Sims Limited (SGM.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Everybody, it's 2:00 p.m. So let's get started. Welcome to SA Recycling's Gwinnett site. I'm glad you could all join us. What I'm going to do is just run quickly through the agenda because there is one kind of really important item. We do need to be back on the bus by 4:30 p.m. for those of us that are on the -- I think I'm like an 8:20 p.m. flight. If we're not on the bus by 4:30, we're going to be running it pretty close. So we've got a -- that gives us a good 2.5 hours, and I think we've got a really good trip organized for you. I'm really pleased to say joining me today, I've got Kalvin Adams, the Head of Business Development; and Mark Sweetman, the CFO for SA Recycling. So I'm not going to talk much. I'm just going to do kind of a bit of an introduction about our point of view on SA Recycling because I want to spend most of the time with these guys. And then we've obviously got a tour of the site organized as well. What we'd like to do is hold Q&A to the end of us speaking. We'll do some Q&A then get out on the site. And maybe if we've got some time at the end of that, we can do some more Q&A as well. But it is important that we get on that bus by 4:30 p.m. Health and safety point of view, the bathroom facilities are down the hall at the end, male and female on the left and right. There are no planned drills today. So if there is a siren sound, follow one of the SA Recycling people because it means it is a real. We're not doing any test today. We're not expecting anything to happen, but it is very much a working site, which you'll appreciate when you're out there. So we definitely need to keep together and follow our SA recycling hosts, and we will take you through a very safe trip of the site as a result of that. And it is a very, very impressive site. I want to start just talking really just a little bit about the governance of SA Recycling. And I think you'll get the whole theme through this presentation is SA Recycling and Sims, we do work very closely together. It is a joint venture that started in 2007, highly successful joint venture over that time. Let's look a quick look at the governance. So there's 8 Board members on SA Recycling, 4 Sims Board members and 4 Board members from the Adams family. It is a 50-50 joint venture and the Board reflects that, highly experienced Board from both sides of the ownership structure. And if you look at the management team here, you will see that there -- from an operating point of view, it is -- George Adams is the Chief Executive and the Adams family are very well represented throughout the business, highly experienced. I often talk to George about this. He is very lucky that from a generational point of view, he has got very, very strong succession and family members within the team. And I view that as a high strength of SA Recycling. So a very good strong governance structure. What I want to show here is this is a map of both the SA Recycling sites and the Sims sites. And this is a really crude rule of thumb, but it works pretty well. If you draw a line across the middle of California there, just from West Coast to East Coast, draw a line through the middle of California, and what you'll see is more or less a few exceptions that prove the rule, but more or less, SA recycling is below that line, so down in Southern California down through the Southern states, and you can see up through to where we are here in Georgia. And Sims is above that line. There are a few exceptions to that. But in your mind, I think broadly, the country is divided across the middle, SA Recycling below, Sims Limited above that line. And you can see we are -- there's a lot of coastal activity goes on in there as well, which gives us, both companies some good optionality around export and domestic. In terms of operations, the stats are there, both companies, very, very significant operations across North America. And the 2 companies combined, and we do work very closely together, we're the largest in North America by a significant amount. So very, very significant business between NAM and SA Recycling. I guess there's a few points I want to make here, and this is really about how do we work together. For a start, we physically work together. We've got a really good complementary footprint. We don't compete in each other's areas because that would just not be sensible. We know where our strengths are. Kalvin will take you through the SA Recycling strengths. But the footprint is extremely complementary. Different operating, I guess, different regions that we operate in. From a Sims point of view, NAM operates in very, very dense cities. So we've got big operations in New York and all around those areas in particular. SAR has a really, really strong metro presence. So different markets that we actually are in within the broad split of the U.S. that we have. But it certainly delivers scale and defensibility across the whole of the U.S. I guess from a strategic point of view, our strategies from a sales point of view are not terribly different. We both seek to capture the very strong growth that has happened domestically in the U.S. in EAFs and will continue, right through to 2030, we've got significant growth in EAF. So both parties capture that growth. SA Recycling has a stronger domestic presence than we do at Sims at the moment. Probably worthwhile pointing out from an export point of view, we sell our ferrous as one. So we sell all of SA Recycling on a broker basis on the export market. So it really gives us the ability, I think, to maximize the dollars that we get for our export and coordinate that very, very well. And we also sell a substantial amount of the nonferrous for SA Recycling from an export point of view, not all of it, certainly not all of it. And domestically, SA Recycling sells its own ferrous and domestically, we sell ours. But in a very -- I think it's a very strong partnership that we do. From an operational, safety, R&D point of view, engineering, all of those types of things, really strong connections between the 2 companies. I often hear Brian Maeck, our Head of Safety, is talking with Tamara, the Head of Safety. It is Tamara, the Head of Safety at -- I'm probably pronouncing that slightly, Tamara. Okay. I'll do the American pronunciation, Tamara at SA Recycling. So operations, engineering, all the things that you would expect us to coordinate on and share our learnings, very, very strong connections there. So I guess if I was to summarize that, we don't view SA Recycling as this completely separate business that we happen to have a 50% ownership of. It is absolutely core to our U.S. strategy, and that is the way we think about it constantly. Now for some reason, at the end of my presentation before I hand over, I've got a technical slide. I just want to bring everybody up to date on because there is some uncertainty and some confusion around the dividend framework from SA Recycling to Sims and also how do we consolidate the results into our business. So let's look at the dividend framework first. And it's actually relatively simple, but it gets a little bit complicated by tax. So SA Recycling doesn't pay tax at its level -- at the joint venture level. Each joint venture partner is responsible for paying the tax on its share of SA Recycling's profit. So how the dividends work is there's 2 chunks of dividends. Firstly, whichever one of the shareholders has the highest tax rate, that amount is distributed to everybody so that they can pay their tax. And on top of that, about -- no, on top of that, 20% of EBIT after that distribution is also paid to each of the joint venture parties. That results in a payout ratio of EBIT of around about 50% to 60%. It can fluctuate between those 2 amounts, but as a broad rule of thumb, think about 50% to 60% of the EBIT finds its way into cash flow dividends to both parties in the joint venture. Second thing I want to point out quickly is how do we consolidate SA Recycling into the Sims result. There -- I guess there are 2 things where you just can't take the EBIT that we're showing in Sims and say, well, that must be 50% share. It's not. You've got to take SA Recycling's EBIT in this case for 2025 was $259.5 million. You back out interest of $57.7 million to give us the net income of $201.7 million. And then we add back the amortization of goodwill. SA Recycling operates under U.S. GAAP. We operate under IFRS. So we don't amortize goodwill. We just record goodwill and we look for impairment, signs of impairment every year. SA Recycling is amortized it. So you take those 2 things, then you get IFRS adjusted SAR net income and we take 50% of that. So if you ever wonder why you just can't take 50% of what you're seeing in SA Recycling and that's our share, it's because of those 2 adjustments. I think that will hopefully clear that up. On that, I'm now going to hand over to Kalvin to run us through the SA Recycling.

Everyone, I'm Kalvin Adams, VP of Business Development for SA. I spearhead a lot of our acquisitions and a lot of the integration for new facilities into our current regions and other areas. This first slide, just a brief overview of kind of where we think additional EAF capacity is coming in the next 10 years. Another 10 million tons will be added over the next 10 years. And we think that we're very well positioned to take advantage of that. We -- as I'll show you guys later in the presentation, our footprint overlaps a lot of the EAF footprint and the additional capacity that's coming online here in the near term, and we will show you guys that. Our business overview, I know Stephen already mentioned some of it. And somewhere in this presentation, it says we have 24 shredders. This page says we have 22. We have 22 automobile shredders that are currently operating. We have 2 aluminum shredders as well throughout our system. So it's really 24 shredders. Both of them are correct. We've got 148 facilities right now. Within the next 30 days, this number will be updated to about 150. On average, we're adding another facility about 1 per month. About every other month, we're doing a new acquisition and adding to our current system. We operate 9 different copper choppers kind of strategically located all the way from Southern California down to Southern Florida. We've got 2 here in the Greater Atlanta market. And so they're relatively spread out. Our own feeder facilities are feeding a lot of that wire that's going to those copper choppers. And so, yes, that's kind of a brief overview of our footprint. I'll take a minute on the acquisitions. We -- as you go through them, each one kind of had a different strategic reasoning behind it, I suppose, and each one of them, for the most part, complemented our existing regions. A couple of these were the start of a new region. And then you'll see after that, we bolted on a couple more single facilities to help out that region. So just a couple of examples. Even before this 2019 is when we first entered the Northern Alabama market with Tennessee Valley Recycling shortly after that was Alter Trading down in Mobile, which kind of gave us a shredder in the southern part of Alabama and the northern part of Alabama. And then just a year later, we did Steel City, which is another shredder right in the middle. So these are all very complementary because we're dealing with a lot of the same customers. We can take advantage of freight lanes and different things like that. Just you'll notice like 2022 was a little bit of a slower year, but that's because of the PSC Metals acquisition that was in 2021. That came with basically 3 brand-new regions in Tennessee, in the Greater St. Louis area and then also the Ohio area. So it took a little more resources and time and human capital to digest that and really get them on board. So 2022 was possibly a little slower, but PSC was our largest acquisition to date. Southern Recycling was the other shredder in Nashville that complemented that Tennessee region. And I don't need to go through all of them. I don't know how many of these you guys have read about. But we did Oak Cliff there in 2024, which is our first entrance kind of into that Central Texas market. They came with 4 yards, 1 in San Angelo, 3 in the Greater Dallas area. And then a year later, we added Lake June Scrap Metals, which is in Balch Springs, just east of Dallas. And so we're constantly kind of approaching these new regions and most of our acquisitions like that, trying to complement our current footprint and find synergies and bolster kind of our market position in that certain area just to get our name out there and become a larger presence in those different areas. Sims Odessa, we swapped with a small facility we had down in Houston. It complemented us. It complemented Sims. And so it was just a natural thing for us to swap those facilities. Anyways, I won't go through all of them. I guess Circle K, that's another one important -- another important one to mention. They're also in the center of Alabama. That was a competing shredder where we had Mobile to the south, we had Phoenix City to the east of it, and then we had Birmingham and Decatur to the north. So we bought that facility. We shuttered the shredder because it made a lot more sense to move those tons to existing operations and that were a little closer to actual mills. And so each one of these has a different story, a different reason for why it kind of bolstered our existing operations. This page, this is an overlay of kind of all of our facilities and the different EAFs. We started out on the West Coast. Our first entrance into the Southeast was with this facility you guys are at right now, the Newell acquisition. And from there, once again, we started bolting on. I keep talking about that, but we've really built our company as kind of a hub-and-spoke system. And so traditionally, in the past, our shredders are the hub, our feeding facilities on the outside are going to be the spokes so that they can buy from the general public, handle local government contracts, different local small industrial accounts and that kind of thing, which in turn is going to feed into our shredders. We've really transformed some of that hub and spoke recently or not even recently, but over the past 8 years, really, where the shredders have become a bit of the spokes and our big nonferrous plants, which we'll get into in a little bit, are really the new hubs. And so Gwinnett right here, this is probably our largest hub that we have in the entire company. All of the darker red dots you see here in the Southeast are actually feeding this facility with our ASR. So first, every shredder is getting the easy-to-grab Zorbo with eddy currents. The concentrated ASR after that is coming here where we can further get all of the metal out of there. So this is really the new hub. But the important thing here as well is just our concentration around these EAFs. And we'll get into some of the transportation here on the next slide or two. But whether it's up in Decatur, down in Birmingham, down to Mobile, you've got Nucor, you've got SDI Mills, CMC mills, SSAB. Most of the major EAFs that are in the Southeast, we have a shredder in just about the same exact city. And so that's really allowed us to be good partners with those steel mills to keep them fed. We've got advantageous freight get into them. And so that's kind of what this shows. Talking about our kind of network footprint. So in the past, we were primarily an export company because we were located in California, very few steel mills. These days, we are selling about -- these are all ferrous volumes. So our sales volumes, we're roughly 3/4 going domestic these days. And just about our entire Southeast footprint is staying in the domestic market. We do a little bit of export out of places like Savannah or down in South Florida. But for the most part, our sales volume on the ferrous side is primarily domestic. In terms of intake, I know this is something that I've heard in past calls, we primarily buy unprepared scrap, and that has to do with our extensive feeder yard facilities because we're buying it from the source, we're buying it from the general public, the auto recurs, the salvage yards, that type of thing. It's primarily unprepared scrap. We do very little brokerage type scrap. We're not buying very much prepared. We like to be the processor. And so we're collecting it from the source at our feeder facilities, shipping it into our shredders. We're the ones processing it and then obviously selling the final products directly to the mill. We do have a pretty extensive dealer network that we're buying from directly into the shredders. But you can see the majority of our volume is actually non-dealer. And so these are going to be tons that I suppose are higher margin and easier to acquire with kind of our network of yards. We put a little note there that our shredder utilization is roughly 50% just -- and I'd say that this is a pretty common theme really across all shredders. Shredders are built to ware -- they're tough. They can run a lot per month. And most of our shredders are running 1 shift, 1.5 shift per day. And really, the point I wanted to make here was just we have a lot of room to grow organic volume, and we could handle it with our existing shredding footprint relatively easy. Shredder capacity has a lot to do with the market dynamics. As the price picks up, more scrap comes out of the woodwork and our shredders obviously are going to run at a little bit of a higher utilization rate. Let me see if I wanted to bring anything else up here. No, this mentions the hub-and-spoke model. I think I talked about that enough. So we'll move on. This is kind of showing some of our logistics strength, and we'll give you some kind of hard numbers on our assets on the next slide. But you can kind of see the river system, whether it's the Mississippi River where there's tons of EAF right there up towards like even Osceola, Arkansas, where the second Big River has recently come online. You've got the high-bar steel mill. We've got many barge loading facilities that can utilize that river system. We have many facilities on these Class I railroads so that we can get salable products on the UP, the BN, CSX, Norfolk Southern. And this just kind of shows an overview of those rail lines. And if you kind of juxtapose it over the layout of where our yards are, it's a very nice fit. These are some of the kind of harder numbers. So we have over 1,700 railcars, and we use them. So most of our yards are rail served, not most, but most of our large yards that are actually selling direct. We've got 52 with active rail access. And we can utilize those railcars with our footprint by -- like I'll give you an example, here in Gwinnett, we'll load our shredded steel in a railcar. We'll ship it over to Nucor Decatur. Our SA Decatur yard will then grab that car, fill it with ASR to send back to Gwinnett so that we minimize the empty moves that those railcars are having, which naturally is going to save us money in freight compared to maybe some other people, let's just say we didn't have those assets and you're shipping shred over there. They're all going to come back empty, you're going to get lower turns per month with an actual loaded railcar. And so with our footprint and these assets, we're able to utilize them a lot better. We've got over 750 trucks in our system. Most of our trucks are for inbound purposes, picking up from dealers, servicing industrial accounts, different things like that. Most of our facilities with barge loading capabilities came with the PSC acquisition. We've -- they're all throughout Tennessee. We can load barges down in Mobile, ship them up to Mississippi River. We just have a lot of flexibility depending. I mean, sometimes the river levels aren't great. And so those same facilities can load out railcars. Sometimes there's a shortage of railcars where you're getting bad service and the market is potentially going down, you can load barges and get them up the river. And so we've got a lot of flexibility with our different methods of transportation for getting our scrap to the market. We do have 3 bulk container loading from really 3 big bulk loading yards. We've got 2 in Southern California, and then we've got Savannah, Georgia as well. We don't traditionally load too many bulk ships out of Savannah, but it's an absolutely necessary tool for us to have to pull those levers when negotiating our domestic sales prices because we're one of the only ones that can actually pull a significant amount of tonnage out in a bulk cargo ship out of the Georgia area. And so if we didn't have that, the steel mills know that, and it takes away some of our levers for negotiating that domestic sales price. And so we don't utilize it all the time, but we need it, and we have it for when we do need it. And when the market does shift and export does get stronger and we need to use it, we easily can. And so just a couple of examples of some of the logistics strengths that we have between all methods of transportation. So here, talk a little bit about aluminum. And today, you guys are going to see it. We recently installed the first large-scale LIBS machine by STEINERT here in Gwinnett. So that we can further segregate our aluminum out of the Zorba so that we can get them directly to a mill. You figure traditionally Zorba has to go to another processor, much Zorba is traditionally exported or goes domestic to another processor, but it's not going directly to be melted. And so now with our investment into new technology, we're actually able to segregate much better than we ever have before. So we're actually creating 6,000 series aluminum that can go directly to be melted, 5,000 series that can go directly to be melted. And that's something that's really important to us. In the bottom right, you can see that our sales volume is roughly split down the middle between export and domestic. A lot of that export is going to be on the Zorba side. A lot of our other products are staying in the domestic market. And so we're hoping to increase our domestic presence with the investment in technology to further segregate those metals and get them ready to go directly to the consumer instead of to a processor. So that's kind of the important thing on here. And then scaling nonferrous retail growth, it's really the same thing. We just have a lot of scrap yards. We pride ourselves on customer service. Our local communities enjoy coming to our facilities. We pay fair prices. We treat them well. And that's how we're able to scale that nonferrous growth. People -- we have a really good name in the marketplace. And we just have so many collection facilities, whether they're in small towns or many of them in a larger town such as Atlanta. And that's really how we're able to kind of scale that nonferrous retail growth. Acquisition growth. I've talked a little bit about it, and I kind of talked through some of the different strategies we've employed to grow over the past however many years. But what we want to show here is just it is still a very, very fragmented market. There is so much opportunity for further consolidation. We have no intentions of putting a pause on our acquisitions. For the most part, once again, you guys are probably sick of me using the word, even though it's true. They're just bolt-on acquisitions. We already have a really good region. We have a good management team in place. We're just adding more spokes to feed that hub so that we can continue to become stronger in that local marketplace, and we can increase our volumes, which has a lot of synergies with additional tonnage going through the hub and becoming stronger as SA. That's the main thing here. I don't know. With that, I guess I'll hand it over to Mark. That's what I've got for you guys today. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Mark Sweetman, the CFO of SA Recycling. I've been with the company since its formation in 2007. And prior to that, I was with Sims. So I have, I guess, some visibility to the historical financial performance. The slides as they show, I love the number in Australian dollars at AUD 0.5 billion worth of average EBITDA over the last 5 years has just obviously been a really solid run rate for us. But really, if I look back over -- one of the things I feel is, if I look back over the entire 18 years, we've always had a way of making a profit. And sort of over the course of those 18 years, I think there's really only 1 year, 2012, where we lost money if I ignore the amortization write-off. And so I guess the key is we just -- we have a culture that's profit orientated. And I think the reason we've had a lot of this success and you see this kind of stability right now, really, there are kind of a few things to it. One is the business model, as I say, you got -- today, you've got 145-plus locations that are all 145 managers, let's say, that are focused on the profitability of that individual location. And so you got a very entrepreneurial culture within the business right down at the individual yard level. So Kalvin talked about the hub and spokes. It's not just at the hub, it's like at every spoke. And then with the huge number of acquisitions we've done, approximately 66, I think it is acquisitions life to date. We have diversified significantly from back in that 2008, '09, '10 time frame where we were a West Coast ferrous export business. And 18 years later, we're now -- as some of those previous slides indicated, we're -- revenue terms we're 50% nonferrous, 50% ferrous. The business is 50% on the East Coast, ballpark, 50% on the West Coast. So we've just -- we got a lot of diversity in it. And with that diversity, the nonferrous in particular, I feel, has really helped us gain a greater level of stability. I always view the retail nonferrous side of the business, in particular, has kind of been a mattress to our profitability. It really was very little of it in our business 18 years ago. And today, SA's, you know, what, either the #1, #2 nonferrous -- retail nonferrous player in the U.S. So in terms of the operating cash flow, we're generating AUD 353 million -- an average of AUD 353 million worth of operating cash flow. It's -- I know the question always comes up about how we're financing the acquisitions. And so we've had a really good run in the last number of years. And I would say I would estimate that sort of over the last couple of years, we're probably generating somewhere in the region of about USD 70 million to USD 80 million of free cash flow that's available for acquisitions on an annual basis. The margins. So we have a really consistent run on the trading margin. This nice perfect run of almost 30% over the course of the last 5 years. I almost feel like it's quite difficult to explain a trading margin. And I think when you get into the weeds of it, you -- it's all about your product mix and where those elements were. And I take the last 3 years as an example, we have this nice consistency of 31%, let's say, 30%, 31% for the last couple of years. But over the course of the last 3 years in each successive year, ferrous sort of stair stepped down. And so it's degraded. And hopefully, we're close to the bottom of that market at the moment, who knows. But on the flip side to that, over the course of the last 3 years, we have had the nonferrous side of the business kind of stair stepping up. And so one has offset the other. So that's one comment I'd make about it. And the other thing I look at when you look at that trading margin, I also feel that there's an element of it that's a reflection of kind of the business model that we have where as the sales prices are running up, we are sharing the element of that margin as we're running up with the suppliers. And as sales prices are running down, we're looking -- we necessarily are compressing our margins in order to kind of keep the volumes flowing. And so each month, each year for our team on a monthly basis, there's just always this strain of looking at that volume and margin mix and what it's going to take to keep it going. And maybe the line is a reflection of we, I guess, play the game relatively fairly with our suppliers. Maybe another reason for some element of its success is there is, as Kalvin pointed out, we are just predominantly buying a peddler type scrap and scrap that's sourced through our feeder yard networks. And certainly, we also buy from a lot of dealers, but the types of dealers we buy are not usually -- they're not giant regional players. There's small mom-and-pop dealers around our entire footprint. And so we just maybe have a greater lever to pull to move to work with our suppliers as the sales prices are going up and down. I do tend to focus probably more on the underlying EBIT per tonne. We obviously had that incredible year in 2022. Those years come along every now and again, not often enough. It was sort of 2009 with an incredible run, 2012, I think we got a great bump. So periodically, we'll get these bumps and have huge profitability levels. But just I think really, the last 3 years are probably a better reflection. Maybe '23, I suppose you could look at '24, '25, and say, ferrous has certainly been hit hard in the last couple of years. But as I say, there is the offset in nonferrous. So I feel like we're at a point where our over the course of the last year or 2 is, it just feels like something that we're probably capable of sustaining. And really, I don't know that I've got any more to say on that slide. So SA's CapEx strategy is relatively simple to explain. The goal is to buy as many scrap yards as possible in the shortest space of time as possible. And I don't know that there's really much more to say about it. That's my challenge because that's the CEO's goal. And so each year, we basically are -- we're always looking to replenish the depreciating CapEx. And so that's always going to be the baseline. Replenishment CapEx, you could use the depreciation number. Over and above that, each year throughout the business now, there are always different other projects that come up and other opportunities that arise internally that we're looking at to improve the business and bring new business. Maybe the biggest portion of that investment over the last probably 5 to 10 years, I'm going to say, has actually gone to our nonferrous processing and to downstream to innovations and R&D and a lot of work has been done over -- really over 10 to 15 years on improving our recovery processes and getting every last ounce out of the ASR. I do notice as we were pulling together these slides and on one of the prior slides, it was noted that our ferrous growth rate CAGR was 7% and our nonferrous is 10%. So that number actually applies to both the retail nonferrous side and for us, the Zorba side or the MRP side or whatever you want to call the byproduct side. And so to me, that basically sums up nicely that we have been successful with those investments because our recovery rates have just simply gone up. Some of that is just going to come from just the changing of the materials on the in-feed side where the in-feeds are becoming maybe just that little bit more nonferrous laden. But certainly, some of it and a significant portion of it, I think, has come from the technologies we've put in place and all the enhancements we've made to the downstreams. In terms of looking at acquisitions and deals we want to do, the target ROI for us is 15%. Do we always get there in every year? Not every deal is going to necessarily get there. There will be some that will be done for strategy. And I'm really just thinking of that because Kalvin commented on the Savannah acquisition and how so we bought the port facility in Savannah. We really don't ship that many cargoes out of there. And so the return on that investment is probably as much about how it impacts the rest of the Southeast business as it is about the individual business that we bought. So it can be difficult to return, but I think -- to explain. But I think as you look at our ultimate performance, we've certainly achieved that 15% ROI over time on all the deals that we've done as a consolidated. So the financing strategy, I think when we set out 2008, '09, '10, '11, '12, and the business was a lot smaller, and we were trying to grow and acquire companies, we had a very conservative approach to our financing strategy. We've virtually always used traditional bank debt. We've a U.S.-based syndicate revolver in place really for 15-plus years now. There are actually 2 revolvers in place today. We recently added a second smaller revolving line. It's a $150 million line to -- just to segregate our acquisition of the properties. We have a preference to acquire the properties that we operate on. And then we do have some tranches of term debt formally in our debt stack, there's about $140 million worth of term debt, which is basically made up of one -- mostly one term loan and then some small amount of $30 million, $40 million worth of equipment financing. So the -- we use our revolvers for the vast majority of our acquisitions because they tend to be smaller transactions. They tend to be in that $10 million, $20 million, even $30 million type range. A lot of them are smaller single locations. And so we're using the revolving facilities to do that. When we'll do a larger deal like the PSC one in 2022, at that point, we're sitting down with the banks and revisiting the structure, and we would usually put a term loan in place for deals like that. And we've used interest rate hedging also in some of those scenarios for larger deals. And I think we've always used the traditional bank debt because for the course of that 10 years from 2010 to 2020, and you had -- you're paying interest rates of 3.5% and 4%. If you go to any other forms of debt, you were always paying an extra couple of percent. And so it was exposing us to -- you could nearly say certainly 50% increase in the interest costs associated with that debt or more and just made it that a little bit more difficult to achieve those hurdle rates. So I think the strategy has worked well for us, and it's still the one that's in play. As we stand today, or at June 30, rather, these facilities expire -- the revolvers expire in 2029. There's $450 million worth of availability under these lines at the end of June. And while it seems like a large number, from our perspective, we are at the -- certainly the lower end of the ferrous markets. And if we're buying we have months where we might buy almost 0.5 million tonnes, you just imagine a situation where if the market like it did in 2022, and it's just when it comes, it comes really fast, and it will happen in 2-, 3-month time frame. The market will run up dramatically is what's happened in the past. And especially now with 70% of the ferrous business being domestic and you're shipping into the domestic steel mills that are taking 45 days and maybe paying 50, the working capital suck when that happens. And you could -- as Kalvin commented, the scrap really comes out of the woodwork. If the market runs up to $500, then in a very short period of time, we'll suddenly be buying rather than 500,000 tonnes a month, you're going to end up buying maybe 650,000 tonnes a month. So a lot of that excess capacity is there to -- just to always guarantee that we're ready to move if we need to. And obviously, as I said, we're running acquisitions through the revolver. So there is capacity there for -- to allow for acquisitions. We are comfortably meeting all of our bank covenants and say, I do feel like we have a very good relationship with the team of banks that are financing us. Bank of America have been leading our facility for pretty much our entire existence. The balance sheet, just -- we put the slide together this way really because when I look at our balance sheet and you want to talk to somebody about whether or not you think SA's balance sheet is resilient. I look at the $1.7 billion worth of assets that -- of total assets that we're showing. And the one thing that always sticks out at me is under U.S. GAAP, which I realize you guys are looking at IFRS a lot of the time. And so under U.S. GAAP, we are amortizing away our intangibles. And between that and the write-off that there was a stretch from 2012 to, let's say, '15, where the business was just terrific for 3 years in a row. And it got to the point where under U.S. GAAP, we just had to write off intangibles. Everybody else did around the same time. The ones you have been around for a while and recollect Sims and all the other players did the same thing. So -- but the end result, I personally thought it was crazy at the time, but there you go. The end result is if you looked at our balance sheet today, there's really -- the business as it existed is 2020, there are no intangibles on our balance sheet associated with that business at all. And that business is probably -- well, if we had $0.5 billion worth of EBITDA on an average basis for the last few years, that business is probably generating $400 million, let's say, worth of EBITDA, and there's not a single intangible on the balance sheet associated with it. So there's that aspect. And then as you guys would be aware of Sims situation of having a large value in off-balance sheet land, we're maybe not to the same extent, but we're in the same boat where we have substantial value off the balance sheet in our property portfolio. I'd conservatively estimate that there's $350 million worth of off-balance sheet land. So when I take those 2 scenarios and stack them on top of our total assets and then I look at our gearing ratio at 45%, I think we're in pretty good shape. And I think with that, it is time to flip it over to questions for these guys.

Couple of seen up as well. So unfortunately, you're going to have to wait for the mic for those people online who are going to listen to this later otherwise, they won't hear your questions. So raise your hand. You've got these 2 guys here. Any questions whatsoever?

Mark, [indiscernible] working capital?

So we're very aggressive in terms of moving our inventory slightly. Our yards are -- there's monthly scoreboards. Am I talking about, there's daily scoreboards going out to all of our yards. All of our general managers each morning get a company-wide list showing where they stack up in terms of inventory positions. We just really don't take positions almost never -- virtually, we almost never take positions on inventory. The goal is to move it quickly. The business model incentivize our managers to move inventory quickly. We run a P&L by location for our managers, and we don't apply an overhead calculation to their individual P&Ls. We just calculated that on a consolidated basis. So you can imagine if you're running one of our 145 yards and you're getting a bonus based off the EBIT of that location with no overhead, then if you don't move the inventory, you don't generate gross margin, you don't get a bonus that month. So -- our people are driven to move their inventories. And if that's not incentive enough, they have Kalvin and Tyler and constantly hammering on them and highlighting the people who show up in the red zone. So...

In a perfect world, a yard should get down to 10% standing inventory. So if you're buying 1,000 tons at the end of the month, you should have 100 tons on the ground. It's easier said than done most of the time. There's obviously other things that can throw a curve at that. But in a perfect world, we'll get down to 10% standing ferrous inventory. Nonferrous is probably closer to 40%, 45%.

Yes. Working capital, there's approximately $300 million worth of working capital.

We'll call it 45%. It's a harder one to hit.

Was it [Technical Difficulty] I'm going to change the subject.

I can answer that really quick. Why is nonferrous...

Sorry, why is it so much harder to manage nonferrous?

You sell a lot of mixed loads on nonferrous and you need to build up a 40,000 pound load. And so if I'm buying 30,000 pounds of 60, 63 extrusion every month, it's hard for me to hit that exact 40,000. So you're going to have some carryover without a complete load. A ferrous truckload is 20 tons, a railcar is 90 tons. It's a lot easier to ship that out. There's delivery appointments on nonferrous that could be far out. It's just a harder item to move with so many more consumers and a much wider array of a product mix.

So just a quick question on -- the way in which you're incentivizing each of the different yards. Can you give us a sense of what the, I guess, the operating KPIs or the financial KPIs that you're incentivizing the individuals at the yard level?

It's pretty straightforward. It's straight up EBIT. They get a percentage of the earnings before interest and tax of their individual location. Each manager -- every manager at every location that we have gets a percentage and not only every manager, but every employee shares in the profitability of that location. So there's a manager gets a percentage, which will vary by location. And then the employees will get a similar percentage that goes into a pool that's split up among the employees.

And is that calculated on an annual basis?

Monthly. And paid -- we pay those bonuses within 3 weeks at the end of the month, which is really key and important.

It's the same month.

Yes, they need to see it real time. They need to know this is what happened last month, and now I'm getting my bonus.

A small yard manager can make all the way up to 10% of their EBIT. A larger yard, maybe we will have a reduced rate of more like 2% of their EBIT. We kind of have a little bit of a sliding scale based on the size of their yard and how much business they're truly handling.

Kalvin, just on your M&A strategy, could you give us a bit of a sense of how you think about navigating integrated, their own position in terms of scrap sourcing, how much they're using or intent on using from the open market and then how much you would target to supply into some of those integrated? I'm thinking of new core steel dynamics and the like?

I guess I don't really know how to answer that. I mean, Mark kind of mentioned earlier that we don't really take any positions. We're going to sell what we think we're going to buy. So at the beginning of the month, we're going to come up with what our projected buy plan is based on that market, if we think the market is up $30 and maybe we think we're going to buy some additional tons, we're going to try to place all of those tons into the best home possible. You're typically going to start with your closer mills, and you're going to start placing tons into those various mills until we can try to get to a net neutral inventory level for the most part. I don't know if that really answers your question, though.

Perhaps not entirely. But if you're thinking about the contestable tonnage into one of those integrated players, what component they're going to do self-source versus come to you as a potential source of scrap and how you're sort of planning strategically to position the network in the context of how they may or may not move over time?

I think what you're saying like Nucor, DJJ...

Tough grades versus the shredder feed, maybe. So in other words, like the mills will buy directly. You mean they'll buy some of the cut grades and prepared grades directly versus the...

Or even go and source themselves, i.e., Steel Dynamics' Omnisource goes out and buys in the market. But how do you think about positioning yourselves vis-a-vis Omnisource in each of these markets that you're not tripping over each other and going after the right amount of contestability, you get what I'm saying.

Yes, I understand. Look, we have a lot of overlap with a lot of these people, and I can go through a couple of examples. I mean, in South Florida, we're right next to Trademark, which is Nucor owned, in St. Louis, we're only a mile away from their shredder. I'd like to think that there's enough scrap for all of us and the steel mills do need it. I feel that we have really good relationships with them. And so I would say that you're right, we do not want to overlap. I'm probably -- logistic with Nucor. Nucor is very concentrated in Northern Florida and Central Florida. They're in Ocala and Orlando, and we're not going to go build a shredder there because we would be disadvantaged. And so we're definitely thinking about that and where our footprint would overlap with theirs. But -- I mean I'd like to think that there's enough.

I think -- I'd also comment that the feeder yard network helps a lot there. So when you -- wherever you have a feeder yard, it's going to capture that local peddler scrap for a radius of 10, 15 miles, whatever. And so whether it's SA or DJJ, SDI, the others you mentioned, there's only so many feeder yards they have. So one of our strengths is gathering the scrap at source. And like you take -- like where we are in the state of Georgia here, there's like 19, 20 locations...

22 is what [Technical Difficulty]

So we just have -- we have a very significant footprint in the feeder yard network, gathering the scrap at source. And so all of those feeder yards you could almost consider them like dealers and themselves.

Most of our acquisitions are going to be the feeder yards because we want to buy the supply directly. And so I'd say...

Are you suggesting that you're perhaps better positioned than some of those larger players, say, an Omnisource as an example, in a feeder yard context?

We have more feeder yards, maybe than most of them, but it doesn't mean we're -- like it just would depend on the geography. And if they have -- where they have their own networks of feeder yards, they are also well positioned.

Just one for you, Mark. Just wanted to clarify, you mentioned performance over the last year or 2, you feel like probably capable of sustaining that sort of level. I just want to clarify, is that on a sort of per tonne basis? Or is that a trading percentage margin or total profit sort of level?

I would be talking more on a per tonne basis. I just -- I feel like if -- the one thing that could go against it, if the nonferrous market -- so what we have right now is we do have some support from the nonferrous side of the business. So certainly, like the black swan event is that we have both the nonferrous market and the ferrous market in the toilet at the same time. But relatively speaking, when you're looking at, where everything is per pound for me, so somebody else can do the metric ton conversion. But when we've got Zorba values at $0.85, and you got copper well over $4, it's bouncing all over the place, but it's sort of like $4.50, something in that range. When you got nonferrous metals, so that our -- the value of our byproduct is certainly significantly greater on the Zorba side. But then also even on the retail side, it just gives us an opportunity to eke out slightly larger margins on the retail nonferrous side. If you were to believe that copper was going to collapse and I'd be talking about like down to $3 or something and aluminum was going to collapse down to $0.50, okay, then all bets are off. But if you kind of feel like the environment we've had for the last couple of years is an okay market, because on the ferrous side, I think a lot of people would believe there is the potential for some upside on the ferrous side whenever it comes along, who knows, but that there's at least the potential. We don't -- I don't think we lose too much sleep about any major downside on the ferrous side, maybe it should be, but I don't. And so I think we're in a space right now where we're -- we feel like I think we could comfortably probably keep rolling at this pace.

Just a question over here on M&A. Interested to understand how you structure the deals just to make sure that the vendors don't kind of come back with a similar business shortly afterwards and you sort of undermine the share gains, I guess, from doing the deal in the first place?

Yes. I mean, typically, the way we structure them, they're pretty much all going to be just asset purchases. In terms of them not coming back, most of these businesses we're buying, these people are ready to retire. That's why they're coming to us in the first place. We have a long-term relationship with them. We know them. They -- in many cases, they want to stay on and help us. A lot of times, they just want to get rid of the headache of actually running their own business, and they want to focus on the fun part, which is buying scrap, processing scrap and selling scrap. And that's how we've had a lot of people come to us wanting us to take care of the headache of the back end of the business, whether that's HR, taxes, the back-end accounting. And all they want to do is focus on what originally gave them the passion for running a facility like that. And so we really don't worry about that. I can't think of a single -- I mean, we'll give non-competes for a period of a couple of years within x mile radius, but I can't think of a single time where somebody has come back in business to try to do it all over again per se in one of our direct markets from somebody that we've acquired.

Just wondering if the autonomy and the business performance is brought right down to the feeder yard level, what do you do when feeder yards are not performing? Have you gone through and shut down feeder yards? And how does that impact, obviously, those managers that are trying to perform? Or do you try and rectify feed yards and work out why they're not performing? And just wondering how do you manage your pool. You have a very large pool of feed yards, obviously, with very different profitabilities on a scale. What do you do with the tail to lift the tail or chop it off?

I think Kalvin has overseen a bunch of regions for us, probably better positioned.

Yes. We have definitely shut down a couple. I can only think of maybe like 2, and they were -- like Tennessee Valley recycling is a good one. That was kind of my first big region in 2017, I went and took over. It came with 7 yards. There was 1 small yard in Hartsville, which is very close to our other yards. And we gave it an honest go for 4 years. It just never performed and we decided we were better off. We didn't own the property. We gave up the lease and we moved the employees that we could to our larger facility in Decatur, and we let go of the manager. Those stories are few and far in between. That doesn't happen very often. For an underperforming feeder yard, I mean, honestly, because of the entrepreneurial spirit of SA and our profit system, at the end of the day, you have to hold the manager accountable. And many times, we will just hunt for the right manager to run that facility because we believe that, that's a market where we can make money. And sometimes you just have to change out that manager.

I think having so many yards also has given us a great advantage there, with 145 benchmark points, we can generally look at a location in a geography. And as long as we know the volumes that are running through that particular location, we have a very good feel for what should be possible at that location. And so it's -- and we provide a lot of that detail to our managers, and we allow them to benchmark themselves against other man. So it's never really a huge surprise to anyone.

It seems to me that the biggest strength of your model is the local relationships that those managers of those feed yards have with their local community. Is that fair to say?

I would definitely agree with that.

Mark, you talked about the -- how you interact and manage ferrous versus nonferrous and resi versus commercial. Could you just talk through that again, please? I'd just love to hear it again, if you don't mind, just in terms of how you -- how those different segments, how you manage those and what they mean to the business on a sustaining basis? I think you used the term a mattress for -- can you just go through that please?

It's -- I always view -- the retail -- so to me, we got 3 or 4 businesses. We have our -- we have the shredding business and then -- and the associated processing of the MRP or the ASR. And then we have the cut grades business within ferrous and then we have the retail nonferrous business. And so when I say the retail nonferrous business, I just mean like with the nonferrous, we're buying across the scale directly through all these feeder yards. So all of the feeder yards are buying copper brass and aluminum from the general public. That particular business tends to have, for us, far more stable margins.

Retail nonferrous?

Retail nonferrous. Never going to get rich off it. But also, I feel like I could count on one hand the number of months that we've lost money in that business over time. So if the value of copper shoots up to x dollars, that margin we make -- I mean, okay, maybe it broadens a little, but you end up giving away most of that on the way up. It's like those, but on the way down, because if you're -- if you got copper and it's worth $4.50 a pound, if it loses $1 in value and now it's worth $3.50 a pound for the peddler or the person out in the community that's collecting that scrap, it's still economically viable at $3.50. They're still doing well off it if they've collected it from wherever they found it, it's still worth their while. Whereas with ferrous, it can get to a point where when that value drops to a certain point, then a lot of ferrous just becomes not economically viable anymore. And it really -- it can slow up the movement. Like if -- where we are with ferrous today, if we lost $100 off the ferrous value today, we wouldn't be buying any ferrous scrap, just the volumes would be crushed. So to me, when I look at it, that the retail nonferrous side of our business, which wasn't significant at all 18 years ago, there was little or no retail nonferrous, and today, as I say, we're either #1 or #2 in the U.S. in terms of the volumes of retail nonferrous we're handling. And the margins on that business month in, month out are incredibly stable. And so it's a very reliable business for us. And so it's always there as a buffer. When things go wrong elsewhere, it's a buffer. And it has been a buffer. The ferrous markets have come down the last 3 years in a row, and so there has been some margin squeeze there. But we've been able to rely on the retail nonferrous and on the byproduct side -- the nonferrous and the byproduct side also offsetting that ferrous decline.

So stability there, is that in terms of EBIT per tonne? Or is that in terms of EBIT overall? And can you give us an indication of how material this mattress is for the business? Are we talking what percentage of earnings?

I don't want to get into the specific earnings of each segment. But the volumes I mean, we're -- well, we've -- these days, we're buying between 70 million and 80 million pounds a month. So it's a significant business for us.

I think we'll do a couple of more questions, and then we'll get out on to the site.

Yes. Just a quick one for me. So the growth over the past sort of 10 years has been pretty impressive. Just keen to hear what your thoughts are on the competitive response or what other big groups and competitors are doing in the market as well?

Doing similar things at a much slower pace. They prefer -- in my opinion, the other larger players would prefer to take down a large acquisition like when Nucor bought Grossman in St. Louis, one shredder. It's a big acquisition. They paid a lot of money for it, came with no feeder yards. They have not grown in St. Louis at all. They bought Garden Street down on the west side of Florida, same exact thing. No network, big acquisition, a lot of processing capacity, but they're going to go out to market and get those tons from other dealers, and they're just going to buy it from other companies. And that's really the response. I mean, they will grow, but I think that other companies have a harder time managing such a large footprint of small facilities. I mean I enjoy buying facilities that are under $1 million. You buy them for their real estate value. You've got 3 employees. I have a rule of 3s or 4s really, I prefer the 4s. If you have 4 employees, you can buy 400 tons and 40,000 pounds of nonferrous and you can make money. You're not going to make a lot of money. But now if you've got 50 of those facilities, you're going to start making some money. And that's -- I don't think that other companies enjoy that type of operation just because it becomes too much of a headache for them. So it's just a different strategy.

[Technical Difficulty] 4 employees.

Yes, 4 employees, you can buy 400 gross tons of ferrous and you should be able to buy 40,000 pounds of nonferrous and you should be able to make money in any market.

I know I'm going to guess the rule of 4 every time I go. Having said that, I'd also like to make the point, when you -- put up a very good slide. I think that this does feed into the rule of 4, which I've heard for the first time now, I'm going to bank that one. Just how disaggregated the market is. There is still -- I mean our view on SA Recycling, as I said, SA Recycling is not this thing that we sort of occasionally on. We deeply view it as integrated to our strategy. And if you look at the amount of potential growth there still is in this market for SA Recycling's very successful growth that it's done over the last few years, there's still miles to come. We're not at the end of the runway. There is a lot of consolidation of the market still to go. And I think when I look at SA Recycling, we learn a lot from SA Recycling. The way that they've gone about with these small acquisitions, building the relationship with the owners, typically, the demographic is grandparents, kids not maybe interested in the business, and they're ready to retire. As you talked about, that would be a very typical demographic. SA Recycling does very, very well at that because it just doesn't ride into town in a month. They've spent years developing those relationships. And when it's time to sell, it's quite an emotional decision for the seller. And I think SA Recycling positions itself very well to get those acquisitions. Let's do one more, if there's one more because I'm going to have to pay timekeeper, I do want to get out on site because it's interesting, and we do need to be on the bus at 4:30.

Sorry, one final question for me. What is your biggest threat to your business model and what keeps you up at night?

It's a tough one.

The biggest threat to the business model.

Maybe would keep you up at night at the moment.

Well, I mean, just in terms of profitability, kind of that black swan event that -- I mean, the last time there was just nothing we could do type situation was 2015 where China was just dumping a lot of steel in the market, and it just pushed ferrous prices down so low that we just -- we literally couldn't eke out of margin. So...

And the nonmarket factor, I would say, is human capital with the rate of our growth, getting enough all-stars that continue wanting to run small facilities, large facilities that have that hunter approach and they want to grow their business. I do get worried that you're going to start to run out of some of those people. I mean we've been incredibly lucky. Most of these people have come with the acquisitions. They were a supervisor. They've worked there 15 years. They know everything about the business. They know the local community. Now they're running the facility. They're under our profit sharing system. They're making double the money that they used to because they feel like they own 10% of the operation when they didn't used to. We've been so lucky at maintaining that. But that's what worries me is that you run out of those people where they age out and there's not enough young people that are going to want to step into those shoes. So I'd say that, that's my biggest fear.

Something unanticipated from the regulatory side of things, too, just you never know.

Okay. Thanks, everyone. Great session. We can -- I really stress we all need to keep together. This is a busy facility. It inherently has very strong safety culture, but that's within the company. So let's not break that safety culture, keep together. There's potentially one point where we might split into 2, I think -- who's bobbing on. We might split into 2 because there'll be -- we quite much get you to the top of the shredder so you can have an overlook, but that's not going to be for everyone. If you don't feel comfortable about doing that, there will be an alternative. So we've got -- I don't know if you know when you got in, there's safety gear all out in the front, harbors and helmets and safety glasses, let's keep those on all the time. We'll be -- we don't need to have safety shoe, steel caps because we will be keeping you on pathways where that's not necessary. And hope we'll be back here in an hour or so, maybe a couple of more questions from the site visit and then on the bus.