Good morning. Please welcome Jacqueline Rooker.
Good morning and welcome to Martin Marietta's 2025 Capital Markets Day. It's great to be with all of you in person in New York and have those join us virtually for our live webcast as well. As you've heard, my name is Jacqueline Rooker and I'm the vice president of investor relations. I have been with Martin Marietta over 11 years with experience spanning across district and regional finance, FP&A, compliance, and over the past two years leading our investor relations efforts. It has been an exciting journey thus far and we believe Martin Marietta is exceptionally well positioned for continued growth. An outlook we're excited to share with all of you today.
Before we proceed, we'd like to take a few moments to review some important items. Some of the remarks made today may include forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. The slide currently displayed outlines these risks and provides information on where you can access additional information about our risk factors. A full replay of today's presentation, including the accompanying slide deck, will be made available on our website following today's events. In addition, given safety is of utmost importance at Martin Marietta, we'd like to take a few moments to review some safety protocols. In the event we need to dial 911, Katherine Pierce will be our designated caller. If we need to administer CPR, Bob Carden, our chief accounting officer, is certified. If we need to access an AED machine, there is one located in the fitness center, which is located on the same floor as this ballroom to the left of the elevators on the left-hand side. In the event we need to evacuate the building, we will take the double doors in the back of this ballroom, head towards the left side of the elevators, pass the fitness center, and take stairwell A and B on the left-hand side. Now that we've reviewed safety together, let's take a look at our agenda.
Today's program offers a clear view into our strategy as we launch SOAR 2030. To begin, Ward Nye, our chair, president, and CEO, will provide an overview of the business, highlighting our proven track record, offering an update on our SOAR strategy, and describing the long-term strong demand fundamentals that underpin our long-term growth. Ward will then introduce SOAR 2030, outlining how we're codifying our Martin operating system to further accelerate organic growth through greater alignment between our go-to-market strategy and operational excellence initiatives. Following that, our division presidents will join us for a fireside chat sharing how they are driving organic growth across our divisions. After a brief break, Michael Petro, our CFO, will walk through how our capital allocation and M&A execution drive long-term value creation. To close, Ward will return to offer final remarks before Michael joins us back on stage for our Q&A session. With that, please join me in welcoming Ward Nye as he shares how we're compounding returns across a rock-solid foundation.
Jacqueline, thank you very much. Good morning to all of you. We are so pleased to have you here in New York and we're pleased to be here in New York. It's not lost on us that the last time we did this was 5 years ago and when we did it 5 years ago, we were doing this very much remotely. We enjoy being here. We enjoy being with our shareholders and our owners. We enjoy being with our analyst group. So, thank you so much for that. The other thing is as we all went through COVID together, we got a lot better at technology. So, we do have people joining us today virtually from around the world. Unfortunately, we can't engage with you directly on Q&A. If you're attending virtually today, we do look forward to coming back with you and speaking with you at some point in the not too distant future. I'm going to do a few things today as we go through today's slides. But before we jump into it, just to give you a sense of how this build is going to work, I'm going to spend some time talking about SOAR and what it's meant to our company. In many respects going back to 2010 when we started this process and taking a look at what it's done for our company and our shareholders over this extended period of time and then after we've gone through that and really set a foundation we'll talk more about what SOAR 2030 is going to look like. So with that said let's take a minute to talk about what Jacqueline just said, compounding returns on what we call a rock-solid foundation.
So, as we jump into the slide deck today, here's some takeaways that I would like for you to keep top of mind. Who are we? At the end of the day, we're exactly what we've long told you that we are. We're a leading aggregate supplier. That's who we are. That's what you should expect us to be. And you should expect us to be even more of that. But what we also have, we have this wonderful complimentary specialties business that has been a true differentiator for Martin Marietta for 30 years. We're going to talk about that business in a bit more detail today. But here's what we've also done. If you look at unit profitability growth, we have offered you something in that dimension that no other player in our sector has. Unit profitability growth. We think we're going to continue to lead the pack in that over the coming 5 years. We'll talk about exactly how we're going to do it. Much of it's going to be driven by the strategy that we've long had in place that hasn't moved around. Let's face it, SOAR has been something that has worked really well for our company. Our strategic operating analysis and review. We started this in late 2009, put it in place in 2010, and we spent nearly 30,000 man hours inside Martin Marietta honing that. And how has it worked over the intervening periods of time? We've doubled our market cap every 5 years. Again, that's not by accident. That's good planning. Much of that's been driven by M&A and where we've chosen to grow and how we've chosen to grow. We're really picky about the where. My view is there are three things in this industry that are disproportionately important. The team you put on the floor, where you choose to grow, and the culture that you have in your business. We'll talk more about that today.
But if we pause for a second and just kind of set the stage on where is Martin Marietta, what does this company look like after 15 years of SOAR? This gives you a pretty good snapshot of what we look like. A $37 billion market cap, nearly 10,000 employees coast to coast. If we're looking at the midpoint of our guide, which we continue to feel very good about, $7 billion of revenue, $2.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and 400 aggregate locations coast to coast across the United States. But take a look at those circle charts on this slide and think about what that's telling us. You see equally where revenues and gross profits come from in our business relative to aggregates, relative to cement and downstream, and relative to specialty. What I'd call out to you is if you look at the aggregates piece of it, you see that 66% of the revenues are coming from aggregates. But take a look at how the gross profit lines up. If you've ever wondered why we're an aggregate company, that's a really good quick depiction of exactly why. We're taking less revenues, turning that into a higher percentage of profits. I would ask you to keep that 79 in your mind because in just a few slides, I'm going to show you what that number moves to upon the completion of the Quikrete transaction that we announced early last month.
But equally, when we're doing that, you heard from Jacqueline and you hear from us, safety is at the forefront of what we do. My view has long been if we run a safe operation, a lot of goodness follows from that. And during this entire period of time, in particular in 2024, which was in many respects a record year for us, and that's what you see on the slide, we have continued to perform at world-class levels relative to safety both on lost time incident rates and importantly on total case incident rates. But think about this. We've been doing that while last year we brought in $6 billion worth of transactions. That's a lot of new people coming into Martin Marietta. People who need to understand our culture and understand this is a non-negotiable for us. And the fact is we do a good job in training our people. They understand our culture and they work safely. It's a very powerful story.
As that rolls up, what does the business look like? Oh, here it is. It's a coast-to-coast aggregates business again with a complimentary magnesia specialties business. If we just look at the left-hand side of the slide looking at the building materials business, you see several things. We're one or two in 90% of our markets. Let's go back to the very beginning of SOAR. We were one or two at that time in somewhere between 60 and 65% of our markets. In a big heavy industry, moving at those degrees of percentages over that period of time is a big deal. Here's the other thing that's a big deal. And think about this. If you're in the business of mining, you're naturally in the business of depleting reserves. You can't help it. You're drilling, you're blasting, you're crushing, you're selling. It's going out the gates. While it's a diminishing resource, we actually have 85 years of that diminishing resource at current extraction rates. We've been very careful to think about our business long term. We're not a monthly business. We're not a quarterly business. I don't think we're an annual business. We're a business that if you want to invest and see nice returns over a long time, we're a wonderful place to be.
Now, part of what we've said to you very purposely over the years is we're an aggregates-led company. We have strategic cement. We have targeted downstream. And if you look at the bottom portion of that slide, you're going to see some change there. And again, this change for us this year is very purposeful because part of what you see, if we're going back to 2024, we had about 2 million tons of cement. We had about 5 million cubic yards of ready-mix and 9 million tons of hot mix a year. At the completion of the Quikrete transaction, this is what we look like. The cement portion of our business goes away. Our ready-mix skinnies down considerably, which means as a practical matter, the largest ready-mix business we'll have left will be in Arizona and we continue to have around 9 million tons of hot-mix asphalt. You should consider that to persist. We'll talk more about that.
But equally, if you switch to the other side of the slide and you think about this specialty products business that in my view has never gotten the airtime that it deserves, several things to remember. One, we've grown it recently. Two, it starts with mining. We've got a large mine in Woodville, Ohio. We've got a large mine in Gabbs, Nevada. That business and our core business have nice correlations between the two of them. But if you look at that business all by itself, we're the largest producer of dolomitic lime in North America. And we're the largest producer of magnesia products in the United States. That's not a bad place to begin.
But if we want to think about the building materials business, remember I asked you to keep in mind that 79% of gross profit before. Take a look at what it looks like following Quikrete. That 79% goes to 86%. Why are we doing that? It's the most durable product we have. It's the best price product that we have. It's the best margin in heavy-side building materials. And at the end of the day, that's our core. It's what we do. It's what we're best at. This is the business we know. It's durable. And you've seen it go through cycle after cycle and continue to outperform. What we're building, and our team is convinced of this, we're building a business that's more durable and will perform better in the future than it ever has in the past. And by the way, it's performed pretty well in the past.
Now, are we running away from downstream businesses? Not at all. And you can see from this slide exactly why. At the end of the day, they're hugely valuable distribution channels for us in select markets. We don't want to be vertically integrated everywhere. Frankly, we don't want to be in the quarrying business everywhere. We're very picky about the where. Remember what I said? Geography matters, your team matters, your culture matters. We're going to choose where we want to be vertically integrated. And by the way, if we start vertically integrated, it doesn't mean that we're going to end vertically integrated. We can talk more about that.
But if you're looking to see what that type of strategy has done and what it's built, here you go. Here's your coast-to-coast aggregates business literally from Atlantic to Pacific, from the Gulf into Canada. And importantly, you can look at these states and you can see again very purposefully where we've built our business. I would say several things. One, imagine this chart next year in the aftermath of Quikrete. What's that going to mean? It means that we're going to have a much bigger business in Virginia. Virginia is a very attractive aggregates market. We've long wanted to grow our business there. What does it mean? We're going to have a much bigger business in the central part of the United States. If we think about those states, they tend to be some of our most stable positions year in and year out. I remember when we were going through the financial crisis and we were seeing very difficult business circumstances across the United States. That was never the case in the central part of the US. What else happens? We built our business pretty considerably in the Pacific Northwest, an area in which we've long desired to get. This gave us a very sensible entry point to get there.
What else changes? You can see Texas is our single largest market by revenue. You know what? It still will be very much by design. We're just changing the makeup. So, instead of being 30%, it's still going to be 17%. But here's the difference. It's going to be 17% and it's going to be a pure aggregate business. And if we think about what that business looked like in 2010 before we started SOAR and what it's going to look like at the end of this transaction, it's a fundamentally changed business. But here's some other components of this slide that I would ask you to keep in mind. In many respects, in most respects, we're in business in states where we can operate year round. We think that's really important. And the other thing that's important is we've chosen our states really carefully and that is we're in states with really attractive department of transportation budgets. If we think about our single largest end use, it's infrastructure that's coming from the federal government, but you have to have a good partner at the state level. We've chosen states where we can do that. But importantly, look at the right-hand side of the slide that tells you the story. The single largest driver of what's happening with aggregate going out of gate is when people are coming into a state. We have chosen very much by design for over 15 years where we want to be. And you can see that the population growth in our states compared to the rest of the country is 2x. That's not an accident. This is good planning. This is really purposeful.
How does that translate? I talked about the fact that if you're looking at cash gross profit per ton growth, we're unparalleled in the industry and what we've offered over an 8-year period. So, we've actually gone modestly beyond even the SOAR period to give you a snapshot of what we have looked like in two different dimensions because when we were here with you or virtually with you in February of 2021, one of the promises that we made was you would see at least a 200 basis point difference between price and cost during that relevant time period. If you look at the left-hand part of the slide, it tells you promise made, promise delivered. But if you look at what those two things have done and then what they've done relative to cash gross profit per ton over that time period, a double-digit CAGR, and you can see over that time period it's up 96%.
How do you do it? Geography matters. So does team. This is the team that we put on the floor. Look, you would expect me to say this but I believe it. This is the best team in the industry. It just is. But what I would ask you to look at too is several things, not just these pictures. Think about the people behind these photographs and the culture that you are evidencing here today and that you've seen in performance over the last 10 and 15 years. It starts with our board of directors. Jack Koraleski is here today. He's our lead independent director. He has been a superb director and lead director for Martin Marietta. You may recall that Jack retired years ago as the chairman and CEO of Union Pacific. He understands big, heavy industries. He understands culture. He understands moving products. And he's been invaluable to us. He and the board are very focused on several things. They're focused on oversight. They're focused on governance. And they're also focused, as they should be, on succession. And this slide is a perfect example of how succession has worked and continues to work in this company. Because if you think about what we looked like five years ago when we're meeting with you virtually, Michael Petro was not in the CFO position. We've had a CFO change. We promoted from inside and it's been seamless. Equally, Oliver Brooks was not running the East Division. Ron Copeland retired. Oliver has come into that role from inside. It's been seamless. Bill Gaan retired in the Midwest or the Central Division after nearly 40 years. Bill Padrazzi came behind him from inside. It's been seamless. John Harmon retired at Magnesia Specialties also with 40 years. Chris Samorski came behind him and Abbott Lawrence in the west also seamlessly. So the two people you're seeing today who you saw 5 years ago are Kirk Light and me. But again, it tells you that the team is deep. It tells you that the team is talented and it gives you a sense of what we care deeply about as we look at this team. We prepare for the present always mindful of what the future needs to be.
Geography, people, and culture. These are our core values and they haven't changed. Safety, integrity, excellence, community, and stewardship. I'm going to talk more about safety in another slide. I'm sure you're terribly surprised that we're going to talk about safety here today. But two things that I'll focus on on this slide. Community and stewardship. Look, this is not an easy business to get into. It's not an easy business to stay in either. We have to have a mining permit. We have to have the right zoning. We have to have a special use permit. We have to have a water quality permit. We have to have an air quality permit. It goes on and on. It's highly regulated. Here's what people don't think about. We have to have a social license in nearly 500 communities across the United States to do what we do. We're somebody's neighbor. We're drilling. We're blasting. We're crushing. We're putting stone on trucks and it's going out our gates. It's important for us to be a positive role model in the nearly 500 communities in which we operate. And we do that really well. And I'm proud of the way that our team does that. We're building communities. Our neighbors know that, but at the end of the day, someday we'll be gone as well. We have to leave that community better than we saw it. That's what stewardship is about. And I think one thing that people don't think about enough in our business is what we do with land when we're done with it. We're not just leaving a scar on the earth someplace. We're leaving something that can be good for the community in which we've been operating for 50, 60, 70 or 80 years. We'll talk more about that. This is all core. This is what we do. These are our values.
How do they translate? Here you go. Look at Martin's safety record versus our largest peers and relative to the overall industry. What I'm proud to say is we're the only company that has consistently performed at world-class levels relative to safety. This does not have to be a dangerous business. It can be if you don't do it well. We do it really well. We have sites that have gone 20 and 30 years without an incident. I'm not talking about a lost time incident. I'm talking about, excuse me, someone who's got a fleck of sand in their eye who's a little bit irritated and because of that they have to get some prescription drops for a couple of days. To be clear, in our world, that's an incident. If that happens in your office, nobody knows at OSHA. In our world, they know. We have sites that have gone 20 years without an incident. This is core to us. We talk about it on our earnings calls. We speak to it in our sustainability report. We talk about it in our proxy. You heard it from Jacqueline first thing when she came on the stage today. This is core to us. It doesn't change.
What else doesn't change? This doesn't change. These are the pillars that have driven SOAR for the last 15 years. And by the way, a little bit of a spoiler alert, they're going to drive it for the next five as well. I'm going to talk to you about organic growth. I'm going to talk to you about portfolio optimization. Michael's going to spend more time talking to you today about what we're going to do relative to inorganic growth, but I'm going to be focused on what we're doing in commercial excellence, what we're doing in operational excellence, how we're going to invest in this business from a capital perspective that makes good sense for us as operators and good sense for you as owners. I'm going to talk about what we've done and what we're going to do relative to asset swaps and divestitures and what we're going to do with the land that we continue to own. But with that, let's talk about how these pillars have allowed us to grow this business over the last 15 years.
This is what we looked like in 2010 at the very beginning of SOAR. And what I'll tell you, we're pretty proud of that business in 2010. 131 million tons, $1.8 billion in revenue and $375 million in EBITDA. That was a long time ago and several things happened. And again, this is not necessarily opportunistic. This is being thoughtful and planning well because as we began SOAR, we put markets in five different buckets. Expand, protect, hold, exit, and target. We had long wanted to find our way into Colorado. And you can tell from the slide that just popped up, we did the largest asset exchange in the industry's history, River for the Rockies, and took down a platform position in Colorado. It's important to remember that's typically what we do when we go into a new geography. We take down a platform position and then we come behind it with bolt-ons. You'll see more evidence of that in just a second.
Next, TXI in Texas. This was a huge deal for us at the time. This was the single largest transaction we'd ever done. Denver was a target market for us. Texas was an expand market for us. This did several things. It made us the largest aggregates producer in Texas. It made us the largest cement producer in Texas. It made us the largest ready-mix producer in Texas. And importantly, it really bulked us up in North Texas in Dallas-Fort Worth. Our division headquarters used to be in San Antonio because that's where most of our gravity was, but our sense was most of the activity in Texas was going to be in North Texas. We wanted to find a way in there. That's what TXI did for us.
If you're taking a look at what's next, suddenly you see several things happen. One, Bluegrass Materials. What did it do? It made us the leader in Georgia. Georgia is a hugely attractive state from our perspective. It made us the leader in Maryland overnight. We had no meaningful presence in Maryland. Two small locations at the time. The day after this transaction, we were the largest producer in Maryland. And it also gave us a nice toehold in Kentucky. Again, nice steady transactions. What was next after that? Minnesota with Tiller. I told you early on the central part of the United States doesn't get the fanfare like specialty products that it deserves. This is a good steady market for us and Minnesota is a very attractive market with a very attractive department of transportation. We had long said we wanted to be a coast-to-coast business and that's what Lehigh Hanson and the transaction we did offered us. We had told you we wanted to be in the Arizona Sun corridor. We had told you we wanted to be in the Southern California mega region. We told you we wanted to be in the Northern California mega region. That's exactly what that transaction did for us.
But remember, I told you when we took down that position in Colorado in River for the Rockies, what we typically did was we took down a platform transaction and then we came back and bolted on. Look at Colorado. And we came behind it with Alpine. Again, adding generational reserves in a hugely important market along the I-25 corridor where 85% of the population in Colorado lives. We're the largest single player in that marketplace. Following that transaction, what was next? More blue. Not Bluegrass this time, but Blue Water. It put us in Tennessee, a state that we had told you last time we wanted to be in. Bulked up our presence in South Carolina, bulked up our presence in Alabama, but equally bulked up our presence in South Florida, another market, excuse me, in February of 2021 that we told you we wanted to grow. Then lastly, RE James in West Texas and Youngquist Brothers in Florida.
It was a busy five years. But if you take a look at what the tale of the tape says after five years, there you have it. 196 million tons, $7 billion in revenue, and $2.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA. And you know what? That doesn't take into account what we're doing with Quikrete. You can come back and see very visually what's happened with that map across the United States over the last 5 years, but even 10 and even 15 years. It's been a journey that we've really been proud of. But this isn't just about getting bigger. It's about getting better and making sure we put ourselves in a position that we can continue giving you compounding financial returns. And that's what this slide says, too. And by the way, you should expect us in 5 years to put up another slide that's very complementary to what this one says. You look across this slide in every dimension, every dimension, you see at least double-digit CAGRs. And that's fine. Double-digit compound annual growth rates. Pretty heady numbers. But here's what I like about that slide. Look at the build. Revenues are up 10%. That's great. Adjusted EBITDA is up 13%. Diluted EPS is up 16%. This is why this is an aggregates-led business. We're not just growing the top line. We're growing the quality of this business and you can see it in that adjusted EBITDA margin up 1,200 basis points. This is why this is an aggregates-led business and this is why having the white space ahead of us that we'll talk about in just a few slides is so important to this company's present and so important to this company's future.
But what have we done for shareholders during that time frame as well? I mean here are your TSR numbers. So if you look at the TSR numbers under almost any time frame that you want to relative to SOAR launch, 10 years, 5 years, 3 years, or year to date, and you say look how's Martin done relative to the S&P 500 or relative to the S&P 500 Materials Index, we've outperformed. Are we a nationwide aggregates company? Yeah, with a complimentary specialty business, absolutely. But have we chosen our geographies in such a way and built our team in such a way that we've consistently outperformed? Yeah, I think so. And do I feel like we're going to continue to outperform? I feel very strongly that we will. Does it happen by accident? Not at all. As I said, we're planners.
It's easy to look at what we announced last month and say, 'Okay, well, look, another deal. Martin's done a lot of deals. You've told us about these before. There's nothing terribly new about this.' The fact is if we start thinking about how all of this has happened, a lot of it started with this course that we started charting with the purchase of TXI. I remember talking to you, a lot of you on that day and you were surprised by that. You're surprised because you didn't see that pitch coming because it was an aggregates leader but it had cement and it had downstream and you thought well that's a little bit different. And I said it is different but it's giving us geography that we need. It's aggregates-led, was 18 million tons. So keep in mind TXI was the largest aggregates transaction this company had ever done. But what did we do after we got that business? Number one as I said it made us a beast in Texas. If you're going to be a beast someplace let's be a beast in Texas. It put us into the S&P 500. It gave us that footprint in North Texas. But importantly, we also said to you what we were going to do with that business. We told you that we were going to come back and invest in the aggregates business. We're going to invest in the cement business, make it all fundamentally better.
And we Martin Marietta had a plant at Chico and TXI had a plant at Bridgeport. And they literally shared a fence line. We tore up the fence line, put those two sites together. We make more money at the Bridgeport Enterprise quarry operation in Texas today than TXI was making when we acquired TXI. Think about that. We did the same thing in Oklahoma. We had a quarry in Mill Creek. TXI had a quarry in Mill Creek. The reserve base was so vast that a portion of it was granite and a portion of it was limestone. We pulled up the fence. We've got an enterprise in Mill Creek today. But equally, there were found synergies that were created from that. And you see Hunter Stone on there. I want to clarify one thing for all of you today because I think it's been a point of confusion. We sold Hunter Cement. We didn't sell Hunter Stone. So, did we open an aggregate location adjacent to the cement plant? You bet. Did we sell the cement plant to CRH? We did. Have we maintained Hunter Stone? We did. But what's important is as we've shaped that portfolio, particularly over the last couple of years, we've taken the cement portfolio that we had in Texas and it's been translated into 35 million tons of pure stone businesses. Again, that's our core.
And if we think about what that build looks like, think about it. First was taking down Alpine in Colorado. Second was coming back and taking down Blue Water in the southeast and most recently was taking down the middle part of the United States and the Pacific Northwest with what we've done in Quikrete. So what does that mean as we tally it up? Means if we go back in time and we think about our time virtually in February of 2021, we told you we were going to do several things. I'm proud of the fact that we have a really bad habit of doing exactly what we tell you we're going to do. We told you we were going to have a price-cost spread of 200 basis points. We've had 228 basis points during the intervening period of time. We told you exactly where we were going to put most of our growth capex and most of it was in Texas with Kirk Light. And you're going to hear Kirk talk about his business more today. But something that we also did, and I'll confess, I didn't know if it was gutsy or foolish at the time, but we told you where we were going to grow. We put up a map and we put circles on the map and we said, 'We want to be bigger in Virginia. We want to be bigger in Tennessee. We want to be bigger in South Florida. We want to grow in and around Austin. We want to get in Arizona. We want to be in Southern California. We want to be in Northern California. And we want to be in the Pacific Northwest.' I'm happy to tell you that during the intervening period of time, we put a check in every one of those boxes.
So, how has the business been transformed over that period of time? Here's a great snapshot. What did we look like in 2020 relative to gross profits? What do we look like in 2025 relative to gross profits? And how have we changed what we're doing in what's most core to us in our aggregates business? And you can see an 1,100 basis point improvement relative to what we're doing in aggregates. But if you look at the right-hand side of it, there's the tale of the tape. What have we done relative to revenues over that period of time? What have we done relative to adjusted EBITDA? And what have we done relative to our adjusted EBITDA margin? That's been a nice run. And what I'll tell you, that's been an impressive run in what I would generally describe to you as a ragingly okay economy. This has not been a volume-robust period of time. Housing has broadly been on its backside. And that's why now as we start thinking about what we've done over the last 5 years and what we can do over the ensuing five years, if I'm you thinking, 'Yeah, nice run, good 5-year run, actually good 10, 15-year run, at some point they got to stop running,' I don't think so. I don't think we're anywhere near stopping running.
And what these next series of slides will do is give you a good sense of what the investment highlights look like and why I think this is so sustainable. And the first one is going to the slide and looking at 64% EPS growth built on that notion that I just shared with you. This has not been an economy in all end uses for us over the last cycle that's been hitting. We'll talk about how we see these end uses evolving in a series of slides, but in the circumstance that I've just described to you, we've had a 64% growth in EPS. But you can look at the left-hand side of the slide and you get a very clear sense of exactly why. Consistent earnings growth through the many cycles. Why? Largely because we're an aggregates-led business. We have a really flexible cost structure. People don't think about this. Aggregates is not a 24/7 business. We can turn it on, we can turn it off. You can't do that in a lot of other heavy industries. You can do that in ours. But importantly, think about the fact that we don't have a single customer who's more than 5% of our revenue. That's how diversified our customer base is. But importantly, and we've seen it from the data, we've been largely insulated through the cycles of private construction and we still put up those numbers. And then we've also got that nice differentiator in specialty products. That's the business that allows me to stand before you and say we have never cut or never suspended a dividend since we've been a public company. If you can find another public company in our space who can say that over that same period of time, I'd like to know who it is because I haven't seen that yet. But aggregates-driven is what allows that to happen.
And what does aggregates-driven look like? What are the drivers of an aggregates business? You can see in the left-hand side of the slide what the big drivers are. We've talked about diminishing natural resources. I won't spend a lot of time on that. We talked about the difficulties of getting in this business and staying in this business. That's the permitting piece of it that's so important. We haven't talked about limited substitute products. I don't worry about the guy in a garage in Palo Alto coming up with an aggregate substitute. I just don't see it happening. Not in the next five, not in the next 10, not in the next 15. The other thing that's so important about our business is the cost-to-weight ratio. Let's face it, the vast majority of stone leaves our quarry on somebody else's truck, not ours. That's actually really important to remember that because it means risk of loss is gone once that person's truck rolls over our scales. But once they haul that product 50 miles, the cost of the haul is as much as the cost of the product. It gives you a sense it's not going very far. But we also have a flexible cost structure because we can turn these plants on and turn them off. They're not 24/7. But importantly, we're a small piece of the overall cost of construction. So when they repave Park Avenue out here someday, we're going to be 10% of that cost. If you build a home in the Hamptons or any place else, we're 2% of the cost. If you're putting in a non-res project, we're somewhere between the two and 10%. I've yet to see the project not go because somebody has said, 'We're not taking this project forward because the stone is just too expensive.' It hasn't happened. And I don't think it's going to happen in the next five or the next 10 or the next 15.
People, geography, culture. This is where people and culture fuse. And you can see it on the slide because it gives you a great sense of what we look like relative to EBITDA per employee and SG&A as a percentage of revenue. We're picky about the people we let into this company. Culture matters to us. It matters to us a lot. And you know what? If you can't do more than one job in Martin Marietta, you probably need to think about a career someplace else. And if you take a look at these two components, it gives you a sense of why can we continue to have that price-cost spread that's been so helpful. The single largest cost component that we have in our business is people. If we get the right people and we manage them well and we have a team that's cohesive and all going in the same direction that demonstrates a lot of agility and that's what this slide shows, you have something that's really special.
This is something that's special, too. As I indicated, this business doesn't get the airtime it deserves. This is a great business. Look at this slide on gross margin consolidated from Martin Marietta. And look carefully at consolidated margin for specialty products. Now, keep in mind, I just said specialty products. I didn't say magnesia specialties. We're rebranding this when? As of right now. So, you're on the cutting edge of the rebranding of this part of our business. But several things are worth noting. You've heard us say for probably almost a year that this business had earned the right to grow. Again, we're very purposeful in what we do. We're purposeful in what we say. If we surprise you, it's going to be by accident. If you listen to us, we're going to do exactly what we tell you we're going to do. We've grown this business. This is never going to be a huge part of Martin Marietta. Let me be really clear. We're going to be an aggregates-led company, but we're going to have this mag business that's truly special, is a real differentiator, and again gives us a buffer going through cycles that nobody else in our space has. This is a special business. You'll hear more from Chris Samorski on this. So, did it earn the right to grow? Sure. Have we grown it? You bet. Where's the growth going to be? This is where it's going to be. This is the show. This has been the show. It's going to continue to be the show.
This number I'm about to give you on the slide, but please remember it. 4,400. 4,400. There are 4,400 aggregate operation mines across the United States and 33% of them, about a third, are in the hands of public entities. That means nearly 70% of them are in closely held corporations. Therein lies the opportunity. Okay, I've said geography is really important. People are really important. Culture is really important. Back to the notion we don't want to be everywhere. As we've looked at that total addressable market that you see is 2.7 billion tons. Our view is we don't even want half of that. We don't want a third of that. We'd like about 12% of that. Those are in the markets that we've identified through various SOAR periods looking at deep research on areas that we want to be. And what does that mean as we skinny it down? It means in markets where we want to grow, in businesses that we can afford, in businesses that can go through a regulatory review and come out the other end, there are about 300 million tons per year of businesses that we can buy.
We'll look like at the end of this year, 200 million tons versus 300 million that are out there. It tells you very tangibly that there's another Martin Marietta plus in these markets where we want to grow that I believe we're well positioned to buy. It's easy to look at this business and hear that video at the very beginning and hear people say they've done over 100 transactions and think we're somewhere near the end of that road. But we're not. That's what we're going to be building. But this is something else that we're doing as we're building that. If you think about what we have to be good at, we have to be good at buying land. We had to be good at taking care of land. We had to be good at getting the right zoning. We had to be good at getting the right permitting. We're also good at making sure we're fulfilling that core value of ours, that stewardship, where we're leaving the land better than we found it. We own 170,000 acres in major MSAs across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. That's an enormous opportunity because when we're done with those properties, what can happen? They can be big mega sites. They can be water reserves for communities that are very tight on water. They can be subdivisions for homes. They can be used for commercial applications as well. And we've had all of those things happen. And again, it's just as the planning that we've had. None of this is by accident. Think about what you see in the right hand side of the slide. When we bought TXI, there's a 1,200 acre depleted sand and gravel operation in central Texas. It would be easy to look at that and say, 'Well, here's a sand gravel operation. We've got a reclamation reserve on there for a few million dollars. Let's go sell it for a few million dollars and just have the reclamation liability and the purchase price wash out.' We did what we do. We took it, we rezoned it, and we started planning for that to be an industrial site. So, what happened? We ended up with a gigafactory there. We sold the property for $97 million and we took a supply agreement back for all the stone and all the concrete that went into that project. And by the way, that project continues to go on in different phases. These are the types of opportunities in Martin Marietta that I'm convinced people don't think about, but they're real. And when you got 170,000 acres, they're really real.
Let's talk about what demand drivers are because again I think this is a powerful story over the next 5 years and I think it's probably a nice growing story over the next 5 years. So for those of you who have long watched our company you know three things that we typically talk about end uses on infrastructure, non-res, and housing. Infrastructure is our single largest end use and it's about almost 40% of what we do. Non-RES is at 35% and REZ is at, let's call it mid-20s. We'll talk more about each one of these in just a minute, but keep in mind if we're looking at what Dodge is indicating for non-RES going forward, they see that growing 21% over the next several years, during the next short period. If they're looking at REZ, they're seeing that growing about 20% over that same short period. But let's start with the single largest one that we have relative to infrastructure. Investment Jobs Act came in in 2021, $1.2 trillion dollar bill but only 350 billion of it was relative to highways, bridges, roads and streets. Only 350 billion and as we stand here today only about 40% of that has found its way into commerce. It tells us that '25, '26 into '27 from IGA ought to be very attractive. But here's what's worth noting. We have an administration today that's led by a builder. We have someone who ran for president the first time wanting to build more infrastructure. And my sense is we're going to see a successor bill that's likely to have a larger piece attributed to highways, bridges, roads, and streets. When that comes out, we believe that we're likely to see that successor bill before this Congress is adjourned. It's half the story on infrastructure. The other half of the story is what's happening with the states. I mentioned to you before when we're deciding where we want to be, we decided back in 2009, one of the clear clear criteria was going to be states with really good DOTs. These are our top 10 states. Look at what that stat says. The average DOT budget, the average DOT budget in Martin's top 10 states is 2x the remaining 40. Get your geography right, get your team right, get your culture right. It shows that's the single largest end use we have. What's going to happen in the more cyclical side? Let's look at housing because a lot of have seen this cycle work. The blue bars show housing starts in the United States for an extended period of time. The green bar shows what's happened with aggregates tonnage through that same period of time. What we see is peaks and trough in resi but we always see the aggregates tonnage following what's happening with resi. So if we go back in resi and say look the absolute peak that we saw was back in 2005 but you can see actually where we ran into a peak on aggregates a year or so after that. Equally, you can look and see when housing starts peaked again during COVID, but when aggregates peaked on that, here are the big numbers to me. We're 4.7 million homes short in the United States today. That's a US number. Most people have been moving to those states where you've seen that we built our business. So, the housing shortages in Martin Marietta states is more acute than it is nationally. But you can also look at these numbers and say, 'Look, it's still 45% below peak.' Well, I think that last peak was really peaky. But here's your number. We're 17% below where we were at a post-COVID peak. There's a lot of run to come in housing. But what happens behind housing is this. What comes in non-resi on retail, on hospitals, on schools. And you know what's not on that slide? Energy. Because as I think about what's going on in data today and what's going on in data warehousing today, we're going to have to think about energy in this nation fundamentally differently. You've seen some of the same data that I've seen. Texas is going to have to think about almost doubling their energy capacity by the time we get to 2030. You can't build big energy in this country without crushed stone. So what are your takeaways? Exactly what we talked about at the beginning. You know who we are. We're leading aggregate supplier. We're going to continue being that. We're going to give you better growth on unit profitability going forward than our peers will because that's exactly what we've done over the last 5 years. We have a proven track record of doing exactly what we're telling you we're going to do. We've done it for 15 years. We're going to do it again. We're going to go in the white space in that narrow band of that 1.7 billion tons that's out there and take down our share of that and we'll continue to do it in leading markets.
Now, let's talk about SOLAR 2030 for a few minutes. This is going to be important because I'm going to give you a sense today of how we codify what we refer to as the Martin operating system to drive further organic growth. So keep in mind, Michael's going to talk to you about inorganic. I'm going to be focused on organic with three key messages. One, we're going to have greater alignment than you've ever seen before relative to our go-to market strategy and what we do with production. Those two are going to fuse in a really powerful way. But equally, we're going to use data and we're going to use analytics in ways that you've never seen us use before to hone both of those to make sure that they work extraordinarily well. And the end result is going to be we're going to continue to give you unit profitability growth that we think is going to be unparalleled. So, how are we going to talk through this? And Michael's going to hit the inorganic. I'm going to hit these two relative to organic on commercial excellence and operational excellence geared primarily toward pricing and its precision and the customer experience as well as cost management and strategic procurement. So what does that mean? Where those two Olympic rings come together on commercial excellence and operational excellence is the Martin operating system based on a foundation of safety as you've heard today. What do we think we can do in the future? Well, we told you last time we do a 200 basis point spread between price and cost. We're going to do better than that this time. We're looking at at least 250 basis points. That's an important place to start. And how are we going to do it? We're going to do it by utilizing data and analytics with this team of people that we have behind us to put ourselves into positions that we can make real time decisions on sales, real time decisions in operations to drive our business and move those levers relative to cost and price in greater dimensions and with greater agility than ever before. And what's one of the ways we're going to do it? Precise IQ. That's probably one to remember. Precise IQ. Precision real-time engine for customer information, strategic and intelligent quoting. What does it mean? It means that we're putting a tool in the hands of our sales team that when they're talking to a customer, where's the job? Where's our closest quarry? What do our inventories look like? What's our closest competitor? If we're looking at the history on bidding on public jobs where the bidding is apparent and the world can see it, what does our bidding history look like relative to our competitors? What has been our win rate with this customer? It puts the power of that in that salesperson's hands with immediacy. I'll tell you a story that you'll enjoy. We had a young salesperson come in and take our board through this some time ago. He didn't know we were going to do it. We called him literally the day before. He came in and he was getting a question and they said, 'How agile is this machine?' He said, 'Well, I'll tell you a story. I went to Nordstrom Rack and bought a tie today before I came into this session and actually sent out two quotes while I was in Nordstrom Rack today.' That's the type of agility that this is going to bring. So, if you think about what it does to a salesperson, it's powerful. But think about what it does for our customers as well. It takes our responses and gets it back very very quickly. It gives them a more consistent experience and it makes the relationship all the stickier. That's something that I think has long been misunderstood in our industry and that is how much relationships matter in what we do. This actually makes the relationships better. But AI, machine learning, and technology isn't just going to affect what we're doing on the sales side. It's going to drive what we're doing operationally as well. We've got really big plants. You could see it in the video that you saw as you were coming in today. Big plants and about 40% of them are automated. In fairness, we're not ever going to get to 100%. Because some of our plants are so small, going into small plants with automation doesn't make good sense. But you probably got an 80/20 rule. So should we have probably 80% of them automated? Probably. So and will you see us going through that? And what would the automation do? It enhances our ability to run them. It runs them more efficiently. It takes cost out of the system. That's big fixed plants. What are we doing relative to our rolling fleet? Using telematics in our fleet today to give us a sense of how many hours are on that machine. When's the last time that machine was serviced? How productive is that machine? How many turns is it making? This is a business where nickels and quarters in operation mean a lot. You take those two things together and put them together, you have the ability to flex costs in an aggregates business. Again, that's unlike most big heavy industries in any respect. But the other thing that we're doing and M&A continues to make us better at this. Look at what we've done relative to procurement just since 2002. We took from 48% of our contracts under some form of a national contract to 60% today. Now again, will that ever be 100%? It won't be because again, if you've got 500 operations, some of them very remote, you have to have a local contact to do that. But we can continue to drive it. What do these things do together? This is what it does. It gives us plenty of space relative to what we can do on aggregates unit profitability across our districts. You can see what that average number looks like. You can see how many of our businesses are above it and frankly how many are below it. We can bring the ones that are above it up and we can bring the ones that are below it along. So what does it mean? It means this is what we're telling you today. We said for a while on earnings calls and meetings with you, look, we think historical ASPs in this industry in our company that you had long admired, we think they're going to look considerably better going forward than they have in the past. So if you look over history, 4%. We think mid-single digits probably in the high end of that is mostly what we're thinking about going forward. If we think about what we can do with operational excellence using these tools that we have, that's what's going to drive the spread. So, as I sit here today, am I confident that we can give you 250 basis point spread price cost? Absolutely. How do I feel about low double digit unit profitability growth? Really good. Really good. Because that's what we've been giving you in a ragingly okay economic environment. So again, what are your key takeaways from here? Several. We're going back to the beginning. We're going to have a strategy relative to go to market and production that's more aligned than it's ever been. We're going to be using data and analytics in ways that we haven't before and that we think will be industry-leading. And we think the combination of those two things will give us degrees of growth per unit that you've seen from us that will continue to outperform. We're going to talk to you more specifically about how we're going to do that because in just a minute you're going to have what I think is going to be the best part of this day and that is you're going to have a chance to hear from this extraordinarily talented group of division presidents. Before we do that, we got a quick video and this video will give you a good snapshot of what our district of what our divisions look like east to west. So with that, if we can roll the video, please.
That'll make you feel pretty good about industrial might. With that said, I'll ask the division presidents, please, please come up and join me. Couple of things before we start this fireside chat. This is primarily going to be geared toward what we're doing organically. Again, Michael Petro is going to come back and talk a lot about what we're going to do inorganically. But as you've seen from the slides and you've seen from the performance over the last 5, 10, 15 years, what we've done organically has never been by accident. We look very carefully at what we're doing relative to our commercial activities, very carefully at what we're doing relative to our operational activities and how we can do it better. And now how we're introducing different degrees of outside help relative to AI, machine learning, and otherwise. And for that, you'll hear from Oliver, you'll hear from Kirk, you'll hear from Bill, and you'll hear from Chris here today. But first, what I'd like for them to do, because some of you know them, some of you don't. I'd like for them each to give you a brief introduction of who they are, what they're doing, and then we'll jump into our dialogue today.
Thank you, Ward. My name is Oliver Brooks and I'm president of our East Division based in Raleigh, North Carolina. I joined the company in 2013 and since then have held a series of operational and corporate roles. I've now had the great privilege of working across three of our divisions, the West, the Southwest, and the East. And I've also held enterprise responsibilities for certain corporate functions like safety and health, operational excellence, and commercial excellence. My undergraduate business degree is from North Carolina State University, and I also have an MBA from Harvard Business School.
All right, good morning. My name is Kirk Light. I'm the Southwest Division President. I've been with Martin Marietta for six years in that capacity. Prior to joining Martin Marietta, I spent 20 years with another large building material supplier roles ranging from operations to business development and finally to P&L management. I have an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and I have a business degree master's in MBA in Michigan.
Good morning. I'm Bill Padzi, president of our Central Division, which is based in Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm 23 years with Martin Marietta. I started as a plant manager in our East Division. I've been very fortunate to have roles of increasing responsibility across the company working in the Southwest, Central, and East Divisions. You know, most recently, I was a regional vice president in South Texas. Been in Indianapolis for about three and a half years and really proud to lead that group of miners and individuals we have working in the Central Division. I have my undergraduate degree in mining engineering from Missouri S&T and an MBA from the University of Missouri.
Good morning everyone. My name is Chris Samorski. I'm the president of our West and Specialties Divisions. I've been at Martin Marietta for seven years. Prior to my division responsibilities, I was the vice president of corporate finance, procurement, and supply chain. My undergraduate degree is in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin and I have an MBA from the University of Michigan.
So, for an ACC guy, I got a whole lot of Big 10 up here. I'm struggling with that a little bit. So, so that said, I've spent a lot of time talking to most of you in this room, and I'm not going to say all of your questions tend to be around commercial excellence, but I think a lot of your questions tend to be around commercial excellence. So, Oliver, let's start with that. The team has seen today the roll out of Precise IQ. Talk a little bit about Precise IQ and what that has meant to you and your team and how you see that working in the future.
Of course, happy to. Precise IQ represents another important step forward as part of our broader commercial excellence journey and we're all excited about it because it's just beginning to make an impact in our businesses. But to your question, what we're doing with Precise IQ is wholly aligned with our business and two fundamentals of our business really illustrate why. One is how we price our products is a disproportionate lever of our earnings growth. We've said that this is wholly aligned with it. Another is our aggregates business is inherently a local one. And what I mean by that is we serve thousands of customers across the country but local market dynamics can vary substantially even within a 50-mile radius. That's where Precise IQ comes in and equips our teams with localized data-driven pricing recommendations. But let me give you more of a sense of what this really is and what it does. At its core, it's a mobile quoting app powered by bid-specific commercial analytics. So it pulls in variables that you would expect like location, transportation, and inventory to generate pricing guidance for our teams. It also though has reporting and intelligence capabilities. So as we use it more over time, it will give us better insights into sales trends into commercial performance and we believe that should help better demand forecasting too. And all of this is important as we consider what it offers to our business and to our team because it does a couple things. One, it empowers our sales teams with a mobile-first intuitive quoting platform, very importantly available in the palm of their hand where they do a lot of their business. And also, it leverages the vast amounts of high-quality data that we have across our company for better decision-making. So, as a result, our sales reps spend more time with our customers and less time behind a desk. So when we add all of that up, we think about Precise IQ and how it gives us better responsiveness to our customers. It gives us better information overall. That absolutely supports those customer relationships you spoke to. It absolutely enhances the value of our long-standing reserves that you spoke to and it absolutely reinforces our locally led teams who are executing our pricing efforts every day.
So if you go back to it, Oliver, I mean we've gone through several slides that we try to say what are key takeaways. As we know as you just look at and try to verbalize your key takeaways from this would be what?
Well, there's several key takeaways so far and they speak to both the design and the impact of the tool. First, the East Division and specifically the Raleigh District sales team helped design this tool. And that's a meaningful takeaway on its own because from day one, all of us agreed that local sales teams should help shape this tool's capabilities. And that's important because our local sales teams own their local pricing results. And candidly, I see that playing out every day because every day when I walk out of my office, I pass by our Raleigh District sales team and they've gotten very used to me stopping by and asking how this tool is performing and how pricing is going. Generally, their feedback has been consistent. It's intuitive. It's fast. It's built for how they work, but it's also built for where they work as well. Another takeaway has been around a significant reduction in administrative time. The amount of time it takes to generate a quote has been cut in half. That's certainly a win for internal efficiency, but that's a win for customer responsiveness, too. And notably, our customers are seeing benefits here as well. Recently, we used a third party to survey our customers. And we surveyed them around their top buying criteria when selecting an aggregates provider. And alongside things that you would expect like availability and quality and price, they also ranked highly things like proactive communication and problem solving and strong relationships with their sales professionals. Precise IQ directly supports all of those customer priorities too because again it gives our teams the agility to respond quickly, effectively and with better information which is exactly what our customers are telling us makes the difference in their business.
Let's do this. Let's shift for a second that that's a piece of it commercially. Let's go to operations. I mean, Bill, you're seeing automation, you mentioned in your intro, you started as a plant operator in this industry and your division president today as you're looking at automation and how that's rolling out. How is that changing the way you operate and the degrees of efficiency that you've seen in your business?
Yeah. Well, thank you, Ward. And yeah, you're correct. I've spent time with plant automation and really think there's so much benefit to our business. So, you'd mentioned before about 40% of our aggregate sites are fully automated. So, what does that mean? You saw in the video, there's crushers, there's conveyors, there's screens, there's pumps, there's all kinds of associated assets that go with making our finished product. Well, those are all controlled by what we call a programmable logic controller. And it's a centralized ruggedized computer that really controls that plant. So, we design these things with variability and efficiency in mind. So if you got a plant that's designed at 500 tons an hour, you want to run it at 500 tons an hour for as much of that shift as you possibly can. So it's about every second of every minute of every hour of every shift, taking full advantage of it. You want to take that human element out of the control of it. And we're doing that and we're seeing benefits from it. But there's other things that go along with it. Field managers can watch conveyor performance, crusher performance, and they can make decisions on when they adjust crushers, when they need to make a change in product mix, when they need to plan for maintenance. And all those things are so important as we try to maintain our cost flex and really manage our variable cost. All of these things provide vast amounts of data, but with these PLCs, a lot of it has been when it's just localized at a plant level. So, we're trying to get that and we've been very successful at getting it out on a cloud-based platform, which I'll talk about here in a minute. That data is really going to empower our managers and we're going to take it a step further.
So, Bill, as we think about that, you said and I said both that we've got plants with, let's call it 40% degrees of automation. How do we scale? I mean, what does that mean? What does that pace look like?
It's a great question. So, we're really in the early innings of all of this. As I said, 40% is a good number. But we've got elements of automation and other operations and I'll touch on that here in just a moment. But over the next 6 months, we're looking at some licensed technology to take that data that we are gathering and provide real-time input, real-time alert. So if I'm sitting here and we've got a plant that is supposed to be running at X tons per hour, it will alert me if it's got below that and then I can figure out why and dive into it. If there's a potential maintenance issue going on, temperatures are running high, there's a certain conveyor that's giving us problems, we'll be able to get those alerts. And it'll also provide it in real-time dashboarding. I think it's very exciting because it'll give our field managers that opportunity to be out ahead of this instead of waiting for it to tell us when we need to do maintenance. After that, we're going to work on some playbook information. So the success stories we've had at our existing sites where we've implemented this, we're going to take best practices and put it together and share it amongst our automated sites. I think that's where there's going to be a lot of benefit that comes to this. Any new plant that we build going forward, we're going to have it with full automation capabilities. I think that's very important that we understand that we design it, we have it in mind that we're going to be taking care of that. So that's on the operating side. Oliver touched on the commercial side and I'll hit where automation is helping us on the commercial side. So why do you think that's important? Well, if you look at every one of our locations, Ward mentioned the 400 plus aggregate sites, there's a scale at every one of those that's weighing a customer truck, printing a ticket, and out at the door it goes. Well, what we've done in certain areas is we've taken that scale operator and put them in strategic central locations. And in one region in particular, we're able to manage over 30 locations with less than 10 people. So, automation is not only helping us on the operation side, but when you look at commercially, it's doing some real beneficial things for us as well. And I think it's very important as we look towards SOLAR 2030.
You know, switch and go to the Central Division, I'm sorry, Southwest for a second and turn our attention to Kirk because as I mentioned in the early slides, you'd hear more from him today, particularly relative to what we've done at Bridgeport. I mentioned that we had a historic site at Chico, TXI had one at Bridgeport. We tore the fence line. We put those sites together. And when we were with you and Kirk and I were here with you five years ago, we said that we were going to put significant investment there to expand it and to make it more automated and that's been an impressive journey. But Kirk, you want to talk about what that has looked like?
Absolutely. Ward, I love to talk about Bridgeport. We have a great team there and we have a great asset. So our North Bridgeport FL plant is fully automated from the primary crusher all the way to customer loadout. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, what it means is when a haul truck dumps its load, from there it's crushed, cleaned, and screened and moved all the way into a customer truck. There's no other mobile equipment that interacts with it. There's no manual process. It's all run by an operator in the control room. Now, to do this, we need a lot of equipment similar to what Bill was talking about. So, we have conveyor motion sensors. We have chute plug detectors. We have programming interlocks that protect upstream and downstream equipment if there's an issue. We even have intelligent crushers. These crushers adjust the feeders to allow just the right size rock at maximum efficiency. Since inception, our team at Bridgeport has done a fantastic job of keeping the integrity of what we installed at that plant in place. We've also added a number of improvements and this discipline and this integrity has allowed us to operate at peak efficiency without interruption.
Yeah, you mentioned efficiencies a couple of times, Kirk, and I know that's important to you and your team because you talk to me about that a lot and you talk to your team about a lot. I mean elaborate if you will for a group of people who don't live in a quarry every day. What do those efficiency gains look like pragmatically?
Absolutely. Well, when I think about this, I typically think of it in three different areas. Think about it on the production side. What we're doing with maintenance and how we're making our customers more efficient. So, if we start with the production side at North Bridgeport, the plant we installed can produce the same tonnage in 44% less hours. That's because of the equipment size, the equipment choices we made, but also the automation that I already referenced. Recently, we've also been adding more technology at North Bridgeport. A good example of this is an AI system that has electronic eyes or cameras that look down on the primary feeder feed. It's looking for large rock or rock that's shaped just right that it might plug the throat of the crusher. Now, when a plug like this happens, it's a pretty significant event. It can be 50, 100, 200 tons of material that backs up. So, as you can imagine, that takes a long time to dig out, and it's a difficult process. Well, the system we've installed has eliminated 80% of those plugs since we put it in. It does this by shutting down the feeder, alerting the operator, and that way we can address it long before there's a bigger impact. We've also begun working more on the maintenance side relative to efficiencies. So today, our mechanics all have handhelds. That's where they get their PMs. That's where they get all of the equipment that they need to know what they have to take out into the field. This makes them more efficient day-to-day, thereby making the plant more reliable. We began to enter into technology that helps us with machine health. We have literally hundreds if not thousands of data feeds that come into the control room. Things like temperature, pressure, vibration. We now have an AI system that can look at all of these and look for minute changes in concert with others to help us identify if there's going to be a problem with a machine before it happens. That way we can take it down, address it quickly, cheaply, and before there's any damage. So that's a bit what we're doing on the production side. A little bit about maintenance, but my favorite is what we're doing for customers. I mentioned that we had an automated customer loadout system. How this works is we have material and overhead bins. Customers come in, position their truck, they select the material they want, they're loaded, ticketed, and out the gate. This has led to a tremendous improvement in efficiencies and cycle time. It's about 70% quicker than it previously was. So, a customer is getting loaded today in 10 minutes. Previously, that was 30 to 40 minutes. That puts us in the leading position in North Texas in terms of how we provide product to our customers. But it's not just that it's efficient, it's also cheaper because we're not using loaders. We don't have to maintain them. And it's a little bit safer, too, because you no longer have the loader and the truck interaction. So, that's a combination that we can always get behind. And when we combine all of these efficiencies, the best way I can underscore the success at North Bridgeport is to tell you that our gross profit per ton today is equivalent to what our selling price was just three and a half years ago when we started the plant. And that's not even the best thing. The best thing is we're learning a lot. We're setting up a lot of best practices that we can take to other facilities across the division and across the enterprise.
Well, that is a lot of goodness and I'll take the pricing too. But, you know, let's do this. Let's talk with Chris Samorski a little bit about the newly rebranded Specialties Division as well because part of what his team have done forever is they have really managed costs with extraordinary skill in the last several years. They've taken that cost management and put real commercial expertise to it. So in a time where broadly chemical markets aren't booming, his business is seeing record years. So Chris, talk a little bit about how your team manages costs and how you're using technology to do that.
Sure. Happy to, Ward. So aligning our cost structure with fluctuating demand has been a real challenge for the Specialties Division over the past few years. We've had to intentionally build both cost efficiency and cost flexibility into our operating system. And those efforts are really now starting to bear fruit. So in the first half of 2025, we had roughly a million dollars less in total cost of sales than in the same period in 2024, more than fully offsetting the impact of inflation. So to achieve that type of cost performance, we prioritize and focus our efforts on our most significant production cost drivers, including labor, energy, and maintenance spending. So on the labor side of things, we right-sized our workforce for current market demand and we insourced contract services work that was previously done by third parties at a cost premium. To drive energy efficiency, we invested in low-cost and clean wind energy technology at our Woodville, Ohio lime facility. We also leveraged heat exchanger technology at our Manistique, Michigan chemicals facility to capture and reuse process heat. And given our end markets have been on the south side of ragingly okay, Ward, we were able to consolidate production onto fewer assets and therefore idle some energy-intensive equipment. Finally on the maintenance side of things we invested in a reliability program. These operations are 24/7, 365 operations. So downtime is expensive. That technology that we invested in which includes sensors to monitor both equipment vibrations and temperatures has allowed us to dramatically reduce our unplanned equipment downtime and thereby improve our maintenance cost efficiency. So Ward, these are just a few ways that we in Specialties are investing in technology and leveraging process improvement to drive a more lean and flexible cost structure.
You know, part of what Chris said, and it's really important to tease it out, his businesses in Specialties are 24/7 businesses. The quarries really aren't. So, he's talking about what he's doing to flex costs in a 24/7 business. Kirk, I want to come back to you on cost flexing because if you're looking at your aggregates business, it's not a 24/7 business. Talk to the group a little bit about how you flex costs in the Southwest in that big aggregate division.
Absolutely, Ward. It really is a pleasure to get a chance to talk about this because the team has done a tremendous job over the last few years on managing costs. We've done this starting with robust processes. So we have a number of robust management processes ranges from demand planning all the way to continuous improvement exercises that we deploy on an as needed basis. When you combine those processes with technology like I already spoke about and with talented people, it leads to great outcomes. Now, if I was sitting in the audience today, I would say, 'Okay, that sounds interesting on the process side, but talk to me about something tangible. Talk to me about some of the real cost buckets.' So, we're going to talk about cost buckets. Labor is one of the largest in my division. It's about 20% of our variable cost structure. And as you already mentioned, Ward, aggregates is not a 24/7 operation. That means we have a lot of flexibility in terms of how we schedule production to meet demand. Now, in a scenario like a short-term downturn, we're able to pull back on overtime quite easily. We can substitute contract labor for Martin Marietta employees. We can even let natural attrition run its course to help us manage headcount. In a more prolonged downturn, we can idle adjacent facilities. We can change how we distribute to our leading aggregate terminal network. We have a number of levers that we can pull and we have been pulling to help us address labor costs and to help those match very well with what we're selling. But beyond labor, we have other large cost buckets like repairs, parts, services. We manage these again with a series of very robust processes. As I mentioned, we do demand planning. We do cost planning. We don't look at these annually, monthly, weekly. Sometimes we're looking at these daily to ensure that we maneuver with weather or that we make all the appropriate changes in what we're spending again to match with what we're producing. We make smart capital choices. We bring the newest equipment into the best places where it can be the most productive. And the equipment that's higher in hours, we're putting those into terminals or places where it doesn't have to work quite as hard. This leads to a very linear cost profile on repairs. And we have excellent mining engineers that do a great job with mine planning. That helps us with things like stripping costs, explosive costs, even the distance to the primary crusher. We're thinking about these over very long periods of time to ensure that there are no surprises and again we get that linear cost profile. So our variable cost per ton now in the division over the last four years, it's only gone up about 10%. And as you know that's when we've had generational inflation and if you look at our ASP over the same period it's grown more than 40%. So, a pretty dramatic achievement in results there. But again, one of the best things about all of this is we have a tremendous amount of available flexible capacity. There's a tremendous amount of operating leverage available to us. Since we're running only one or two shifts at all of our facilities, as demand picks up, that cost structure is only going to get better and better.
So if you think about the dialogue we've had so far, we've talked about putting technology in the hands of salespeople. We're talking about what we're doing relative to technology in these big plants in which we operate across the country. Let's talk about what we're seeing in rolling stock as well because if you think about really what we have throughout our facilities, loaders, haul trucks, etc. Bill, if you can talk to us a little bit about what you're seeing with technology and our mobile fleet and the benefits that we're seeing from that.
Sure. Absolutely. So, I hit on the plant piece before and a really critical part to our operations is the mobile equipment. And we've got over 5,500 pieces of rolling stock that provide production and product production support for our aggregate facilities. About 4,000 of those are what we call yellow iron. That's our core fleet. So, it's the key stuff that loads, hauls, delivers, and ends up providing the material into customer trucks so we can actually get it off of our property. So, you got 4,000 of those. How do you manage all of that? And so years ago, we developed an internal system called CORE, Comprehensive Operations Resource Environment. And CORE at the time was a good idea because it tracked a lot of the things that are important about when things go down, how much production, fuel consumption, availability, utilization of our mobile fleet. But with that came a lot of manual entry and a lot of countless hours doing what we can automate now. So, last year we went to a
Connected platform called Samsara and across that 55,500 piece of equipment fleet, we've deployed that. So, what is that? It's a connected device that provides GPS location. It watches metrics, various things that are going on with that piece of mobile equipment. It can provide safety alerts, potential alerts with maintenance, and so on. Field managers can use that to make decisions. But really the most important thing is it takes away those countless hours of data input.
There's some other things we're seeing from a benefit perspective. First, are all these assets gainfully employed? If we've got assets that aren't gainfully employed, we're looking at reports and dashboards that we can identify underutilized assets and can we move those and stretch our capital dollars and potentially just replace a really inefficient piece of machinery.
Secondly, across the platform, we've incorporated what we call geo fences. So, what is a geo fence? It's really an area that is set aside for GPS tracking. And historically, it's just based on a stationary object. Well, we've incorporated it on mobile equipment, so it moves. So, how is that important? Ward talked about it a little while ago, but when you've got a loader that's feeding a number of trucks in a fleet delivering rock to a primary crushing station, that's time. That's productivity. So if you've got excess equipment, you've got underutilized equipment, we can determine that through this geo fence technology. At one of our locations where we've tested this, we actually saw an increase of 15% in daily productivity and a run rate improvement of about 10%. That's at one site. That was a frustrated manager going, 'How can this tool help me?' So that's one of the benefits.
It also, and I mentioned the alerts, but we can look at fuel use and fuel consumption and idle time and what does that mean? So if we've got assets that are sitting there idle, they're not being utilized to the fullest ability that they are. So we can make decisions to do that. I think one of the things that we're just scratching the surface with and I'll close it out is we've hit on safety and I think safety is of utmost importance to what we do and we've got new miners and new people that we're training constantly. Well, all of these devices or most of these devices have a forward-facing camera. So what does that do? You can use it as a training opportunity. I can go on my phone right now and every one of the assets that are in the central division, I can see what's going on with that asset and if there's something concerning to myself or one of our field managers, a plant manager, they can go back and review that and it's a training opportunity for those miners. So those are the things I think from an efficiency and a safety perspective that we are just really scratching the surface. It's going to go a long way in terms of improving our cost as we move toward 2030.
Yeah. A lot of what Bill just spoke about is what technology is doing if he's watching it from outside or if you got a driver in that mobile equipment. Some of the questions I get from you is where's the industry and where's the company relative to autonomy? You know, what happens if there's not a driver in that facility? Oliver, you want to turn some attention to that?
Happy to. We're engaging actively on that front and I'll start this one with a personal example because recently I took a ride in a 70-ton rigid frame haul truck that drove itself and so that gave me a very tangible sense the technology is here. And more to your question from a strategic standpoint, this represents an important innovation in our industry and it's starting to move faster. It's already been deployed in larger scale mining environments for quite some time. And what I mean by larger scale are massive metal mines, often several times the size of aggregates operations. But we're starting to see meaningful progress in quarry-sized applications as well. As we think about autonomy, we know it offers several advantages. It offers advantages across safety, across productivity, across operating hours, and certainly across other areas, too. And that's why we're in a series of conversations with OEMs. We're also in a series of conversations with technology providers in this space. In one case right now, we're actively working with one of the OEMs to help them test their prototype autonomous truck at some of our facilities. We have similar opportunities under evaluation as well. So Ward, if I come back to your question, are we staying close to autonomy as it comes into our industry? I would say yes, we are. Are we engaging directly in many cases to understand its deployment? Yes, we're absolutely doing that, too. And are we starting to look at the potential returns and its fit with our business over time? There's no doubt we're doing that, too.
You know, one of the values that we talked about today, I think it's important is stewardship. And I think an area in which we've been particularly good and will continue to be leading is in ESG and we're very sensitive to emissions. We've talked about autonomy. We've talked about technology. Let's talk about electrification, Oliver. I mean, how's that evolving in today's world?
Of course, battery electric for our industry is on a longer timeline. Again, here there is some early adoption in that larger scale mining environment, but it's not yet economical and it's not yet near term in our industry. All that said though, the potential is real. Recently, I was at a live side-by-side demonstration and I watched an electric haul truck notably outperform a traditional diesel truck fully loaded going up a haul road. So my takeaway from that was pretty clear. Beyond the sustainability benefits that you would expect like fuel and emissions reductions, we're going to see real performance gains here too. But the good news on the sustainability front too is as this technology comes about, it's going to make an already relatively clean aggregates business even cleaner from an emission standpoint. Now while this technology advances and while the OEMs continue to develop it, we are doing a few things in the meantime. One is we've been increasing the number of hybrid loaders in our fleets. These hybrid loaders have electric drive systems rather than traditional transmissions, and we've been seeing strong performance with notably lower fuel usage from these units. We've also joined a multi-year educational program led by one of the OEMs. And this educational program is exclusively focused on the energy transition relative to mobile equipment. So what that means is we have a front row seat to capabilities like battery electric as they continue to evolve. It's just a longer arc for R&D here. It's a longer arc for commercialization. But Ward, I would tell you we have the right relationships. We're in the right conversations and this is one that we'll stay close to as it matures.
That's helpful. You know what I want to do one more thing before we open it up for your questions. Then as I've said, Michael's going to talk a lot about M&A, but obviously we've just done some M&A and we've done it in specialties and we've also rebranded it. So Chris, you want to talk a little bit about the why on both of those? Why rebrand and what does the M&A look like?
Sure, I'd be happy to. So let's start with the strategic rationale behind the rebranding from Magnesia Specialties to Specialties. For those of you who aren't familiar with the business, there's a lot more to the specialties division than just magnesia. It all starts with a large limestone quarry in Woodville, Ohio at roughly 4 million tons per annum. It's one of the 10 largest quarries in the enterprise. From there, two distinct businesses emerge. The first is dolomitic lime business. Again, that's the largest dolomitic lime operation in North America, and it's a fantastic business in its own right with aggregates-like characteristics, high barriers to entry in an attractive marketplace. Then we have the namesake magnesia business. It starts at the same place in Woodville, Ohio with lime. That lime is transported up to our chemicals facility in Manistique, Michigan, where it's chemically reacted with naturally occurring brine and further processed to produce over 60 unique products that are sold into a variety of industries and to customers all over the world. So as you can see, independent of the Premier transaction, Specialties is a more accurate and holistic representation of the legacy Magnesia Specialties business.
Now let's shift gears to the Premier acquisition. Premier operationally looks very much like our heritage specialties business. It again starts with a large aggregate mining operation in Gabbs, Nevada. The material from that operation is processed into derivative magnesia products in Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana. Commercially, that acquisition broadens our marketplace. It broadens our product offering. It really solidifies us as the leading producer of magnesia-based products in the United States. We're early in the integration process, but I do anticipate significant operational and commercial synergies to come from that transaction. And then finally, as we look forward in terms of potential growth opportunities, I see them both organically and inorganically. On the organic side, we've got a robust R&D pipeline where we're looking at other applications for our lime and other products within lime. An example is milled dolomitic lime for use in the glass industry. On the magnesia chemical side, similarly, we're looking at different products and applications including derivative products that could be used in pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and in food additives. To take advantage of long-term health trends and increasing demands for magnesium. So, just to wrap it up, Ward, we're always going to be an aggregates-led company. The specialties division will continue to be a high margin and durable differentiator for the enterprise. And I'm very excited about the potential growth prospects moving forward.
Chris, thanks for that. And in the category of I just can't help it. I mean, we have to go back for a second to Texas and we have to go back for a moment to TXI and that transaction that I think changed everything. And Kirk, I want you to talk a little bit about what does Texas look like post Quikrete, but importantly, how different does North Texas look today than it looked 15 years ago?
Absolutely Ward. Well, let's take the first question first, which is how do things change after the Quikrete transaction? Well, it is important to note that there will be no change to our leading aggregates position across the state of Texas and certainly not in North Texas. And so, if we shift to the TXI transaction, it really was truly transformative for Martin Marietta. It provided an enhanced geographic scope and it really provided a platform for growth in Texas and importantly in Dallas Fort Worth which is one of the leading construction markets in the US. It also gave us opportunities for synergies operationally as well as commercially. So the synergies on the operation side, things we've already talked about, Bridgeport, the combination of those two facilities fully enabled by the TXI transaction, you mentioned Mill Creek earlier, same story, fully enabled by the TXI transaction and both of those facilities today support our leading aggregates rail network in the state. So that's some of the things that happened on the operating side in terms of synergies but the biggest impacts were on the commercial side where we really changed the philosophical approach to sales and that's when we moved to value over volume. That led to tremendous power in terms of pricing. That has been 10 years of double-digit price increases since we made that change. So when you combine the operational synergies, what we're getting on the commercial side, and a lot of cost discipline for the aggregates business, it's been a 13-fold increase in EBITDA since the transaction. So that's the impact in Texas. But as you were talking about before, it's also had a very important impact to the enterprise as a whole and what we can do in terms of how we've shaped the asset base. So it's essentially a swap of our cement and ready-mix businesses for 35 million tons of pure-play aggregates businesses. So that's the Albert Frei transaction, the Bluewater Industries transaction, and of course the Quikrete transaction. But again, 35 million tons. Think about the power of that when you think about the 13-fold increase in EBITDA that we had with the TXI transaction. So, this really exemplifies the type of value-generating execution that our aggregates-led strategy can lead us to throughout SOAR 2030 and well beyond.
Kirk, thank you. You all have been very patient in allowing me to ask some questions that I thought you would want to hear answers to. But I know from personal experience you're not shy with your own questions. So here's what we're going to do. We have some people going around the room now who have microphones. Keep in mind we've got an audience that's also attending this virtually. So if you had a question, please raise your hand. We'll get you a microphone because we want to hear you and we want to make sure our guests can hear as well. And Trey Groom's right here in the front.
Thank you Ward. Thank you everyone. This is pretty exciting stuff especially on the tech side of things. Where would you say we are if you look across the enterprise in the rollout of tech here both on the pricing side of things and operationally? And I know Michael's going to get into M&A later on but with that, what could this bring to the table as far as additional synergies as you look at M&A going forward just rolling out this and leveraging the tech side of it?
It's a great point Trey. I'd say several things relative to technology and what we're doing operationally. If you got 40% of your plants that have degrees of good automation in them, you know that's a nice head start on that. I think what'll happen is our ability to continue to roll it out will nicely accelerate. I think what's going to happen relative to technology commercially is going to roll really quickly and I think we're in a very attractive place with that. We have worked with very constructive partners to get us to the place that we are very, very quickly. What's going to be fascinating is to watch how machine learning works in that. So it's good now. It's going to be better in a year. It's going to be better in 18 months. It's going to be better in 24 months. Now to your question, is that going to put us in a position that I think we can do even better in synergy realization on M&A? I think the answer is unquestionably that it will. But the other piece of it that I'm excited about, we've talked about the fact that sometimes the toughest part about M&A integration is getting the other team to understand how you think about items commercially and operationally. I think these tools take that learning curve and it takes that down considerably. The other thing that I think it does is it allows us to move people more fluidly across Martin Marietta, particularly those on the commercial side of the business. I mean, if you're in the crushing business, crushing granite in North Carolina looks a lot like crushing granite someplace else or crushing limestone in Texas looks a lot like crushing limestone in Ohio. But the markets can be decidedly different. And I think this technology is going to put us in a place that we're going to have the prospect of having much more fluidity with very talented salespeople going forward.
There we've got a question right there.
Ward, at the last investor day, you outlined the opportunity to close the pricing gap between, you know, maybe lower priced regions and the company average or higher priced regions. And I'm just wondering how that has kind of gone relative to your expectations. I mean you bought Lehi, you bought Bluewater and I think slide 44 you have the kind of pricing curve. How steep was that 5 years ago? You know how has it gone relative to expectations?
Well, I mean I think if you look at the pricing curve from 2015 to 2020, it's one number. I think if you look over the last five, it's clearly been different. And I think a lot of that's a very different philosophy that we brought to it. Now, to answer your question very directly, I think it's worked about the way that we thought it would. In fact, I'm not going to steal Michael's thunder because he's going to take you through a few market snapshots and give you some very granular views of exactly what you're asking. What's it look like in some markets where we've gone in and taken a different philosophy and has it worked the way that we thought it would? I think the answer is yes. But I think it's got a lot of legs ahead of it.
We've got a question right back here. Oh, I'm sorry. We got questions here, too. We got questions everywhere.
Hello, Katherine. Hi. Thanks for taking my question today. A two-part question. One's going to be easier and one maybe not as easy, but the first one is on specialty. You had talked about some services that are brought in-house versus outsourced. So, maybe give a few examples of those. So, that's the easy question. The harder question is in going through the slides or I didn't see anything about you and kind of where you see yourself five years from now.
I'll let Chris talk first.
I'll take the easy one. So I think the question was around the contract services work that we've insourced versus outsourced previously. Things like maintenance, electrician work, in some cases stripping, those types of either trade services or periodic expenses that we have to contract out. Given the cost environment, given the lower inflation, given the fact that these are 24/7, 365 environments and we have to maintain a workforce, we were able to bring that work in and do it at a lower cost than we were paying people to do it previously. And with respect to me, I mean, look, the fact is I've got the best job in the country and I know it. Now, part of what we spoke about in the early slides is how focused the board is on succession and we've seen succession at division president level, and otherwise and CFO go seamlessly. You know, the fact is I'm 62. I intend to work for a while. I've always said I sit on a stool literally with four legs. I have to want to do it. The board has to want me to do it. I can't be blocking somebody else who's ready and my health has to permit it. You know, right now I'm in good health. I enjoy doing what I'm doing. I think the board seems to be relatively happy with what I'm doing. I think the challenge is going to be at some point we have such a gifted group of managers. I need to make sure that I'm really mindful of that. So, the short answer is if you're good with it, you're stuck with me for a while yet. But I think what's important if you think about Martin Marietta, we've had two CEOs in 31 years. And what that allows us to do is plan. We get to plan well and we get to execute against the plan. And I think that has allowed us to outperform. And my aim is at whatever time succession is appropriate, it needs to go as smoothly for the next guy as it did for this guy.
Ward back here to your left. Back here to my left.
