Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. How is everyone?
Good.
Good. I'm Linda Lang, WD-40 Company's Non-Executive Board Chair, and I'm very happy to welcome you to our annual meeting of stockholders. It's an honor to be part of this great organization, and I love seeing all the tribe members and shareholders here. To experience the passion and commitment that each and every tribe member brings to the company is really special. Thank you for allowing me to go on this journey with you. Before calling the meeting to order, I'd like to introduce the other directors who are with us today. Would each director please stand as I call your name? Daniel Carter served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of BevMo! from 2009 until June 2016. He is the Chair of our Audit Committee. Thanks, Dan. Melissa Claassen is the Vice President, Brand Finance for Adidas Group, headquartered in Germany.
She is the Chair of our Finance Committee. Okay. Eric Etchart served as Senior Vice President of The Manitowoc Company from 2007 until his retirement in January 2016. David Pendarvis is Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel of ResMed. Thank you. Daniel Pittard is the former President, CEO, and Board Member of Rubio's Restaurants. Greg Sandfort is President and Chief Executive Officer of Tractor Supply Company, and he is the Chair of our Compensation Committee. Where is Neal? Neal Schmale was President and Chief Operating Officer of Sempra Energy from 2006 until his retirement in 2011. Of course, everyone knows Garry Ridge. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of WD-40 Company. Peter Bewley is not standing for re-election this year and had to leave early to catch a flight.
On behalf of the entire board, I'd like to express tremendous gratitude to Pete for his 13 years of service to our company, and we will really miss Pete. He hasn't gone away. He's just not going to be on the board anymore. He's still around. Just to clarify, I don't want to start a rumor here. I'd also like to introduce Sara Hyzer from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company's auditors. She will be available to answer questions during the question-and-answer session of the meeting. Thank you, Sarah, for being here. For the business matters to be conducted here today, I will act as Chairman of this meeting. Rich Clampitt, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting. We will now officially start the meeting by confirming that proper notice of the meeting has been given and that we have a quorum.
Thank you, Linda. I'm pleased to announce that proper notice of the meeting has been given, that at least 12,762,000 shares are represented in person or by proxy, constituting a quorum.
Thank you, Rich. I now call this meeting to order. Following my opening remarks, Garry Ridge, the company's CEO, will discuss the WD-40 strategic outlook and then take questions from the audience. Following Garry's presentation, we will introduce the three matters to be acted upon by stockholder vote at today's meeting. The three matters for consideration are the election of directors, an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, and the ratification of the selection of our independent auditors. The Board of Directors of WD-40 Company is dedicated to providing its collective knowledge, experience, and guidance under the highest corporate governance standards to ensure we continue to build an enduring company. As Board Chair, it is my pleasure to introduce our President and Chief Executive Officer, Garry Ridge, who will share with you an update on the company and where the company is headed in 2019 with its strategic initiatives.
Garry?
Thank you, Linda. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the second meeting we've had in our lovely new teepee, which we're really enjoying. Special meeting because we're celebrating our 65th birthday. Who would have ever thought that that little formula 65 years ago could end up where it is today? Today I'd like to give you a little overview of who we are and where we're going. Of course, if you're listening on the website and through our webcast, I do draw your attention to our forward-looking statement, and please read it and understand that what we're saying here today is only for today. Who are we? Well, it's pretty simple. A lot of people often ask me, what do we do at WD-40 Company? We're in the memories business.
We get up every day to create positive, lasting memories, solving problems in factories, homes, and workshops of the world. We solve problems and we create opportunities, and we do that by creating a culture of learning and teaching that goes to work every day and lives our values. What we do is we take all of that to the world. We sell and market our products in 176 countries around the world. Everybody gets an opportunity to touch what we do, which is really important to us. The thing that keeps us on our straight and narrow is our values. We live our values every day. We often say in the organization, anyone can make any decision they want in the company as long as they live our values. Now, values are hierarchical. You can't cherry-pick the value.
A lot of you might think that standing here at a shareholder meeting, our number one value should be to make profit, or we call it to add value to the sustaining of the WD-40 economy. Certainly, that is a value. I often say if we live all of our other values, that happens because profit is the applause of people doing great work. What we have at WD-40 is a tribe of wonderful people, just on 500 people across the world, and we have an employee engagement measure of 93%. Why is that such a good number? The average in the U.S. is about 33%. We often say, imagine a place where you go to work every day, you make a contribution to something bigger than yourself, you learn something new, you feel safe, and you go home happy.
That's the world we envision at WD-40 Company, that's what we work to do every day. 99% of our tribe members globally say they love to tell people they work at WD-40 Company. You know what? We just sell oil in a can. No, we don't. We're in the memories business. It's really those people that make the difference that, as Linda said. To all of our tribe members around the world, again, a big thank you for everything you do every day, we just got to continue to have fun. How are we going to have fun? Here's how we're going to have fun. A dream doesn't become a reality through magic. It takes sweat, determination, and hard work, certainly, that's what we think about having fun. Where are we going?
Our long-term growth revenue aspiration is to go from where we are today, which is about $400 million in revenue, to approximately $700 million in revenue by 2025. We're going to do that by making the blue and yellow can with little red top, the product that started the company, available to more people in more places and have them use it more often. We opened a subsidiary in mainland China 12 years ago. Today, the China market is our third largest market for WD-40 in the world. You can see that every day, someone in China wakes up and meets the blue and yellow can for the very first time. It's not just in China. It's in many other countries around the world. Our number one initiative is to take that blue and yellow can to more people.
Our number two initiative is to build our Specialist brand. Many of you know, about five years ago, we took a bold and brave step. We said, "How are we going to leverage the power of the shield?" We released our Specialist product line. We've gone from zero to over $30 million during that time. We're going to continue to build our other products out that are going to be surviving through to 2025. We're going to continue to attract and retain and develop outstanding tribe members and get our employee engagement number up to 95%. We're going to continue to look at operational excellence, which is how do we value engineer our business? It's not about cost-cutting. We don't have a lot of cost-cutting opportunities, we have a lot of opportunities to do what we call value engineering.
How do we engineer our business to create great value? The brands that will be around that will take us to 2025 are these, the blue and yellow can, our specialist product line, our 3-IN-ONE brand, which is doing exceptionally well as we take it into new areas like our RVcare product line. Spot Shot, our bike product that we can launch the number of years ago that now each year continues to grow. Then some of our key household products that will be with us in 2025, including Spot Shot, Solvol, and Lava. Our No-Vac brand, which is a very strong brand in Australia, and our 1001 brand, which is a brand of household products in the United Kingdom. You'll see that over the past years, we've continually grown the core business. Just this year, our core business in our MUP product grew 8%.
As we look at building our business over time, we have a track record of slow, steady, sustainable growth. Here's an idea of where this is going to come from, the big circles of opportunity, China, India, Indonesia. We still have opportunities to grow in places like Germany. Mexico is a huge opportunity for us. You can see from not only the developing markets but the developed markets. Our U.S. market is back in growth due to great things that have been done through innovation, like our current EZ-REACH product. This is our innovation or what we call premiumization pipeline. We've gone from our classic can to our Smart Straw can to our EZ-REACH can. All of these products were meant to make our product easier to use and solve problems in workshops and factories around the world. We unleash the power of the shield.
As I mentioned with our specialist product line, we started with our general maintenance products. We've moved into greases, into degreasers, in a line of motorcycle products, and in some countries, into lawn and garden. Our specialist product line is something that continues to not only leverage the power of the shield, but it also enhances the core brand because we now have a category of maintenance products to be able to solve the needs of our end users. What does our business model look like? It's pretty simple. Our goal is to have a 55% or higher gross margin. We want to run our business at about a 30% of our revenue, and eventually, we want to have our EBITDA at 25%. Currently, it's running at 55%, 34%, 21%.
As we continue to grow revenue, we should get leverage out of our cost base, which will bring the 34% down some. Hopefully, as we continue premiumization, we'll be able to raise our gross margin. Our real goal is to get our EBITDA to 25% by 2025. Cash returns to our stakeholders. We've, over the past years, consistently, I think the last nine years, raised our dividend. In fact, this morning, we announced that the board of directors increased our dividend by 13% over the previous year. This is the ninth, I think. Our new dividend that we announced today is $0.61 per share per quarter. We continue to return our cash to our shareholders. Share buyback. Over the past number of years, we've bought $160 million worth of our stock, which is again, returning cash to shareholders.
As you know, we have what we call an asset light business model. The business doesn't need to invest in a lot of capital, so we generate a lot of cash. What do we do with it? We give it back to our shareholders. They seem to be pretty happy about that, so we think we'll continue to do that. Final thoughts. What does our focus need to be on? Well, of course, we need to continue to live our values and enrich our tribal culture. We need high levels of employee engagement. We need steady growth of our multi-use product. We need to continue to grow our specialist product line. We need to maintain and grow our gross margin at 55% or higher.
We need to manage our costs of business as a percentage of our revenues towards that 30% mark. We need to protect the power of the shield and mitigate any regulatory impact and also protect our intellectual property as we go around the world. One of our biggest risks, loss of focus. I often say that opportunities are abundant and focus is a gift. Having clear strategic drivers that remind people every day how we are to allocate our time, our talent, our treasure, and our technology, and having a solid set of values to help guide those decisions could keep us on track. We don't want to get overwhelmed by the complexity of operating our business in 176 countries and 62 trade channels. We want to make sure that we continue to bring products to market that we can manage.
We want to make sure we don't misalign our compensation. We have a wonderful compensation program called the Growth Reward Program. As the company does well, the tribe does well, and the shareholders do well. All three are aligned. Not being deliberate and focused. We want to make sure that we don't divert from being best in class products that generate positive, lasting memories. We don't want to just put stuff in a can. We always ask ourselves and our innovation group, as they're developing new products and new delivery systems, help us understand how that's going to create a positive, lasting memory. The temptation to de-worsify. A lot of people think about how they're going to change their business. We want to make sure that anything we do is not de-worsifying. We don't need to develop products that need more support than our business model can handle.
We want to make sure that we don't target end user groups that we don't have the existing distribution model to get to. Of course, we're going to live in a world where there's global volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. That's really cool because that's what makes it fun. That's a brief look at where we're going into the future. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to hand back to Linda, and then at the end, I'll take any questions when you've heard all of the rest of our procedures. Thank you.
Thank you, Garry. Congratulations on another great year. There are three matters to be voted upon at today's meeting, as presented in the proxy statement delivered to stockholders with the notice of annual meeting. If there is anyone present that has not had an opportunity to vote or who wishes to change their vote, you may execute a ballot at the registration table at this time. I'll pause for a little bit. No one? Everyone's good? Last chance. Will the Secretary please confirm that the stockholders have voted to approve the matters included on the ballot?
Thank you. The first matter is the election of directors. I am pleased to report that all of the nominees have received sufficient votes to be elected to serve as directors until their successors are elected and qualified. With respect to the advisory vote to approve executive compensation, I'm pleased to announce that at least 9,997,000 shares have been voted to approve executive compensation. The last matter presented for stockholder approval is the ratification of the Audit Committee's selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP as the company's independent accountants for the next fiscal year. A representative of PricewaterhouseCoopers is present and has been offered the opportunity to make a statement and can respond to appropriate questions. No statement, no questions. I'm pleased to announce that at least 12,471,000 shares were voted in favor of the ratification of the selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP as the company's independent accountants for the current fiscal year.
All right. Thank you. Garry, it looks like you're getting paid again this year.
Okay.
That's good. That concludes the formal business portion of our meeting. I would like to thank all of our stockholders for their continued support. We'd also like to thank our webcast audience for joining us for the 2018 Annual Stockholder Meeting. This will also conclude our webcast for the annual meeting.