Manuel J. Perez De La Mesa
Analyst · Robert W
Acquisitions, again, are driven by, and from the outset for us, were primarily motivated by the opportunity to enter a market that we were not in. This industry, like other industries -- in fact that's about this industry, each market is unique. The customers, whether they're a retail customer, a builder customer, customer that focuses on remodeling, and customer that focuses on commercial or customer that really focuses on maintenance, or is another that really focuses on repair, these individual types of customers have their own unique needs. And whether that -- and the markets therefore, whether it be a Nashville versus a Knoxville, are radically different markets. And again, you go to Atlanta, you go Orlando, you go to Dallas, these are all different markets. So understanding that, we specifically look for acquisitions as an alternative to the opening of new locations over the course of time to build on our network. And by the way, if you look at history, about 1/3 of our locations, where new or de novo openings in our part, and about 60%, 65% came via acquisitions, although the lion's share of our earnings and earnings growth have come internally once we've acquired or opened a location. So therefore, the motivation was really to enter a market as an alternative to opening our own location. And to the extent that we already have a presence in a market, the value of that acquisition is less. So if you look at the new part of our business, the swimming pool part of our business, and you look at North America, which when include Canada represents upwards of 65%, 70% of the world market. We are pretty well established in the lion's share of the markets since we started that process almost 20 years ago. In the case of Europe, we have a little bit ways to go. So if we're going to do acquisitions in the Blue side of the business, it's going to be more like the international than domestic. On the Green side of our business, same logic, same approach, we obviously have a lot more to go as we have a much smaller share there of the business and we don't have a presence in many significant markets. So acquisitions will be heavily weighted towards international in the Green part of our business. But when you look at the dollars, given our size and scale, the acquisition cost may represent $10 million to $20 million a year on average. And that really is a small percentage of our total cash flow generated per year. So that's when I talk about that being a modest use of cash over the course of time.