP, which is monolithic in nature. Many companies have gone down that path. We are not taking that path. This is not an Oracle or an SAP implementation. We have seen the journey that many companies have taken, which takes long time, significant investment, operational risk, and it results in a very rigid systems landscape that stifles the innovation, because you're locked into one technology with very limited solution providers.
Our journey is highly modular, based on best-in-class cloud solutions, integrated with a very modern microservices and an integration layer, which also taps into our highly specific, innovative data architecture, so that we can create new solutions that our workforce can take to market to solve complex supply chain problems. We are also leveraging Agile, as I mentioned earlier. This approach allows us to continuously build capabilities, bring those capabilities real-time to the market, lowers the risk, lowers the cost, but gives us the flexibility and the scale from a systems perspective to grow with our business objectives. This is our big data, which includes our information from suppliers, our product dataset, our own operational data, along with the value engineering that we do, our customer consumption data. This is powered by a very unique operating model, which we call as Data Office, which enables competitively differentiating analytics.
It allows us to leverage data as an asset, and it allows us to tap into the platform that we are building to create new offerings for our customers and for our own consumption. Our digital products and services strategy is also based on three key planks. The first one focuses on driving effectiveness for our internal organization, including commercial and operations. You heard about the recommendation product from Hemant. This is a very niche capability to provide right recommendation with preferred suppliers, right pricing information, and an ability to very quickly respond to the RFQs that we get from market. Our middle pillar focuses on creating efficiency across our ecosystem. You heard from Bill about the AV as a Service capability, which is a collaboration offering for our enterprise customers.
You heard from Jim regarding the digital FTTx capability, which is an integrated project management platform that allows for our workforce, our suppliers, our integrators to come together on one collaborative footprint to seamlessly execute towards broadband projects. The last pillar focuses on all the secular trends that you heard today. Smart buildings, smart infrastructure, electrification, smart utilities. This is all powered through our platform. Very early stage for us, but very well aligned with the secular trends that we are tracking. Folks, our digital journey is being put together with clear focus on our people. They are the most important asset, right processes, as well as right technology. We already have a very strong culture of lean, customer centricity, and operational excellence. We are enhancing that culture by introducing agile, continuous learning, automation, as well as design thinking for better collaboration.
We believe we have the best culture, and this is the key ingredient to our success. In closing, I'd like to leave you with three key takeaways. We are well on our way to position our company to be the best technology-enabled supply chain solutions provider across the world. We have clear focus as part of our digital agenda to drive revenue growth, margin expansion, and cost efficiencies. Third, we are creating very unique differentiation for our organization that will unlock value throughout our entire ecosystem, including our investors, employees, customers, and suppliers. With that, thank you for your time. I'm going to hand this to our CHRO, Chris Wolfe, to talk about our most important asset, people.
Good morning. Well, as you've heard from several of my colleagues this morning, our first and most important asset is our people, and that's our employees who are here to support us. I'll be discussing the work that we have done to strengthen our organization and our employees since the combination of these two great companies. I'll start by addressing the integration work that's been completed to date, and then I'll discuss the talent management strategy, and we'll describe what we're doing to recruit and develop our employees. I'll close with a look at our inclusion and diversity initiatives that have been recognized with several awards, as Hemant mentioned earlier in his presentation today.
The focus of the HR team during the first 12 to 18 months post-closing was on integration, specifically completing organization design and selection, harmonizing our comp and benefits programs and our HR policies, implementing a new human capital management system, and consolidating our HR shared services and back office processes. With that work largely completed, our focus in 2022 has shifted to talent management and our strategy for attracting, retaining, and growing top talent. We have made significant progress during 2022. We've built a team of recruiters and to source passive candidates, including candidates from outside the distribution industry with the new skill sets that are required in our changing company. A new employment brand and value proposition has been developed, and a new career site and social media strategy has been launched.
We've implemented a talent review and succession planning process across the company and designated a development framework for leadership that's aligned with our mission, vision, and values, and will serve as a foundation for our future development programs. We've implemented a performance management process that's built on a culture of coaching to encourage frequent performance and development conversations between employees and managers. As we look ahead to 2023, we'll leverage metrics and analytics to measure employee and manager satisfaction with these HR processes, as well as overall employee engagement. These actions will enable us to prepare for the talent-related headwinds that are facing our industry. Our objective is to position WESCO as an industry leader and an employer of choice, to attract top talent to our company while developing the emerging talent to be the future leaders of the company.
Here are some examples from our recruiting campaign that I wanted to share with you. The Never Stop Building messaging resonates with early career candidates. Come join a company where you can share your ideas and build your career. The graphics differentiate WESCO and cut through the social media clutter. To support our diverse early career talent, we've launched the Diverse Leader Program this year to increase our leadership bench strength and prepare the diverse talent for leadership positions. It's a selective, high-touch program that begins with assessments and provides support to accelerate their development. Participants engage with executives in career conversations and learn about opportunities in different businesses and functions. These individuals will be highlighted during our performance review and talent review process, and their retention and career progression will be monitored.
In addition to the targeted inclusion and diversity programs, we created business resource groups to support our inclusion and diversity strategy, and that's focused around our workforce, our workplace, and our supplier partners and customers. The BRGs are helping us build an inclusive culture where all employees feel valued. They provide a forum for underrepresented employee groups to have a voice in the organization, and they're supported by executive sponsors and allies. The success of the BRGs will be measured by the impact they have on advancing the business objectives of the company, and that is positively impacting employee engagement, participating in community outreach and diversity recruiting, and engaging with customers and suppliers and industry groups to share best practices, excuse me, and partner on I&D initiatives. We have five business resource groups, and they have over 2,500 members globally.
They represent women, employees of underrepresented cultural and ethnic backgrounds, veterans, the LGBTQ community, and employees and family members with disabilities. The BRGs are volunteer organizations that advance awareness of the issues facing these groups in our company and our society. They provide training and development for their members and engage with the local community groups to provide support and opportunities for underrepresented populations. The BRGs are off to a great start. We encourage employees to join these organizations and increase the impact they're having on our company and our industry. In closing, we're proud of our accomplishments of integrating these two great companies and establishing a foundation for future success. We're building an inclusive, high-performance culture that will enable us to attract and retain the people, excuse me, that will deliver long-term profitable growth for all our stakeholders.
With that, I will turn things over to Dave Schulz, our CFO.
Thanks very much, Chris. As Chris mentioned, I'm Dave Schulz. I'm the CFO at WESCO. It's great that you're here with us today. You heard earlier from John and from our business unit leaders about our strategy and how we are uniquely positioned to capture the benefit of several secular trends. You then heard from our other leaders about driving supply chain efficiencies, digitally transforming our company, and building organizational capability as part of the new WESCO. Over the next several minutes, I'll provide you with details on how this all translates into delivering superior financial returns. I'll start with an update on our current performance, and I'll then cover the components of our long-term growth expectations, including for cash and how we expect to use capital going forward to increase future returns. Let me start with the current year. We are reaffirming our 2022 outlook.
This includes 16%-18% reported sales growth and adjusted EPS at the midpoint of $16 per share or 60% versus the prior year. If you take a look at the left-hand side of the slide, you can see that sales decomposition of that 16%-18%. I'd like to highlight that 12%-14% of that is the impact of the market growth, which includes price. Price is expected to be 6-7 points of growth as we progress through the balance of the year. I'd also like to highlight on the right-hand side, when we provided our second quarter earnings, we said our preliminary July sales were up 17%. As we close, that was 16% versus the prior year.
August sales also came in at 16% versus the prior year against a more difficult comp, and our sequential sales growth on an adjusted workday basis actually increased July to August. As John mentioned, this is our first Investor Day since 2019, and a lot's changed since then. One thing that we're really pleased to share with you is that we are exceeding the expectations that we set more than three years ago. We called out three financial objectives. The first, drive growth through consolidation. Of course, with the Anixter merger, we were able to accomplish that. Second, we outlined our expectation to deliver long-term sales growth of 4%+.
If you take a look at the last three years, we're currently on track at the midpoint of our guide to deliver 7%+ sales growth from 2019 on a compounded annual growth rate basis. That includes a 7% decline in 2019, or excuse me, 2020, as a result of the pandemic, followed by growth in 2021 of 14%, and of course, our outlook for the current year of 16%-18%. Lastly, we said that we would expand EBITDA margins, and we've delivered on this as well. You can see from the slide here at the midpoint of our guide, we're looking to expand our EBITDA margins by 270 basis points versus the pro forma 2019. Again, we've delivered against the three expectations that we set three years ago in the last Investor Day.
One of the things that's driving this performance relative to the objectives that we set is that we are exceeding the expectations from the merger with Anixter. Recall back in 2020, we set value creation targets. Again, this was during the due diligence phase of completing that acquisition. We set what we believed were the right targets based on similar mergers as we set these targets going forward. As you can see from the chart, we were able to exceed those initial targets for revenue synergies, EBITDA margin expansion, cost synergies, and we also indicated that we would return to our target leverage range within 36 months post-merger with Anixter. As many of you know, we were able to complete that de-levering back to within our target leverage range at the end of the second quarter, 24 months post-merger with Anixter.
One of the other things that we highlighted when we closed that deal was that we expected to deliver $600 million of free cash flow the third year post-merger, $600 million year three of the merger. We are very confident that we will exceed this target given our expectations for 2023. Our performance post-merger is also translating into substantial increases to our adjusted earnings per share. At the midpoint of our 2022 outlook of $16, EPS is up 45% on a compounded annual growth rate compared to 2019, and up 60% versus 2021. Additionally, as we think about the future, we expect to continue to get excellent operating leverage and deliver EPS growth at a rate greater than 2x our sales growth. We have been and expect to continue to deliver superior financial results going forward.
Earlier today, you heard from John and from our strategic business unit leaders about our accelerated cost synergy realization. We increased our cumulative target to $1.2 billion by the end of 2023. Similarly, we continued to generate significant cost savings with the merger. We initially set a three year target of $200 million, and we are now on track to meet our expectation of $315 million. We're tracking well against this target and expect to deliver run rate synergies of over 80% of the cumulative three-year target by the end of this year. One other perspective. Over the cumulative three year period, the combination of EBITDA from the revenue synergies plus the cost synergies is expected to contribute just under $500 million of EBITDA growth since the merger. Let me switch gears to our sustainable value creation framework.
I'll provide additional details in upcoming slides, but would like to summarize that we expect to deliver over the long term mid-single digit plus organic revenue growth. This, combined with continued margin expansion each year, results in adjusted EBITDA increasing at two times the rate of sales growth going forward, and we will generate significant cash. We expect to use our cash generation to further advance our strategy. First, we'll invest to grow our business above the market. Second, we'll increase our return of capital to shareholders. Let me walk you through the details. Over the long term, we expect to outperform the market and generate mid-single digit plus organic sales growth. We're well-positioned to take advantage of the strong secular growth trends and increasing public sector investment.
As we've discussed during some of our recent earnings calls, the merger with Anixter, plus organic investments that we've made over the last several years, has increased our exposure to these secular trends. Essentially, we've mixed up the company. Additionally, recent public sector announcements include spending for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which further reinforce an increasing opportunity for our company. We believe that over the long term, these trends add 1-2 points to the base market growth opportunity. We also expect to continue to outperform the market. We will continue to benefit from cross-sell synergies and increase our share through the combination of our scale, broad portfolio of products, services, and solutions, along with the investments in digital, adding another 1-2 points of revenue growth.
As John mentioned earlier, our goal is to expand EBITDA margin to 10%. We saw a step change in our margin performance over the past three years, and we expect to continue to expand margin going forward. We expect to achieve this through the combination of growing sales above market, plus the impact of future M&A, leveraging our gross margin improvement program, and a focus on continuous operational improvement as we benefit from scale, operating leverage, and combine this with our digital transformation and strong legacy of driving productivity through Lean. With the combination of sales growth and margin expansion, we expect to deliver significant cash flow that will be further used to drive our strategy. Cash generated will be invested to drive above-market growth. This includes investments to grow organically, and we will invest in M&A to accelerate growth by extending our leading scale and value proposition.
We will also increase return to shareholders. This will include the combination of our share repurchases under the recent authorization, and we intend to initiate a common stock dividend in 2023 of approximately $1.50 per share. With our larger scale and expected growth going forward, we intend to deliver between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion of operating cash flow 2022 through 2026. This is a significant increase relative to the expectation that we set back in 2019. Over this period, as I mentioned, we expect to return approximately $1.5 billion or 40% of the operating cash flow to shareholders through share repurchases and common stock dividends. We will continue to pay the preferred dividend through mid-2025 of $57 million per year or roughly 5% of the operating cash generated.
We will also continue to invest in our business about $120 million per year to fund the digital transformation as well as productivity and supply chain automation projects. To put this into perspective, that $120 million per year is well below 1% of our revenue. With the remaining 40% of expected cumulative operating cash generated, we have significant dry powder to further increase shareholder value. We intend to redeem the preferred stock in 2025, and we'll continue to look for ways to increase the efficiencies of our capital structure. We'll look to drive additional value for shareholders with M&A. The criteria that we set for M&A is relatively unchanged from what we shared three years ago. We've got three criteria. The first is we believe our industry will continue to consolidate, and we will participate.
With the Anixter merger, we demonstrated we can effectively integrate and drive value capture through synergies. Second, we will expand and invest in adjacent product and service categories as well as new technologies. These opportunities should provide for additional cross-sell synergies going forward. Third, we're focused on continuing to optimize our portfolio and expanding our exposure to end markets that will benefit from the secular trends we've discussed throughout the day. The announcement this morning of our agreement to acquire Rahi is a good example of the disciplined approach we will take with regard to M&A as it expands our exposure to the secular trends in the data center space and from a portfolio perspective, provides an excellent cross-sell opportunity. Our ability to generate cash and delever quickly means that we can leverage our balance sheet to support future M&A. Many of you have seen this slide before.
Following the Anixter merger, we were able to delever quickly from 5.7 turns to 3.4 turns within 24 months. Our intent going forward is to operate near the middle of our target leverage range of 2-3.5 turns. We believe this provides the appropriate balance to maintain options to invest in our strategy and an efficient cost of capital. To wrap it up, let me summarize our long-term financial framework. Given our demonstrated ability to grow market share and our increased exposure to secular trends, we expect to grow organic sales mid-single digits+ on a compounded annual growth rate over the long term. We expect to expand margins leading to EBITDA growth that is 2x the rate of sales growth.
With our share repurchase program, we expect to increase earnings per share at a rate 2x + the rate of sales growth. We also expect to generate significant free cash flow as I just walked you through, and we expect that will be 100% of our adjusted net income. As a leading solutions provider plus the secular trends we discussed, we've positioned the company for growth. With our demonstrated ability to expand margins and generate cash flow over the long term, we're well-positioned to continue to invest in our strategy and deploy $1.5 billion to our shareholders over the next several years. In summary, we're a new company, and hopefully that's come across to you today and you've enjoyed the presentations and getting to see our executive team in action. Our strategy delivers above-market growth.
We're clearly focused on growing faster and more profitably than our competitors and our investor peers. Our increased cash generation supports both our strategy and increasing return of capital to shareholders. Finally, we're expanding our balance sheet, and we're focused on driving continued returns that would lead to a premium multiple from where we are today. With that, we're now going to open it up for your questions. For those of you that are here in the room, if you have a question, please raise your hand, and we'll have a microphone brought to you. For those of you that are attending the event virtually, you can type your question in the chat box, and we'll make sure that we read that to the audience and ask the appropriate speaker to respond.
If I may just ask you to be patient while we reset the room for the Q&A. Thank you very much. Again, if you have a question here in the room, if you could raise your hand and please wait for the microphone.
Okay. Please announce yourself, if you could, when you ask the question.
Thank you. It's Deane Dray with RBC. First of all, congratulations on orchestrating an in-person investor day. We all appreciate seeing everyone here. Also congrats on all the targets, the new targets that you've laid out, especially that free cash flow conversion of 100%, because that really didn't ever happen before at WESCO. That's a real change. A couple questions. The first is that revenue synergy that you've over-delivered really does jump off the page 'cause, you know, 7x what the original target was, and it really, you know, from my perspective, it's not just a sandbagging process, but it was I guess, a big revelation to you all of what the revenue synergies would be.
just give us some context there, 'cause I think a lot had to do, you didn't have a chance to see the books in any great detail, and where do we go from here on that side? Then I have a follow-up question on services. Thanks.
Deane, thanks. Thanks for the comments and that question. Yes, we had outlined our three-year targets publicly in March of 2020. We announced the transaction, the agreement to acquire Anixter in January. We ended up closing in June, so we announced those three-year targets in March. You'll recall, I'll take you back to March of 2020. It was the onset of the challenging global pandemic. Given the nature of Anixter's business, our business, both being large, leading Fortune 500 distributors, we only had access, to your point, to a certain level of data. We didn't have access to customer-level data. We did not have access to supplier level data until or product-level data until we closed the transaction in June of 2020. We had set 1% of combined sales as the target.
As I mentioned earlier today, this proved to be the most challenging synergy of any acquisition. We thought 1% was an appropriate and reasonable target, having benchmarked many other deals. Again, this being the most challenging synergy to deliver against. Once we got access to customer-level data and supplier-level data, but particularly the customer-level data, you know, we were super pleased to see that we had very little customer overlap. Given the limited customer overlap and the breadth of the new combined portfolio, because Anixter's strengths and WESCO's strengths were in different categories with different sets of solutions, fundamentally, it just set us up for an outstanding cross-sell execution and capture opportunity. With that said, we still had to operationalize it.
We spent a tremendous amount of work in the first few months post-close building out the process, the discipline and the rigor around how we would measure cross-sell, and we had a very challenging set of criteria around that to make sure it truly was incremental, and neither company would have gotten it had we not been together. Furthermore, the incentive plan that we had put in place at the sales desk level and the outside sales and inside salesperson level supported capturing that incremental growth because we expressly provided for compensating the sales force for going out and capturing that growth. Could not be more pleased with the results. The fact that we're a seven times factor larger now is just really outstanding and terrific.
$700 million plus has already been delivered in terms of sales, reported sales. As we look forward, this is now built in the fabric of the company. I can tell you, we see. I use the term unlimited upside potential. We don't know where this caps out. We got great momentum. The opportunity pipeline is multiples larger than the $1.2 billion. Every future acquisition we do, I will tell you that cross-sell will be a centerpiece of that value creation, as Bill mentioned this morning with the announcement of intent to acquire Rahi.
Great. Appreciate all that color. Just the follow-up question is on services. You know, back in 2019, that was a big focus for WESCO to be able to differentiate the go-to-market and how all of the revenues were tied to services tied to the revenues. Where does the new WESCO stand today? Maybe if you could take us through by segment what the percent of services of the revenues and where is it today, and do you have targets that you could share?
Let me hand that off to the three SBU leaders. I'll ask each of them to comment for their respective business, starting with you, Bill, then Jim, and Nelson.
Yeah, Deane, the services content on the CSS business is right around 70%. Maybe, you know, 70%-75%, right in there. Targets moving forward, we haven't established moving forward. Yeah.
You know, on our end, I think we're north of 75%. I talked to you about the complex supply chain agreements that we have. Those are an incredibly important part of our business, and we continue to take those types of products or those types of services out to win new business, not only with the core customers, but also in the project space. We have a very robust services offering in the project space.
For EES, I would put us in the range of 60%-70%. Frankly, I think we have the most upside of the three SBUs by embracing a lot of the existing services that came with the Anixter merger.
Deane, you know, your question cited where WESCO was pre-Anixter, and we were approximately 70. I know when we first put the two companies together, we had provided a range of 60-70. We have much better visibility into that now that we're two years post-close. Hearing the three SBUs just to come on top of that, we're north of 70%. We're in the low 70s. I don't wanna get too precise with that number, but we've clearly ticked up above the versus where WESCO, legacy WESCO was. But I think the opportunity, to Nelson's point, to springboard off of that, is outstanding in terms of driving services, the value-added service at a higher rate than the product sales. That's how we're thinking about it.
Yeah. Hey, John. Chris Glenn from Oppenheimer. Just really curious about the comments about how negligible the customer overlap was. I mean, you guys were a leader, approximating being the leader in electrical distribution, 90% of Fortune 500. Anixter, I didn't cover them for you, just learned more about them since you bought them, but clearly a leader in communications architectures and products. Would presume a lot of Fortune 500. Just wanna flush out what that means.
Yeah, let's double-click it, and I'll talk with respect to the three SBUs. WESCO's deep roots were electrical. Anixter's deepest roots started in wiring cable, pre-fiber, pre-fiber optics, so I'm going back decades. That was highly complementary, Chris. WESCO, where we had wiring cable capability, it was, we may be strong in a local branch or a local region, but Anixter was the undisputed leader in wiring cable and connectivity solutions. It was their deep roots in not only North America, but they had that capability globally. With WESCO's deep capabilities in everything else electrical, all the way up to very complex electrical distribution and control solutions, automation and control solutions, advanced lighting control systems, et cetera, highly complementary because when we came together, we could sell the entire electrical package.
Where we actually would be at a disadvantage sometimes in a local or regional market, particularly for the construction industry, is if that regional player had the full package, and we may not be strong in wiring cable, speaking from a legacy WESCO perspective. There's that complementary nature on the portfolio. Because of the different categories and how they were sold, there was limited customer overlap. That's electrical. In terms of data communications and IP security, Anixter was the clear global leader. They started with enterprise-class solutions, direct end user relationships, which included hyperscale data center customers on down and the tech firms. WESCO's capability really was born out of an acquisition back in 2006. You'll recall, you know us well, CSC.
When you look at that datacom business and where it was focused, it was much more focused on local and regional, I'll call it, datacom projects and focused selling through integrators and contractors. When you looked at these two, again, we were very complementary in terms of the customers served and actually very limited customer overlap. The area where we did have overlap was in Jim Cameron's business. WESCO had established a leading utility position over the last decade and a half, two decades, and Anixter had bought HD Supply Power Solutions, that segment, which the origins of which, if you go way back, is the huge supply roll-up in utility. We did have two businesses that were very, I'll say, complementary but also competed at times.
In the US, we were focused, and the strength was really with different types of customers. The WESCO customer base was heavily investor-owned utilities, whereas Anixter's customer base was heavily public power, municipal co-ops, and such. It ended up being an exceptional combination because of that inherent strength. When you look at what's required to serve an IOU versus public power, and it's more regionally or locally driven market. Again, we had some sense of that, but we didn't fully understand until we saw the full customer list level, like I mentioned. In Canada, we did have to divest the legacy WESCO Datacom business and the legacy WESCO utility business. There, that was, you know, just more of a market concentration issue.
When you look at it, this ended up. We knew there'd be some synergies, but this was a, you know, I will say, wildly surprised us with the lack of overlap. We knew the portfolios would be complementary, but once we got the customer-level detail, and we went customer by customer, we said, "We have this exceptional opportunity. If Anixter owned that relationship, WESCO was not there, and vice versa, we could bring the entire portfolio in." That was true whether it was a CSS customer, an EES customer, or a UBS customer. One final point, I know it's a long answer. The two broadband businesses also were very complementary. I'll tell you that in WESCO, the roots go back to the TVC acquisition in 2010.
That has been an absolute tremendously accretive and strongly growing acquisition, built tremendous capability there. Anixter had built a capability organically to serve global service providers and putting these two businesses together, tied to the secular trend of the broadband build-out and fiber to the X applications and the RDOF funding. I mean, timing's everything in life and business. We put these two businesses together. You've got a market that's accelerating with secular trends, highly complementary end-to-end solutions, and leading set of capabilities.
Thanks. Appreciate that. I have a follow-up for Akash. You talked about the omni-channel solutions, reach, and capability. It strikes me that as companies are talking a lot about digital transformation lately, some of the ones that are upgrading in real time and making strides, we're seeing some visible share gains in some instances where the administration of smaller outlets, which just couldn't get done previously. You know, it was a quick point that you made in the context of your overall pitch, but you know, just curious if I'm barking up a good tree there or if I might be overthinking it.
Well, I think our omni-channel is a great opportunity for us. We are approaching this with a complete integrated point of view from technology, where we are bringing in best-in-class solutions that I talked about, highly unique architecture that creates a very intuitive experience for our customers and overall broader ecosystem. I believe that the opportunity to you know grow there is tremendous.
One other point to tag onto that. We're not a catalog. We don't have a catalog business model, Chris. You know, we have a B2B distribution business model, and so there are a number of other distributors that are in the industrial distribution space that essentially have a variation of a catalog business model. Those companies are exposed to competition from, you know, from the B2C retail distribution e-commerce players, some of which have substantial scale. We, again, you can't go onto the website as a walk-up customer and see the WESCO catalog online. That's not our business model. Furthermore, very few of our branches have counters.
When you start thinking about our business model and the array of business models we have and the types of customers and solutions that each of the three SBU leaders have talked about, think about our digital transformation and particularly our omni-channel e-commerce strategy in that context. It really is supportive of creating a much stickier relationship that has higher value add versus what we've done historically. I will also say that because we've dealt directly with, on a combined basis, 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are our customers, we interact with all of them electronically. We know how to integrate and interact with them, given wherever they stand on the digital spectrum of their current e-commerce technology stack.
I think you'll see a lot more of that over time as we start unveiling that, but I wanna be clear, too, that we think we've got you know a very exciting position we've taken in how we're going about and approaching this. It's not something I think we want to talk a lot about until we're bringing it to bear on customers, and we're increasingly bringing it to bear on customers, 'cause it will represent a fundamental competitive advantage. We're confident of that. And again, you don't see our catalog online, and that's not the direction we're going.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. It's Ken Newman with KeyBanc. John and Dave, you know, you highlighted a lot of secular trends that you expect to provide, you know, real demand visibility over the longer term. Within the targets today, you're only assuming 1%-2% of growth within that mid-single digit organic growth target. That seems a bit modest just given, you know, how positive and optimistic you are in terms of some of these more secular trends. Can you maybe square those comments a bit for us and just help us understand how much of that is just conservatism or if there's something else kind of baked in there that we should be aware of?
I'll make a few comments, ask Dave to add to it. We definitely raised our outlook in terms of the inherent growth profile of the company. Remember, the targets that we're laying out now, mid-single digit plus is over the long term. That's across the economic cycle. You know, I think fundamentally the secular trends are gonna weigh in heavily. What really is built into that mid-single digit plus is not only the secular trends, but it's our outperformance versus market and cross-sell execution, overall sales execution. Again, the short answer to your question is that that's a long-term time horizon that we're saying mid-single digit plus, which is several points higher than where we had been historically. If you go back and look at where WESCO had been, we were always a few points below that.
It's a meaningful step up of several hundred basis points.
Yeah. I think you saw from the presentations from our business unit leaders, there is a huge addressable market out there, and we believe that market only gets bigger because of the secular trends. It's a matter of when does that spending start that we can take advantage of it. It's already happening in pockets within some of our businesses. Again, as John said, we think 1%-2% above that base market growth is really a long-term projection, and that's where we're very comfortable at right now. Again, you know, from our perspective, this is still evolving. We're very confident with the traction that we're seeing, the discussions that we're having with our suppliers and our customers. We're very confident that this is going to occur, but it's over a long term, 1%-2% additional growth.
Got it. That's helpful. Just quickly for my follow-up, is there any way that we should think about the cadence of the IT spend and the digitalization initiatives just as it relates to that five-year CapEx expectation? Curious if you could just talk a little bit about where's the low-hanging fruit in terms of that CapEx, and then how quickly would you expect to see those benefits from those initiatives over that five year timeframe?
We're already seeing the benefits, and you know, this will only accelerate. Akash's one page where he outlined the digital products, you know, digital kind of broader solutions and the platform-based opportunities. We've already stood up and have initial versions of these digital applications running; we are seeing benefits. They're not enterprise-wide yet. You gotta think about this, and remember, we're taking an Agile methodology approach, so they will constantly be refined and improved as we drive them across the enterprise. That's the first part of the answer. It's very critical to understand that we are already starting to see those benefits. That product recommendation engine, we're seeing benefits of. We've applied digital to one of our key margin improvement processes; we're already seeing benefits of.
It will just build from there. In terms of the timeframe, the way I'd ask you to think about it is, when we put these two companies together, we said we'd have a three year integration period. We're two years through that now. We're eight quarters through that, so we've got another year left in terms of the core integration. Again, we're exceeding expectations and ahead of schedule and ahead of the results we expected. We also launched a five year digital transformation, so I'd ask you to think about it that way. We're two years into that. The way to think about that CapEx spend, Dave's built that into the financial algorithm and the model going forward. We've got that locked and loaded.
It supports the overall financial algorithm and our investor thesis, and we've got that laid in per year out through the end of the, you know, really the end of the digital transformation period plus.
Let me just provide some perspective. If you took a look at the pro forma, the CapEx spend, including IT digital, was about $90 million a year pre-merger. We said that when we did the merger, we're gonna spend an incremental, call it $30 million a year in the first three years. So call it a $120 million run rate. We're gonna hold that run rate going forward. Really, what's changed is we have more ideas. A lot of the things that Akash showed you today, you know, are in pilot still. So again, we are very confident that they will continue to drive both enabling capabilities for our business, but also, you know, some of these applications are going to drive margin improvement and revenue growth.
We've got them built in based on where they are in pilot right now into the long-term growth algorithm that we shared with you today.
This is, you know, again, what we wanted to give you was a longer-term view, but this is incredibly important because tech companies benefit from speed to value. Agile development methodology, speed to value, numerous new product launches and applications that and so we're at the front end of that. As we become the best tech-enabled supply chain solution company in the world, that's our vision, this digital transformation is the centerpiece, the foundation of that. We're already seeing the front-end benefits. The speed to value that we've seen already in the applications that we've got running is unlike anything we've seen in the history of our company, and it's very similar to what other tech companies have seen. Yet we're only in the early days.
Thanks, John. Nigel Coe from Wolfe Research. The acquisition this morning of Rahi.
Rahi.
Rahi.
Okay. What do you think is the key value add from a WESCO perspective in acquiring? Is it scaling up the data center exposure? Is it pushing more products through the company? Is it maybe expanding the TAM for that company? Where do you see the key value add?
Thanks, Nigel. Bill?
Yeah, great question. So there's a variety of different things that they add from a value perspective. One, you hit on geographical coverage, very complementary in over 25 countries around the world, and that's gonna expand the TAM for us. They have a services portfolio that we think is extremely complementary to the business. We have a product portfolio that back to them will really help expand their share of wallet as well. So the power of the cross-sell between the two and the growth within this market, it's gonna work out to be a very good acquisition for us from that perspective. So those would be the three things I would say are the key drivers behind it.
That's great. Thanks. Maybe a question for Dave. The 14%, incremental margin, in the framework, I mean, obviously it's not gonna be 14% every year. I mean, it's gonna vary, but that's sort of a good way to think about it. Is there any kind of anything to bear in mind in terms of investment spending or synergy capture that means that might be lumpy over the next five years?
You're absolutely right. It may be lumpy, but again, we're gonna complete the cost synergy delivery at the end of 2023. When you think about our long-term growth algorithm, it basically assumes we're gonna get that mid-single-digit plus growth rate on the top line, and we're going to continue to experience inflation. We built in the appropriate investments that we believe we require to continue to execute our strategy to grow above market, including the digital transformation. That's built into that model with that 14% incremental.
Okay, thanks.
Alan Hartley, Black Cypress. If you're in the ballpark of your financial targets over the next two to three years, your stock should be at a multiple of where it is today. Why bother with a dividend, and why not just accelerate your share repurchases into this year?
Yeah, it's one of the things that we've talked about as a leadership team over the past several years, even going back to 2019, where we said, given the cash flow generation capability of our company, that we intended to become a dividend payer at some point. Since that time, of course, we've done the merger. We do believe that there is the right element of returning capital to shareholders using both vehicles. We do believe that, you know, the common stock dividend is something that makes sense for our company, given our size, our scale, and the cash flow capability we have going forward.
I mean, we've upsized the cash generation capability of this company so substantially. Keep in mind, our balance sheet is expanding too as we grow, and we have an accounts receivable securitization, an inventory revolver, so that only grows with time too, right, as we grow the company. We're highly confident that we can, you know, meet all our investment needs and also add this to our, you know, to our. It makes our capital deployment story to shareholders much stronger, and it will open up a broader investor base for us to go and begin to market our company to. You know, but underpinning it, the decision, is just the supreme confidence around the inherent cash generation characteristics of the company that have been upsized substantially.
One follow-up, if you will. If you do not hit your targets over the next three to five years, what would you think would be the reason behind that?
The way I'd ask you to think about it, because we have high confidence in these targets, is, you know, what we can't control is the economic cycle. Here's the power of a distribution business model and particularly ours. If sales slow down and if it becomes a broader-based recession, we're highly confident, given the mix of the business, we've mix shifted up and the secular growth trends that still will be inherent, we think, in the end markets, that our peak-to-trough swing in terms of revenue will be dramatically less, you know, more shallow, dramatically less than it was, has been historically. What we will do is liquidate working capital. There'll be a tremendous amount of cash flow that then is generated.
Since the beginning of 2021 through the second quarter, we added $1.4 billion to our inventory. Just think about this number. Our inventory went from $2.1 billion entering 2021 to $3.5 billion in the middle of 2022 in six quarters. We made a conscious decision to invest in working capital, specifically inventory, to support, you know, the tremendous momentum of the business, capturing share, delivering value. If things slow down, we will liquidate that working capital. Take a look at WESCO since we went public in 1999, and take a look at Anixter over the same period. Anixter and WESCO generate 100% of free cash flow in aggregate across all phases of the economic cycle. These are inherently very strong cash generation businesses. They're cash generation machines. That's one bookend.
The other bookend is we continue to see market growth. There may be some slowdown in this part of the market, that part of the market, but overall, these secular trends are strong. We think we're in an inflationary cycle. I don't see inflation abating in the second half or next year. We think we're in an inflationary cycle. We're doing a terrific job of selling value and getting our margin expansion, and that's inherent in continuing to drive the top-line growth and the margin expansion in support of our 10%+ operating margin. I mean, the bottom line is, I want to give you some color on it. This is the power of the distribution model. No matter which way the economy goes, we think we win in both cases.
Sam Darkatsh, Raymond James. Again, thank you for all this. There's a lot of work that goes into this, both in front of us and behind the scenes, and I'm appreciative. We're all appreciative. I actually have three basic questions, if you forgive me. The first, and you kind of touched on it, but you've continually said that your long-term expectations, mid-single digit sales growth, double-digit EBITDA growth is across the cycle. I'll have to ask it. How confident are you that 2023 looks like that? You do have 60 basis points of margin expansion coming from a combination of synergies and variable comp reset. You've got a couple, 2, 3 points at least, of pricing rollover. How you feeling about 2023, at least as it stands today?
I'll answer that one. We'll see where your other two questions go, Sam. We're not gonna guide or give a sense of outlook for 2023 yet. We'll do that as part of our normal cycle and process, which will be fourth quarter earnings call. With that said, I'll restate, and I'll amplify our confidence that we will grow in 2023. Thanks, Nigel. We made that statement in our Q2 earnings call, and we are highly confident. I am highly confident. This team is highly confident that we will grow in 2023. Why? Look at our momentum vector. Our final sales in July ended up being up 16%. August is at a 16 against a tougher comp. That's a new data point for today's meeting.
Our backlog has continued to stay above a 1.0 book-to-bill ratio, and we continue to add to our backlog. I will add that, Dave. We continue to grow our backlog sequentially. Our backlog's at an all-time record level. Sam, for the last two years, it's been performing outside of normal seasonality, i.e., typically we eat into the backlog Q2 and Q3, but we've been growing backlog sequentially across the last two years. It's an exceptional level, and it sets us up very strongly for 2023. Final point, look at all the increased investments that are gonna impact the public infrastructure. Now, the RDOF funding has started, it's underway, but we're still in the early stages of just capturing it. Jim talked about that.
That has a long runway, but all this additional spending that's been approved, none of that is in our daily activity levels yet. To the extent the economy gets even more challenged, I'll argue that, and particularly in the US, that money's gonna get spent, and that government, you know, that just represents another catalyst for growth. We're not gonna, you know, guide at this point, but I will make the very strong statement. Again, everything we know, we're highly confident we're gonna grow.
With that, I'll ask a longer-term question then. Couple hundred basis points of EBITDA margin expectations over the next, I don't know, call it five years or so. Mix adjusted, granted that there are certain things that affect gross margins that are over and above billing margins. Generally speaking, how much of that couple hundred basis points will come from gross margin? What is the right gross margin for this business versus the 21.6% or so that you're at right now?
I think, you know, I'm not gonna give you the prescribed recipe for this next 210+ basis points. You know, we've expanded 270 basis points from pro forma 2019 through our mid-range of our outlook. We do expect both gross margin expansion, I do, the team does, and operating cost leverage. We think both will contribute. I will tell you that as we continue to improve the services value proposition, the services content, and we're seeing through the cross-selling too, 'cause when we're cross-selling, it's not just product pull-through. It's services and business model pull-through as well with the example that Jim gave. That has an inherently higher operating margin profile and in some cases, gross margin profile.
I think that we're seeing tremendous runway in front of us, Sam, unlike I've seen in my entire tenure at WESCO, to continue to expand gross margins. Now, will they get a little bit lumpy here and there if, you know, if inflation flattens out to zero? You know, there'll be some temporal stuff here and there, but overall, the trajectory, I think, is positive. The short answer is, with that backdrop, we expect there'll be a gross margin expansion contribution plus the operating cost leverage, both. I'm not gonna give you the prescribed recipe, but both will contribute to that 210 basis points plus.
My third question, the Rahi deal. I think you paid 7.5x trailing. That's what you're citing. I'm also guessing that excludes synergies since you were talking about a trailing number. You also mentioned how you have a distressed multiple in your overall equity. When we look at prospective M&A, knowing that you can't always control when something comes across the transom, but on a synergized multiple basis, is it fair to assume that future M&A would come at multiples that are less than where your current equity is trading at the time?
I won't make a carte blanche statement that that's always gonna be the case, Sam, but I will use Rahi as a good example. We clearly think we're trading at a depressed multiple on what we've already earned and warranted, let alone what we're gonna ultimately deliver. We feel strongly about that. The reason we captured the multiple and put it in the press release was to send a signal of the discipline. In this particular case, you have a company that was built. It was a startup that grew at a hyperbolic rate. They've been investing in growing that business. You know, this is a tag-on to an earlier question.
They realize the size, scope, and scale of the capabilities of the WESCO-Anixter combination, and it will allow that leader and that leadership team to fulfill their dream about being the leading global hyperscale data center provider. You know, it's very hard to continue those growth trajectories. You look at that business, and we paid a very attractive multiple, and we have significant synergies that we're looking at. But don't think of those as a large amount of cost synergies. We think about that as a large amount of cross-sell and sales synergies, building off the success and the rigors of the process and program we have in place as a result of the Anixter-WESCO combination.
All right. We've got a couple here from the virtual audience. Want to make sure we include everyone there. I'm gonna try to piece a couple of these together. The first one is actually for Dave. It's both an earnings per share question and then also a bit around capital allocation. Just when you look at the 2x greater than 2 x sales growth for EPS, can you talk about the balance of capital deployment within that around M&A and share repurchases? How much of that is included in those figures, et cetera?
Yeah. Right now, we base the long-term growth algorithm on our organic sales. We know that we just announced the Rahi purchase agreement, but we did not build inherently additional M&A into that 2x sales growth plus for EPS. I mean, essentially, what we're getting the benefit of is we're growing our EBITDA 2x the rate of sales, plus we're getting the benefit of our share repurchase program. That's what's driving that 2x plus growth rate versus sales for our adjusted EPS.
Then the follow-on on that is around strategy for M&A. The combination with Anixter, and then you look at Rahi, and both of those have significant global capabilities. When you think about M&A going forward, how much of the strategy is based around global expansion versus continuing to expand within the North American market?
I don't want to tilt it, saying it's gotta be global, or it's not going to be global. I think the bottom line is we are the distribution value chain that we're operating in as we sit here today is still very fragmented. We have tremendous opportunities, I'll say, where we have the largest percentage of our business today, our scale, which is in North America, as well as you know, businesses that have global capability or global footprint. In the case of Rahi, it's such a terrific combination because Anixter had the leading position globally in data communications and IP security, which included servicing data centers and hyperscale data centers. There's a terrific global synergy with that combination.
The bottom line is we've got, you know, our part of the value chain is consolidating, it's picking up pace, but it still remains very fragmented. I harken back to the comments I made three years ago in 2019.
The next question is actually for Akash, and it's a good clarifying question talking about the technology stack and the digital architecture. It's actually a follow-up. It says, "Are you including an ERP implementation or harmonization as part of that?" Maybe you can dig a little bit deeper on the enterprise
Systems
systems that we're implementing and what that means from a-
Yeah. Let me reiterate that we are not implementing a monolithic ERP. It's not a one big box ERP implementation. Our enterprise systems is completely based on best-in-class solutions. Front office is purely focused on commercial. It has no ERP component. Mid office is purely focused on operational excellence. We are building some niche capabilities there, leveraging our data and analytics. No ERP component there. Our back office is leveraging cloud-based ERP solution. We are implementing already proven capabilities in that area, especially around finance as well as human capital management.
Akash, could you speak to what's already been stood up?
Yeah.
In terms of back office.
Yeah. In terms of back office, we already have implemented our integrated HCM system that includes performance management, talent management, goal deployment, and a few other key components. We are on our way to implement the one general ledger chart of accounts as part of our financial backbone. That's underway.
The next question is actually for Hemant. It's really around preferred suppliers and when you look at that.
Sort of, what's the margin uplift from that? How does the automated recommendation engine then amplify that opportunity within preferred suppliers?
Okay. It's a great question. The intent behind the recommendation engine product was essentially growing preferred suppliers. Prior to Akash coming on board, really having this entire digital strategy in place, we really didn't have the capabilities to build a product. Step one was having a product that will allow our inside sales and our outside salespeople to actually get a recommendation, because when you're in a business and you're selling, you know, millions of SKUs, it's impossible to expect any one individual to know what the options are. Step one was having the engine built. We did that in what I'll call historically record time. Now we have, you know, Akash and I have a weekly standup with the team where we look at what has been built.
We're, you know, deploying Agile in the ecosystem. For us, it's about growing with our preferred suppliers and there's opportunity. Step one was the product. Now obviously we're incenting that behavior as well. It's just not about building a digital product and standing it up. Working with Bill, Jim, and Nelson, it's now about incenting that behavior. There's a lot of upside for our suppliers as well, like I already talked about. It's good for working capital. It's good for top line growth. It's good for margin. It's good thing to do all around. We expect to drive that share on an ongoing basis, up, you know, a few hundred basis points.
Perfect. We've got time for one more question in the room if anyone has a follow-up. We'll turn it back to John for a couple quick closing remarks.
Hey, it's Ken Newman from KeyBanc again. Thanks for the follow-up. Curious, is there a way to rank the various buckets of initiatives that allows you to achieve that 10% EBITDA margin target? You know, as I think about the digital transformation, the synergy capture or the share gains, where are you most excited in terms of the opportunity from execution? You know, maybe to, I guess, as a quick follow on to ask Sam's gross margin question a different way, what's embedded from a price-cost expectation through the cycle now that you're a different company?
I'll hit the first one, Dave, you hit the second. You know, as a father and grandfather, I love all my kids equally. How can I? I mean, with that as the. I'm serious. Think about what we've done since we put these two companies together. We did not say, "Okay, it's this, these two initiatives that we're gonna drive enterprise-wide." We've had a very aggressive agenda with an array of initiatives, and we stood up a dedicated integration management office that now has morphed. That's still in place, finishing up the integration, but is driving strategic initiative execution across the combined company. We have shown that we have leveled up to a completely different plane of operating, where we can run multiple large enterprise-wide strategic initiatives in combination.
What we've laid out as the foundational plank, so I'm going from, you know, this additional 200+ basis points, and we have great confidence in that, is we're gonna run that playbook with all these enterprise-wide initiatives in concert. Impossible to pick or prioritize. I think this is the power of this new company. We can now, you know, we can do multiple things in parallel, all very aggressively. Actually, when you think of it as a risk management matter, we don't have all our eggs in one basket. We haven't hung our hat on just these one or two things, which creates a much more resilient operating plan in terms of going after our objective. Dave?
Yeah, I'll just comment first on your question, Ken, about price going forward. We've not assumed in our long-term mid-single-digit plus organic sales growth any additional pricing. It's hard for us to predict it, so we didn't build it in. I'll go back to, you know, answer the question about, you know, we love all our children equally. The one thing that I would tell you is some of the things that we're doing, and we're in pilot now on some of these applications that are going to increase our ability to drive margin and sales growth, grow our share. These are things that are going to create competitive advantage that, you know, I know I'm excited about. You know, as we start to see some of these early pilot results, that's what I'm really excited about.
Building competitive advantage to make sure that we can continue to grow share ahead of the market.
Staying on the family analogy, that's the next generation. Okay? To extend the analogy. Okay, let me make a few wrap-up comments. Thank you so much for your time and your engagement and your support. This is a new company. This is the new management team, and we've got outstanding momentum. We've shared with you our bold ambitions today. We've got great confidence, we've got complete commitment, and we are absolutely focused on continuing to deliver superior returns and results, generating that alpha and achieving a premium multiple. Thank you very much. Have a great day.