Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (SSD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thanks. We'll go ahead and get started. I'll try not to knock the microphone off in the floor this time. I'm Trey Grooms. I think I've met most of you guys and gals, but I cover building materials, building products for Stephens. Joining us today is Simpson Manufacturing's President and CEO, Mike Olosky and CFO, Matt Dunn. First off, I want to thank you guys for joining us, coming up here to Nashville. We appreciate having you. I got a long history with Simpson. It goes back a long, long time. But most recently, initiated coverage on Simpson last week. So happy to have you guys here. So thank you.

Thanks, Trey. We appreciate it.

And so Simpson, and I know we're going to go into some more details here shortly. I think Mike is going to go into a few details. But Simpson is the leading manufacturer of structural connectors as well as they manufacture truss plates and fastening systems and concrete construction products, anchors and things of that nature. So I think maybe to start, Mike, do you want to maybe give people kind of an overview of kind of what you're seeing in the world today and what Simpson is about?

Thank you, Trey. Appreciate the opportunity to be here. So let me just level set everybody with a 30,000-foot overview of Simpson. So we are a leading supplier of structural solutions into the building and construction industry. Typically, our products are less than 1% of the bill of materials, but critical to the structural integrity of the building. We go to market with 3 main product lines. The first one is the connector franchise that Trey talked about. That's what our founder started that business. These are engineered stamped steel components that connect wood, 3,000-plus SKUs. If you go into a house, you're going to see our stamp steel connecting all types of wood connections in the residential and commercial space. Second main product line is fastening systems. So this is roughly a $500 million business for us. These are differentiated construction load products. We have about 180 global patents on them. We have delivering systems that help our customers use these products. We have specification and design tools that help them figure out which product to use in the right application. The third main product line are materials that enable concrete connections. So think large anchor bolts. So these would attach the frames to concrete -- to the concrete foundation. It would also be adhesives that are used to do that. And then we also have some of our connector product lines that are used to connect cold-formed steel and commercial buildings, okay? Three main product lines, connectors, fasteners and anchors. We sell that into 5 market segments, the residential space. So we do believe roughly 50% of the business is linked to U.S. housing starts. So that is our biggest market in the North American business. Component manufacturing. So these are truss plates that are sold to people that make truss systems, floors and wall panels. So both of those linked to U.S. housing starts. Then we have a national retail business. So think big box retailers, all things, DIY, repair and renovation. We have a commercial business, and then we have an OEM business. In this OEM business, there are things that are made in the factory. So think tiny homes, sheds, and then other things that need wood-to-wood connections like creating systems. And I think the most unique part about Simpson really is our business model. So we go to the industry with the broadest and deepest line of structural solutions, making us a one-stop shop for these products. We go to building code officials and we help them write codes that ensure houses will withstand hurricanes, seismic events, heavy snow loads. We provide continuing education and training to building code officials. And then we take that broad and deep product line to engineers and we talk to them about how do you meet those building codes and then also how do you design that big house with these big openings, big 3, 4 car garages, things that need a lot of structural connections in it. Between the building codes and the work that we do with engineers and architects that results in a lot of specifications for our products. So if you look at prints, blueprints, our products are typically called out all over the place. That creates the demand for our products. And then we go to the opposite side, we go to the big builders. And we work with approximately 250 builders where they tell the supply chain, they only want to use Simpson Connectors. And so that pulls through the demand we've created with the building codes and with the specifications through the system. And then we go to the pro dealers, lumber yards, contractor, distributors, everybody in the middle and say we're creating demand for our products. We're pulling that demand through the channel with our builder agreements. You can make a lot of money off of our products. And by the way, we're going to deliver great service, place an order today, ship it that afternoon, you're going to get it the next morning. So you don't have to carry a lot of those 10,000 SKUs to be able to provide all these unique structural connections. Then over the top of that, we layer a bunch of digital solutions that make it easy to figure out which product to specify, how to engineer it in, how many you need, how to do custom fabricated parts, all of which again creates a very, very sticky business model. And that's enabled us to drive good above-market growth for the last 10 years. Trey, over to you.

Yes. That was super helpful. Again, kind of just stepping back, when you think about the business, connectors, you guys have been there a long time. But could you talk about kind of what your market share is in maybe from a high level in your different product categories as well as where you see the most opportunity for advancements there?

Sure. If you've seen our investor deck, there's kind of a market size slide in there. It's got 3 big circles on it. The leftmost circle is structural connectors. So in there, there's sort of 3 submarkets. There's the traditional connector market, which is the category that our founder created and we've been in for 70 years. It's roughly $1.5 billion market, and we're probably 75%, 80% share of that market. Another big market in that space is truss plates, so part of the wood connectors. That's again, roughly $1.5 billion market. We're less than a 10% share in that space. It's a significant growth opportunity for us over the next we believe, 5 to 7 years. We've been making progress there. We've been growing share, but certainly one of the big growth opportunities for us. Fasteners is the middle circle you see in that investor deck, roughly a $5 billion market. We play in the kind of high-end premium, load-rated structurally important fastener segment of the market. It's roughly a $500 million business for us. We've been growing disproportionately there. I think some of the changes we made in the company over the last couple of years of how we go to market have significantly enabled us to increase our penetration on fasteners to grow that business disproportionately and as well on anchors, a smaller business, but a couple of competitors there. We have a solid share, but have been growing that again disproportionately as we've kind of been able to leverage the strength of the franchise of the connector business over the last couple of years in order to grow those other businesses significantly.

And you mentioned digital. Can you go into a little bit more detail about what you're doing there on the digital front? And I know there's been -- you worked on some software rollouts that you guys see coming up, I think more specifically on the truss side. If you could talk about some of those initiatives, please?

Yes. Let me talk big picture digital and then Matt, you do the deep dive on the truss space. So again, 10,000 products. We're trying to be easy to do business with by helping our customers figure out which product to use for what particular application. And remember, we're in an industry that has traditionally not been a big user of digital tools. The industry also has some productivity challenges, leading to some affordability challenges. And we think digital solutions is one way to address that. So we've got 50-plus different web apps that are very, very specialized. So just kind of looking at the fastener version. We have a tool that helps engineers identify the correct fastener for the application, figure out what the load ratings are, figuring out how those load ratings can then help them with their engineering work, eventually, we believe, leading to specifications. We've got a connector selector tool. Out of those 3,000 connectors, how do you figure out what the right product is for the varied application. We do a lot of custom fabricated connector applications. So we've got tools that can help our customers actually design that fabricated part online, visualize it to make sure that it's the part that they need and then kick that off and then we'll make those products typically and turn them around within 4 to 8 hours. We've got tools that will help our lumber yard customers and some of our builders create a more accurate bill of materials. So typically, the way it works in a medium-sized -- lumber yards in general, a builder will come in with a 2D print and ask the lumber yard to quote it. That typically is a pretty manual, pretty labor-intensive process. We've got digital tools that will help create a faster, more accurate bill of materials, and we're working on AI tools to do that even faster. We've got tools that work with builders to help them manage the different options in their house in CAD systems that enable them to be able to be more efficient in how they design and ultimately build those houses. So a broad suite of these digital tools that we do believe drive productivity. And the component manufacturing is a very specific case of digital tools. Matt, why don't you talk about that?

I would just add to the tools Mike just described. I would say a lot of those are intended to be -- make our business model more sticky, but we are getting some revenue and commercializing some of those. We believe over the longer term, there's more opportunity to monetize some of those software solutions in and of themselves. And then you look at component manufacturing kind of as a unique situation itself. That market is pretty unique. It has a pretty unique business model that was created by the share leader in that space. Essentially, they provide software to truss manufacturers for free in exchange, those truss manufacturers buy truss plates at a premium. That's sort of the business model that's existed. There's really 3 main components to software in that space. There's the design tools. So that's what's doing the engineering work to design the truss that's going to hold the load that's required as well as wall panels and floor trusses, so kind of those 3 components. The second major software component there is really a project management type software. So it enables the lumber yards to kind of manage which truss projects are they going to make when and where, if they have multiple sites, how do they manage that. And then the last piece is really the software that runs their operations. So it's running the saws that are cutting the wood. It's running the tables that are building the final product from a truss standpoint. We've been developing that software over the last couple of years in a significantly increased way. We've been investing quite a bit. We've been growing share in the space. I think our software today works very well for kind of the small and medium-sized truss manufacturers. To go take some share against some of the larger players, our software needs to be a little bit better, and we've been developing that, and we expect that we'll have kind of all 3 of those main tools that I talked about roughly about a year from now, we will be in market and ready to go on those. One of them we launched this summer, CS Producer, CS Sense for cornerstone, which is our name of our software, but CS Producer was launched this summer. It's a cloud-based software for kind of running the truss plant from the equipment standpoint. And we've gotten a lot of good feedback on that at the major industry show, which is the BCMC show, the Building Component Manufacturers Conference, was a couple of months ago. Lots of good feedback, and that's unlocked some doors for us to continue to pick up some share in the meantime as we kind of work on the final pieces of the software that should be ready here in the next 12 months.

So you've got a pretty small part of the market there in truss plates. With this rollout, I'm sure you guys have some internal, but is there any way for us to think about what the opportunity is from a market share standpoint over the long run? Any targets that we could...

Sure. We certainly have internal targets. We haven't talked about those publicly specifically, but $1.5 billion market, less than a 10% share, roughly every point of share is a $15 million opportunity. From that standpoint, it's not going to be like you flip a switch and you immediately go from x share to 3x share. Each one of these conversions needs to go well with that lumber yard and that component manufacturer. It's sort of like an ERP change for them. And so we have teams that are focused on making sure that, that conversion and that integration goes well for the customer. And some of the customers that we've had for a number of years, I think, have given us input on that and given us strong feedback for the most part, has gone very well. And so we're very focused on that. So I think what you're going to see over time is a pretty significant share opportunity, but it's not going to be a light switch type flip initially, but it doesn't take a whole lot of share gain to make meaningful impact on company revenue.

Yes. And Trey, the last couple of years, that has been our fastest-growing market segment.

Yes. Great. I'll pause to see if there's any questions from the audience. No? Okay. Well, I've got a few more. So what -- or can you maybe walk us through Simpson's -- the way you guys approach pricing? I know historically, you've passed through increases in costs very successfully, done a good job at that. And over the last few years or during, I guess, even further back than that, 4, 5 years, you guys kept a lot of that upside from pricing. And how do you think about that going forward? I know there's a few more that you've announced in the market here even more recently in response to tariffs and whatnot. So anything you could give us on kind of how you're thinking about pricing, both in the near term and your longer-term kind of philosophy around it?

Yes. Good question. So remember, good highly differentiated products add a lot of value that are less than 1% of the bill of material, critical to the structural integrity of the building. And then we provide a ton of service, a lot of innovation around that, a lot of service around that, a lot of training programs. So for that less than 1% of the spend, we believe our customers are getting significant value for that. And so we believe that needs to result in a modest premium from a pricing perspective. If you look historically at Simpson, historically, we've really only priced on major steel moves. If you go back to the COVID time, we finished 2020 at $1.25 billion in revenue. Steel prices went crazy. We passed on $500 million, $500 million on a $1.25 billion base, so a significant amount of pricing. We kept $450 million of that. Part of the reason why we believe we kept $450 million is we invested a lot of that pricing money back into the business to provide even better service to our customers, even more innovative products, and additional things to provide service to them. So we have proven that we're able to do pricing at a modest premium. The tariff story and the pricing lately, Matt, why don't you dive into that a little bit?

Yes. Mike referenced the $500 million. That was across a number of price increases in '21 and '22. And then the last time we actually changed price was giving back that $50 million in late 2022 to kind of get us down to the $450 million net. And we hadn't essentially touched price since late 2022 in either direction. Steel largely been in a pretty tight range during that time frame, but everything else, labor, freight, utilities, costs going up. And so we chose to take a price increase earlier this year on our entire -- essentially the majority of our entire U.S. product line. We were planning that. And then obviously, the tariff situation created a little bit of added dynamic in terms of imported items. So we import all the anchor bolts that we sell from a factory that we own in China. So that's a pretty significant impact from Section 232 steel derivatives. And on the fastener side, we import about 2/3 of the fasteners that we sell today from Taiwan. We make the other 1/3 at a facility not too far from here in Gallatin, Tennessee. So we had to adjust some pricing on imported items as part of that price increase. And so we announced a price increase in April. It was effective early June. It was essentially a weighted average 8% across the U.S. product line, essentially a 5% price increase on most items and then imported items had higher price increases, some up to 15% or so depending on where they came from. We had announced that. It went into effect June 2. Shortly after that, there were additional tariffs announced on imported items. So we followed up with a second price increase. We announced mid-August, effective mid-October. So we typically have 60 days notice, only on imported items. So that's fasteners and anchors for us. And so the situation there is we're taking roughly big numbers, about $100 million of pricing on an annualized basis with these increases. The tariff costs are about $100 million of cost increase. So we're not quite covering the margin impact certainly. On a dollar basis, we're pretty close. I think we're optimistic, hopefully, someday that the tariff situation will get better, but it's proven stickier than maybe we thought it was a few months ago. Transparently, I don't think there's a lot of building products companies getting price increases through now. They're not all subject to tariffs, so that makes it unique for us a little bit. But feeling pretty good about how that's been passed through. I think the -- if you look longer term, the lesson here is it's pretty difficult to take pricing in an environment when housing starts are down and affordability is a big challenge for the builders. So we're definitely talking to our customers and the builders that we work with, and we understand those affordability challenges. So we're working on ways to do value engineering and focus on total installed costs, help them be efficient in other ways to make sure that we can help them deliver on the affordability targets they have, while we maintain our gross margins. I think looking forward, when we get an environment, when the market is growing a little bit, I think that gives us opportunity to continue to deliver on great service and maintain our gross margins, but it certainly has been challenging to get pricing through in this environment.

Very good. Nick, do you have a question?

You all obviously cover a pretty broad swath of the building market. I'm curious where you sort of see the world today across commercial or residential or industrial and sort of where you think the trend line for those are headed into '26. I mean we've heard a lot of commentary this morning that flattish is kind of the new normal. But given that you all kind of see the world from a number of different angles, I was just curious to see where maybe you're a little bit more optimistic or a little bit more pessimistic.

Flattish is a good answer.

But I think if you look at residential as an example, I would kind of put it in a couple of different buckets. So if you took -- if you're a large builder, I mean, you've probably already been subsidizing interest rates, so a movement in interest rates is probably not going to drive a whole lot of incremental more demand. If you're a small or medium-sized builder, you haven't been subsidizing interest rates, I think if the interest rates come down a little bit, I think that opens up opportunities for you, maybe we see some more starts from there. And then I think on multifamily, those projects are typically pretty sensitive to interest rate. I mean they're typically borrowing money if they're starting a multifamily project. So I think what we're seeing that gives us some optimism there is we actually get pretty good visibility on quoting of those jobs ahead of time from an engineering standpoint. I think maybe with the exception of the Southeast, we're seeing pretty good quote activity that's happening out there, which gives us confidence that there's a lot of multifamily projects that are kind of ready to go when the interest rates start to make the numbers pencil. That's probably the fastest way to solve a shortage of houses is multifamily and maybe the most economical. So I think optimistic a little more on multifamily. Obviously, it's off a pretty big low last year. It's growing this year. I think single-family, there's a lot of things that need to happen. There's no silver bullet, but affordability is a challenge. Interest rates are a challenge. Regulations are in terms of developing new lots and things are quite expensive. So maybe a little less optimistic in the near term on that. Commercial has actually been okay, bouncing back a little bit, at least in the parts that we participate in, which is typically stick frame, commercial construction. So a mixed bag, but I think flattish is kind of what we're -- we haven't given formal guidance for '26 yet, but that's kind of what we're looking at in aggregate.

So when -- if you look at the 3 main markets, we use Zonda and then we cross-reference that with everybody. We cross-reference that with our customers. Flattish, probably the right way to say it. We use the Dodge Index when it comes to all things commercial, low single digits up in 2026 versus 2025 is how we're -- what we're hearing from them and how we're thinking about next year. Repair and renovation, I spend a lot of time with the big box retailers. They actually don't talk about market growth. They just talk about the size of the prize. We use Cleveland Research to give us an estimate there. That's also low single digits for next year. I think on the optimistic side, the people that have been in this industry a long time say the more that this continues on, the harder it's going to bounce back. Collectively, we all believe that there's still a significant shortage of housing in North America, also in our European business as well. Collectively, we all believe the houses are old and without the turnover, that's slowing down repair and renovation. So collectively, we are all pretty optimistic about the midterm. We just don't know exactly when we switch from this short-term situation in the midterm. So in the -- from a Simpson perspective, control what you can control, provide great service and support to our customers, try to drive above-market growth at a good profitability level is what we're locked and loaded on.

One follow-up. I'm curious, one of the things we're seeing is the buzz around AI and the build-out of data center. Have you all seen or is that impacting business in any way or too soon to tell?

We had one in our last earnings release, and I was a little hesitant to put it in there because for us, a small percentage, probably $50,000, $60,000 in anchor bolt opportunities in a data center. But over a lot of data centers, it kind of adds up for us, but that's not going to be a major growth driver for us going forward.

Dan?

Regulations that impact the business, I mean, are they mostly state or federal or local -- it seems like it's a big factor in your products.

Short answer, yes. It's all of the above. There's national codes, there's state, local codes, city codes in certain areas. So all of those are something to consider. We do have teams that are engaged with all of them trying to, again, teach them how to build safer, stronger structures. And I think probably the best story around the impact of codes is the recent hurricanes that have gone through Florida. I talk a lot with the bigger builders and the bigger builders say one issue with affordability is insurance. And they specifically call out how newer neighborhoods when hit with a hurricane have come through with relatively little damage, landscaping type stuff when they're right next to an older neighborhood that has had significant structural damage, but the insurance companies don't really differentiate between new or older homes. So there are clearly some examples of building codes making a big impact. How that drives our business, honestly, it's a slow road. We are not, when we look out the next 5 or 6 years, counting on a big change in building codes to drive a step change in revenue for us.

Yes. As I look at building codes, I don't think you see changes year-to-year. But if you look decade-to-decade, you often see the impact of increased building codes, like Mike referenced in Florida, you can see that going back over time. So we're actively educating code officials and helping them to create more use cases for our product that will help make structure safer and stronger, but it's not necessarily something that you see year-to-year big changes in.

This administration has been talking about rollback regulations to unlock building. You don't see that effect in your business though...

I'm not going to comment on that, to be totally honest. I mean I spent a lot of time with the builders and the dealers and how the administration is handling it. I let those guys deal with that. And so I wouldn't anticipate that being a headwind for us.

And then [indiscernible].

Yes. So we are definitely filing patents. When we see high-volume products running out of patents, we're tweaking and modifying them to provide some additional features and functionality that can be patented to make sure that we're protecting them. But the patent story really is one part of it. It kind of goes back to that business model that I talked about is, if you wanted to come in and try to go after Simpson, you'd have to get the engineers to specify stuff that's not readily available in the market, and they are personally signing and sealing those documentation that whatever competitive product that they have is going to meet the code and keep that structure safe and sound. At the same time, then you need to get product into the supply chain. But the supply chain doesn't want to carry it if all the big builders are saying we're going to use Simpson and all of the specifications are coming out with Simpson on it. If you're a middle sized to larger builder and you say you want to switch, that drives a lot of increased cost because now all of the larger pro dealers and lumber yards are going to have to dual stock products. So you -- it's not only just going after the IP and having a duplicate product that we think probably wouldn't conform to our level, but you need to get the engineers, the lumber yards and the builders all in some geography at the same time to have a significant impacting us from a competitive situation.

That's really on connectors. And if you think about IP on fasteners, we have over 180 patents on our fasteners, right? So it's roughly $0.5 billion business for us. These are things that make our fasteners start faster, see better. We have patents around the installation tools that we have. So we have like collated fasteners that come on a strip that you can drive with a drill, standing up, you can shoot top plate screws, standing without being on a ladder, things like that. So we focus on the total installed cost for the end consumer, the end customer and kind of tell that value story around our fasteners. But we do have quite a few patents, and we are focused on continuing to innovate there and launch new products.

Has there been [indiscernible] in your connectors business in recent years?

No.

[indiscernible].

It really is a combination of all of the above. I contend that if some -- if our competitor came in a wholesale stuff, the -- our customers are going to spend more money in gas trying to find that product than they are saving a small amount of money on the particular connectors for the house. It's really the fact that you got specifications, you've got lumber yards carrying our stuff and you got builders saying they're only going to use our products, again, the connector product line and then the fasteners and anchors kind of ride along with it. All of that happening at the same time is what creates that moat. And again, very broad deep product line. We are a one-stop shop for something that is less than 1% of the bill of material. And it's just -- never say never, but it creates a pretty strong competitive advantage.

You guys had talked about on the cost side of things, switching gears, identifying some cost outs in this kind of continued kind of soft environment that we're in. One, can you talk about some of the levers you're pulling there on the cost-out side of things? And then also as we kind of look into this flattish environment for next year, we're just making that assumption, you guys have committed to that target of a 20% EBIT margin or operating income margin as a goal. Just some of the things, the puts and takes around achieving that goal in that type of environment as well as the cost out.

Yes. Let me start with the 20%, and then Matt can dive into the next level of detail. So as we discussed, we believe we've got a fantastic business model. We have an absolutely amazing brand. We have a very strong leadership position in the products that we have. I mean we're doing a lot of things right, and we're taking great care of our customers and great care of our teams. That needs to translate into good profitability. And we think 20% is a good profitability level that enables us to return money to shareholders and at the same time, to invest back in the business to drive that above-market growth. We were not there last year. Our guide this year is 19% to 20%. We need to make sure that we get back to 20%. Ideally, a little bit of growth helps us, but we are locked and loaded on making sure that we hit a 20% operating income.

Yes. In order to do that, and as you said, Trey, I mean, just sitting here today, assume a flat market next year. I think we have a pretty strong track record of doing a little bit better than the market from a volume standpoint. There definitely is a little bit of carryover from the pricing impact, but also the tariff cost impact continues to ramp up as that wasn't fully in the base for 2025, and so when you look at ability and confidence to deliver that 20% EBIT margin next year, we decided we needed to make some cost choices. So we've committed to take out at least $30 million of cost on an annualized basis in 2026. I think that gives us the confidence that we can get to that 20% EBIT margin even if we get the flattish market. Again, we'll give formal guidance in our Q4 release in early February. But in terms of where do those costs come from, I think it was -- there's a couple of businesses, maybe innovation that we had invested in a number of years ago that just weren't delivering on what we expected and what we wanted. And so we've kind of chosen to deprioritize those a little bit, and that obviously has resource implications. We haven't dialed back anything related to our efforts in component manufacturing, where we think that's a huge size of prize here in the near term and the software development and products that go with that. We also did a little bit of kind of spans and layers type work. I mean that's not a normal exercise for Simpson. We really haven't done reductions in force in any significant way, maybe other than once during the global financial crisis in the company history. So we have a strong culture. We have a lot of really long-tenured folks. And so it's tough choices, but I just felt like we needed to get in a little bit more leaner position to be able to make sure we could deliver on that EBIT margin next year if we're not going to get any tailwinds from the market.

Very good. I think you also had mentioned that CapEx might normalize a little bit next year. And also with the goal of kind of long term anyway, distributing somewhere in the neighborhood of 35%, so call it, 1/3 of the free cash flow back to shareholders. How should we think about cash flow priorities with the backdrop of CapEx kind of normalizing and how you balance the buyback versus other uses of capital?

Sure. I mean the company generates strong cash flows. I think we've been in a pretty heavy CapEx cycle in the last couple of years with 2 major facility expansions that are going to wrap up this year. One is a new greenfield site to make fasteners in Gallatin, Tennessee, replacing our existing facility that we sold in Q3. That was part of the gain in the actuals in Q3. And then we expanded our facility in Columbus, Ohio, which is our kind of main hub that serves the Midwest and the Northeast part of the country, which has actually been growing from a housing start standpoint in the last couple of years. All that's led to CapEx in the last 3 years roughly in the $150 million, $160 million range per year. We're going to go back, and we'll issue formal guidance here in a few months, but we're going to go back to the $75 million, $80 million range of CapEx from a year in, year out standpoint, excluding those footprint expansions. So that obviously gives us -- it increases free cash flow and then also gives us more opportunity to return to shareholders. We announced a step-up in our buyback to close out 2025 in our Q3 release, as well as we kind of issued some numbers for our 2026 expected stock buyback of $150 million. I think that's the largest number in a single year the company has given guidance on before. So from a capital allocation standpoint, CapEx is going to normalize a bit. We still have some debt from the ETANCO acquisition, but we're in a pretty good spot from an interest rate standpoint. So chunking it down, but no need to pay it down immediately. I think we want to remain opportunistic for M&A, although, frankly, there's not a lot of sizable opportunities out there that would make sense from a margin profile, product standpoint. We're evaluating things all the time, but we have a pretty strict filter on what would make sense going forward that would be of any significance. And that leaves a pretty good amount of cash to continue to invest in the organic growth opportunities, so funding product innovation and the things that we need to do there, but as well leaves plenty of opportunity for return to shareholders. And so definitely going to continue to be focused on returning at least 35% of our free cash flow to shareholders.

Yes. From an M&A perspective, again, we believe we've got a pretty good runway in front of us in terms of opportunities in our core markets and our core products. We believe we can continue to drive above-market growth by ramping up our innovation machine and continuing to gain share in those various market segments.

Go ahead, Dan.

Your tariff impacted businesses, are you guys considering shifting your production back to the U.S. or...

Yes. So we have 2 main tariff impacted business. One is anchor bolts where we own a factory in China. And even with the tariffs, it's still cheaper to make anchor bolts in China. They're significantly more expensive than they were, and that's why we had to pass on some pricing. I think if there were more tariffs, then we might consider looking at that, but it's hard to consider putting down CapEx, not knowing what the long-term future of tariffs looks like. On fasteners, I think we're going to make some tweaks, and we've already been planning to shift the mix of domestic versus international sourced a little bit. I think we said publicly before, we envision with this new facility opening it being more like 50-50 U.S. sourced and Taiwan sourced. The main reasons for that were lead times on some particular fasteners that we need to be a little bit more agile to be able to quote some jobs, particularly in the mass timber construction space as well as there is a segment of the market that wants made in the U.S.A. fasteners, and that is a growing segment. I mean the reality is if you just -- if a fastener used to cost, I'm going to make a number up as an example, $2 to make in the U.S. and $0.75 to make it or to buy it from Taiwan. It's probably $1.75 to get it from Taiwan and $2 still to make it in the U.S. So it's still slightly cheaper to make a fastener-- or to acquire a fastener from Taiwan, but it's a lot closer than it was. And so, just watching that very closely to see where the tariff situation plays out. Hopefully, they go away or get negotiated down. If they go higher, then we may look at potentially in-sourcing that.

When I talk with our major steel suppliers, you still have such a heavy amount of subsidies going into the steel market that their view is the market price in Asia for steel-related components and raw materials is less than the cost to produce in the U.S. So from our view, the high-volume fasteners and anchors, unless, again, as Matt said, significant change from a tariff standpoint, we -- the high-volume products will probably always make sense to do over there.

Any last minute questions or anything that we didn't touch on that you guys want to highlight before we wrap up?

No, I think that the piece that we continue to talk a little bit about, and we touched on this a little bit are the digital solutions that I mentioned. If you look at the residential space, again, we're in an industry that has not had a lot of productivity and has an affordability issue. There aren't a lot of major players providing digital solutions that today. The fact that we have all that technical knowledge and how to connect wood and all the engineering details around that gives us some interesting insight that enables us to do tools like create the bill of materials. We think there's some engineering capabilities we can bring around there, some services that we can potentially add. So not only are those helping us augment the business model today, as we discussed, but we do think that has a potential to -- potentially be a growth driver for us in the mid- to long term going forward.

Very good. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Matt. I'm sorry, maybe...

Let me -- one quick one. On the European business, I mean, [indiscernible] that deal and there's a [indiscernible] in concrete products into the U.S. but maybe not so much the other way around. How do you see that business? How is Europe is -- I mean you don't -- there's a lot of [indiscernible] in Europe. So I don't know what the opportunity is. Just maybe talk about that.

Yes. So if you look at Europe as a whole, we do think it's a modestly attractive market. The last 3, 4 years of market growth have been a different story. When we pulled the trigger on ETANCO, which is predominantly a commercial business based in France, there were a couple of strategies behind that. One is just more critical mass to help us drive profitability of the overall European business, give us more tools for the toolbox to help us have a better position with our customers. We like the fact that they had their direct sales team. We thought that would give us some additional options. And then the majority of that business in France, and France is a quite profitable business for us. What we obviously didn't see is 2 months after signing the deal, Russia invades Ukraine and then the market goes from growing 2% to 3% a year to being down -- residential probably down high single digits, but the combined commercial residential business down 2 to 3 percentage points. So we had basically a 400 to 600 basis point swing from a market perspective that we had to deal with the last 3 years. So -- as a result of that, the focus has been on driving profitability, less on investing to drive all the outfits of synergies. We do believe we can get that business to 15% in the midterm. We will need a little bit of market growth, and the European business has been improving in the last couple of quarters. But it definitely is a unique market. There are some secular trends that we think will help us in the mid- to long term. The move from concrete construction to timber construction is helping us, albeit slow. Some of the facade systems that we got through ETANCO help with energy efficiency. That continues to develop. We think eventually that will move over here in the U.S. But in the meantime, we're focusing our European business at growing at or above market and getting us to that 15% operating income level.

[indiscernible].

We have it covered. I mean we've got 300-plus salespeople in the U.S. We've got, I want to say, 40-ish field engineers all over. We've got manufacturing and warehouse locations where we can cover approximately 95% of our ship to locations within 1 day, which is a key part of the service level. So we're feeling pretty good about the U.S. I think that when you use the U.S. -- when you look at the U.S. market, kind of going back to one of the original questions, we need more houses in Florida and California because we have a lot more content in seismic areas and a lot more content in hurricane areas. So we could use that industry to pick up. We do believe it will happen in Florida, and we do believe California kind of level out, but we're in a good position in the U.S.

All right. Well, thank you both so much, and thanks, everybody, for joining us. It's a wrap on this meeting. Thank you.