Actually, I'm gonna begin now. I'm Sam Darkatsh. Good afternoon. On behalf of Raymond James, we'd like to welcome you to the Wesco International presentation for today. With us from Wesco, John Engel, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, also Scott Gaffner, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Apologies, we had a little bit of technical difficulties with the presentation, although the investor presentation is the same one available on the company's website, the investor relations website. And with that, John, I think you mentioned your presentation might be, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 minutes maybe. We should leave a little bit of time for Q&A here in this room, but this will also be followed immediately thereafter with a breakout session. So with that, John, welcome back. Good to see you.
Thank you, Sam, and again, we apologize for those technical difficulties. This is, w e'd never miss this conference. Thank you, Sam. It's one of our favorite conferences. We had. We started at 7:00 A.M. this morning. We had back-to-back investor meetings. It's been a great, great day. So you'll have to indulge me without any slides, or if you have Wi-Fi access, you can definitely go out to wesco.com and see our investor presentation. It's there, and follow along. So can you hear me okay? Yes. I'm gonna do this to frame my comments. How many of you know Wesco? Raise your hand. Okay, so that gives me a good sense. All right. Well, look, we're a Fortune 200 B2B distribution company, on 183, 184 on the Fortune 500 list.
We spun out of Westinghouse in 1994 . We went public in 1999. I joined in 2004 , and we were $3 billion in sales and 3% EBITDA. Last year, I'm rounding, we're $22 billion in sales and around 7% EBITDA, so it's been a heck of a journey. I'll talk about just where the company is today. We had a breakout move where we combined with an equally sized, publicly traded company, namely Anixter. They were the same size as us, both $8.5 billion in sales, and we combined with them. We acquired them in the beginning of the pandemic, so talk about timing and life and business. They were gonna go private. There was a go- shop period. We were publicly traded. We saw a great opportunity. We went after them.
The board agreed to go with Wesco come January 2020. That's pre-pandemic, at least pre-pre-pandemic effects on stock prices. We're about $8.5 billion in sales, so we were gonna lever up, use debt, but also use equity. Our stock was $60. Pandemic hits, our stock dropped into the $50s, $40s, $30s, sub-$20. At this conference in 2020, Sam will remember, March of 2020, we got a lot of feedback: "Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling, the world's ending. It's the pandemic. You gotta get out of this deal." We said, "No, it's more important, more strategic than ever." We outlined three-year post-integration, post-closing financial targets at this conference. We had not closed the deal yet. We said, "Oh, by the way, we're not gonna use any equity. We're gonna go all debt financing, and we levered up even more.
We beat and raised those targets. We closed in June, beat and raised those targets numerous times, and we built a whole new company, and so I'm very proud of what we have today. We essentially have a new portfolio. We mix shifted to higher growth markets, and we're exposed to very attractive secular growth trends. Our investment thesis is threefold. First, we are a clear market leader. We have three businesses, which I'll talk about, but we're the absolute clear market leader for two of the businesses in North America, for the third business globally, and as the market leader, we're best positioned to deliver outsized growth due to the secular growth trends of driving AI-driven data centers, increased power generation, IoT and automation, electrification, and reshoring, reshoring back to the U.S. and USMCA markets.
Second item, driver of investment thesis, we have outstanding free cash flow generation. We've averaged 100% free cash flow generation across the economic cycle, 100% of net income conversion to free cash flow. We're focused on taking that cash flow and investing, continuing to invest in acquisitions. These are services-based acquisitions. We've been very acquisitive throughout our history since we spun out of Westinghouse in 1994, and since we went public in 1999. Done over 30 acquisitions under my watch since I joined in 2004. These are very different going forward. We've done five acquisitions post-Anixter. They've all been services-based. So that's our focus going forward. We'll talk more about that, and that's while maintaining a consistent stock buyback program and increasing dividends over time. We initiated a common dividend two years ago, and we increased it 10% in 2024.
We're increasing it 10% again this year. So it's a nominal amount, but it's a good dividend. Last year, we bought back over $400 million of stock, and we reduced our debt by over $400 million. So that gives you a sense of our strong cash gen. I'll come back to that in a minute. Our third part of our investment thesis is we're going through a business transformation founded on complete digitalization across our entire business. When we're done is a very strong statement, every system that we use to run our Fortune 200 company will be new. It's not an ERP transition. It's a brand new tech stack, best-of-breed subsystems wrapped around with a proprietary architecture, wrapped around one world-class data lake.
We're more than half, halfway or 50% complete of what I'll call the design and build of proving out this tech stack. It's operational with a very small portion of one of our businesses now, not tied to any legacy system. The design and build will continue through this year of adding increased capabilities to the tech stack through a portion of next year, and we start deploying to the branches. Those branches, the deployment across our footprint will continue, and complete. North America will be completed by the end of 2027, and then the rest of the world in the year that follows, 2028. So this is, this will be an absolute breakout move for our company.
Again, the greatest asset that a distributor has, whether it's B2B, Business to Business, or B2C, retail consumer, B2B wholesale, B2C, retail consumer, is its big data. It absolutely is. We have more data on our suppliers' products and what they go with and the applications than they have, and we have much more data on our customers' operations than they have in many cases, and we're in the middle of the value chain. Once this is complete, our data lake will have all our transactional data, our historical transactional data, plus increasingly customer and supplier data sets that we hydrated in a data lake. We've expanded our attribute set many orders of magnitude, and we're tailor-made for AI and GenAI applications. Here's the thing that most people miss.
I know everyone talks about AI leveraging, you know, dirty data and uncorrupted information and still can provide value to a business. It can, but the true value add is directly proportional to the underlying quality and fidelity of the data set. 100% truism. And we've spent tremendous number of person hours and costs that started prior to buying Anixter of reworking our customer master data sets, our customer master, supplier master, and product master. And we feel they're in great shape now. And so we're taking historical data, expanded attribute sets, feeding them into that, and injecting customer and supplier data sets into it. So super excited about what this will mean for the business.
We think it'll position the business for greater cross-sell across our whole portfolio of products and expanding services, improve margins or expanded margins through improved pricing, better operating cost leverage, and very importantly, increase speed to value. Increase speed to value on future acquisitions once this platform-based business model is in effect. Quick little overview on Wesco. Again, less than half of you know us in the room. It's a Fortune 200 company, publicly traded since 1999, as I mentioned, $22 billion in sales. Three businesses. Alphabetically, I'll go alphabetically. They're all my favorite. CSS, Communications and Security Solutions. That was comprised principally of the legacy Anixter business. It's a data communications and IP security distribution business, of which the most exciting application, the highest growth application, is data centers.
If you look at our data center business, which is a subset of that CSS business, it grew high- single digits in the first quarter of last year versus prior year, grew in the teens second quarter versus prior year, last year. Grew 40% in Q3 versus prior year, grew 70% in Q4. We had tremendous accelerating momentum vector in that business, record backlog, record opportunity pipeline, and right now, it comprises 13% of total company sales, and it's growing at a very rapid rate. So secular growth trends clearly impact that business. They have a leadership position globally for executing data center projects with our direct end user customers, which are hyperscalers, global MTDCs, multi-tenant data centers, as well as captive enterprise class customers. They can execute globally with a consistent execution model. No one else is positioned to do that.
Second business is EES, Electrical and Electronic Solutions, comprised of the legacy Wesco electrical business. We used to be a captive distribution arm of Westinghouse, founded in 1922, so all those electrical products we took to market as a sales and service arm before we spun out in 1994. Anixter was a leader in wire and cable and connectivity. That started pre-fiber, core copper, et cetera, aluminum. Those two come together, we got the complete electrical portfolio, very strong business, leader in market share across U.S. and Canada and North America. That business is comprised of a very strong and broad industrial business, where we do MRO supplies, captive capital projects for end user industrial customers, as well as OEM, value-added assemblies. So that's industrial, and then the balance of the business is construction.
Not residential construction, but every other type of non-residential product-project, let's say, so across all the verticals. The third business group is UBS, Utility and Broadband Solutions. Inside plant fibers in CSS, outside plant fiber applications are in the UBS business. Utility is just what it says, it's a utility business. Direct end user relationships are the investor-owned utilities and all types of public power customers, municipals, co-ops, and such. Undisputed market leader across U.S. and Canada by far. When Anixter and Wesco came together, one and two came together, three was a distant third. So that's an absolutely terrific business, and that's the most profitable of the three businesses. That's exposed to the secular growth trends of increased power generation. The EES is exposed to electrification. All three benefit from reshoring.
Back on cash generation, we classically averaged 100% of net income conversion to cash, free cash flow across the economic cycle. Last year, we generated over $1 billion of free cash flow. It was 154% of net income. It was an all-time record cash generation. This represented a step change in cash generation versus our history. The next three years, we've committed to cumulatively $3 billion of free cash flow generation, driven by growth in EBITDA, improved working capital intensity, getting better returns on our working capital and stable capital expenditures. Our CapEx runs between $120 million and $140 million a year, so we're not CapEx driven. Again, we're a big B2B distributor, we're working capital driven.
Our capital allocation, about 15% of our operating cash flow is focused on our capital expenditures, the CapEx in the business. The remaining free cash flow, about 25%, is allocated to consistent stock buybacks and the common dividend that I mentioned. The remaining 75% of free cash flow represents free cash flow optionality. We are targeting acquisitions, services-based acquisitions. We have this impressive array of blue-chip end-user customer relationships. Where we already have those, we acquire new services, we can plow those right into those relationships. To the extent acquisitions are not available, we'll look for the highest return, which is paying down our debt and/or buybacks. I talked about M&A being a real source of growth and value creation across our history. Talked a bit about our priorities on M&A.
Back to transformation and the enterprise-wide digitalization. We're touching every process in the company. Again, think about this: all the systems will be new. It's a new tech stack, new processes across our Fortune 200 company. We're doing it in the public domain. It's a complete IT, new IT and digital ecosystem. I gave you a little sense of kind of where we are on that journey. We have upwards of 27 ERP instances around the world today, so that will essentially go to one. And again, the greatest asset a distributor has that's not on their balance sheet is their big data.
So getting it into one data lake will dramatically improve our ability, not only to run the business more efficiently and effectively, with all that data, with one master data management construct in one world-class data lake that we can apply AI, ML, and GenAI to, but we fundamentally can leverage that platform-based business model into new services and solutions for our customers, you know, in terms of supply chain offerings for our customers. We haven't even talked about that yet externally, but very excited about what that unlock will entail. Finally, on EBITDA margins, I gave you a little sense of kind of where we started, sub-3% range. We're right around 7% now. We're committed to 10% plus. We had gotten to 8% post-pandemic, came off that a little bit.
We're committed and confident we'll deliver 10%+ EBITDA. It's a two-step journey. The first step is 2025 through 2027, walking back to 8% EBITDA, and that's why we complete our digitalization investments, everything I described to you thus far. The deployment through across the North American operations should be complete of our new tech stack by the end of 2027. International will happen in 2028. That's the second step of our EBITDA margin expansion journey. At that point, we'll see the pace. First of all, we'll get some SG&A improvement. This total investment is over $500 million, so that ends, right, in terms of building a new tech stack and a new platform-based business model.
But then we start to see greater cross-sell. We'll see better operating cost leverage, improved margin expansion through improved pricing and leveraging our big data set and running GenAI against that. And so we see just an acceleration of sales growth and margin expansion as the second step of this journey, post- 2027, 2028, 2029 and beyond. So that's kind of our walk. In parallel, we'll continue the M&A, as I said, focused on service-based acquisitions. I mean, as we sit here today, we've got the strongest balance sheet that we've ever had, and we have a track record of successful M&A, so that's an underpinning. I think we've seen the real benefits of scale and distribution. I know it's textbook. It absolutely is bearing fruit, and we're not yet seeing the benefits of leveraging all our big data, so super excited about what that means.
So, with that, I think that's it. Sam, I'll hand it to you for Q&A.
Sure.
I'm gonna walk over here, Scott.
I'll start the Q&A with a couple of obvious questions, then we'll open it up to the group here. Typically, John, at the Raymond James conference, you talk about current tone of business, how February transpired. What are you seeing right now in your business? I know January was up 5% or so, ADS.
Yeah, so we typically have business tone and feedback. We're not gonna give you a February number, per se. That's just closing now, but I will tell you that we started the year after it was a slow start in the first part of January that extended from the second half of December. It was encouraging to close up at 5% growth. That 5% growth is ex- M&A, so that gives you a sense of that kind of ex- M&A. We had a divestiture last year, we had a few acquisitions, so ex M&A was 5%. And look, we did not return to growth in, you know, in 2024 until the fourth quarter. So this is just very encouraging.
At our earnings call and earnings release, that momentum vector has continued, as we move through the first quarter. We got strong backlog, good bookings. If you look at the mix of the business, it's really on the back of data centers growth. We had a return to growth in broadband in Canada at 20% growth in Q4. Very interesting. In our EES business, return to growth in Q4. Our UBS business is still down year over year overall, mainly because of utility. So that mix, Sam, kind of the momentum vector and the mix that we had coming out of Q4 into January, is what we're still feeling thus far.
And then your guidance for the year as it relates to pricing, up 1%-1.5% or so, but that was provided prior to, obviously, all the drama over the last few days and a couple weeks or so. What is your early read in terms of the timing and the scope of your vendor price increases and the likelihood of you passing them through?
So on the second part of the question, we absolutely have great confidence and are committed to pass them all through. We've been through this cycle many times before, that even though it will be tariff driven, that is the price increases, it's effectively inflation. So when you think of a B2B distribution company, you know, it's not easy, and customers don't want to take the price increases, but that rising tide lifts all boats, and we will push them through. So that's not the issue. The issue is gonna be really what will be the price increases, and specifically by product, by supplier. And this is where this is a bit more challenging, I think, than the last time the initial wave of tariffs were put in place, you know, 4+ years ago.
When you look at our supplier partners, particularly across U.S., Mexico, and Canadian markets, their manufacturing footprints have been kind of optimized over a period of time, not just a year or two, but 10+ years. They've been optimizing that based on labor availability, labor cost, transportation cost, other incentives, et cetera. And so U.S., Mexico, Canada, has been kind of treated as one market. Now, you lay in 25% tariffs from Mexico to the U.S. and from Canada to the U.S., that creates a really complicated set of conditions for our supplier partners based on where their manufacturing footprint is across U.S., Canada, Mexico. So they're gonna. And by the way, it's not consistent across our suppliers for a given product category where they compete.
They're gonna need to figure out, given where their footprint is and how the tariffs impact them in terms of input side, or call it cost side, input increase, where are they gonna take pricing? But they also need to make sure they maintain and, you know, kind of share versus their competitors. That whole process has to get worked through, Sam. You know, to the heart of your question, this is a complicated exercise. We haven't seen any suppliers materially front load those price increases yet, i.e., before what happened a few days ago. So I'm sure. I know they're working through this now, and then they'll hit us with these price increases, and we'll work with them, and on behalf of them, to help push them through to customers. The real question will be, you know, where how big are they?
What products do they hit? What's the effective date? And then, does it impact demand? Because we will push them through. So the, you know, depending on that particular app- customer application and/or customer, it could have a demand impact. Net-net, this is just another driver to inflation.
Your utility business, arguably, it's one of your best businesses, if not your best business. It's 20%-25% of your total mix. It's a high margin element to your overall enterprise, and it's been impaired or impacted over the past year or so by significant destocking at the customer level, at the electric utility level. When do you see that destocking ending? What gives you confidence in that? And talk about the longer term trajectory of that business and why you're so excited about it.
Yeah. I'll start with the long term, then bring it in closer. Very, very bullish over the mid to long term. Some of you may have heard me speak about this, but utility classically is a cyclical industry. It was GDP, plus or minus a small amount. If you wanted to track the utility industry, you would count new meter starts, new meters in the ground, residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, and that was the utility industry. It was stable, it was predictable. You could do very consistent long-range planning. They would work 10-year cycles, five-year cycles, annual cycles, work their capital spending budgets, work it through with rate case approvals. It was all very logical and consistent, and you know, stable. And by the way, electricity demand has not increased in the U.S. since 2007 . 17, 18 years, flat electricity demand.
Look at it. Amazing, right? The next 17 years is not gonna look like the past 17 years. We're facing an increasing power demand curve that is substantial, and it's not just AI-driven data centers. Okay, there's tremendous drivers to increase power generation. I would argue that we've gone from a cyclical industry to fundamentally a secular growth industry, or if it doesn't, and the investment isn't ticked up to do that, all these other secular trends will not happen like we're all anticipating, by definition. It can't happen without power. You need power for these mega projects. You need power for electrification build-out. You need power for, you know, new semiconductor wafer fabs. You need power for these new data centers. Cannot happen without it. So increased power generation demand is clearly in front of us. We've gone through a period of destocking.
It's called the kind of one of the final shoe in the utility value chain to drop from the pandemic. We experienced substantial growth out of coming out of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. Given how the supply chains are managed, there was a lot of material that was put on order, extended lead times, all that barrage, then demand kind of softened a bit, and so we've had to work through this destock cycle. Typically, it would be six months with a utility if you look across decades. This one is 6+ quarters . To the confidence point, we're, look, we have end user relationships. We don't sell through a contractor to utilities. We sell directly to the investor-owned utilities. We sell directly to public power, and then municipals co-ops. We have integrated supply chain management programs with them.
We get a sense of what their capital spending is and their inventory supplies, so we have got deep insight. The inventory level destocking has been working down. We're not fully there yet. We didn't return to growth yet in Q4. We expect that'll happen in the second half of this year. In addition, we won two new major customer awards that materially start contributing incremental growth for us in the second half. So, you know, that's another call, special cause driver to our second half outlook.
Questions here in the room? Oh, there is one. Okay, I'm sorry. Yep, go ahead.
Just how much more consolidation is there in any areas there?
So I'll repeat the question: How much more consolidation opportunity is there, and are there any specific areas we're looking at? Well, I'll start with the biggest addressable market that no one thinks is one yet, and I'm purposely starting there for a reason. When we're done, our digitalization investments have a new digital platform-based business model. It takes the degrees of freedom dramatically, expands them dramatically versus history. The wholesale distribution market, B2B distribution market, not B2C retail, not wholesale. In the U.S., annually is over $4 trillion a year. It's the biggest industry no one's ever thought of as an industry. Okay? The MRO supplies alone, and we're much more than that, is $600 billion a year. So the markets that we're in are still highly fragmented. The U.S. is the most fragmented. Canada still remains materially fragmented.
You jump across the pond to Europe, they're materially more consolidated. With that said, we're not gonna be buying brick-and-mortar, branch-based business with counters. That's kind of the core electrical distribution business that serves construction markets. That's not what we're doing. We're gonna be acquiring service-based companies. We have this impressive array of blue-chip customer relationships. There is substantial opportunity to continue to drive acquisitions, to support scaling up and consolidating. Example, two of the more meaningful ones post-Anixter were Rahi Systems and Ascent. I'd challenge if anyone in here knew of those companies. If you did, raise your hand. They're not publicly traded. Rahi was a meaningful size, Ascent's a little smaller. Terrific companies, service-based plays, much higher margin. They weren't brought to us by an investment banker, so we're in the space.
They both expand our capabilities and services across the total data center life cycle and scale us up even further in terms of our ability to provide a higher order value prop, so there's innumerable opportunities still, and we're gonna use our strong balance sheet to continue the M&A.
We're out of time. We're gonna continue this in the breakout session.
Thank you.
Thank you all.