Dear Shareholders:
Fiscal 2025: A Year of Continued Focus on our Growth Strategy
During fiscal 2025 our teams executed well despite several dynamics pressuring housing and home improvement demand. Fiscal 2025 was also a year of progress on our growth strategy, as we invested in a number of areas across the business to position ourselves for continued success.
During fiscal 2025, total sales grew by $5.2 billion or 3.2 percent to $164.7 billion, compared to fiscal 2024. Fiscal 2025 comparable sales growth was 0.3 percent for the total Company and 0.5 percent in the U.S. Our fiscal 2025 net earnings were $14.2 billion, and adjusted (1) earnings per diluted share decreased 3.6 percent to $14.69.
Focused on our Growth Strategy
Over the last few years, we have successfully managed through a dynamic environment, including elevated interest rates, pressured housing affordability, and general economic uncertainty. Throughout this period our growth strategy has remained unchanged: drive our core and culture, deliver a frictionless interconnected experience, and win with the Pro. And everything we do is rooted in our enduring set of values and empowering culture. Our objectives to grow market share and deliver shareholder value also remain unchanged.
Drive our Core and Culture
Our stores remain the core of our business, and we will continue to invest in our associates and store experience to deliver the best customer experience in home improvement. Knowledgeable associates and on shelf availability are critical to the store experience, and we are empowering our associates to drive sales by enhancing training and product knowledge, optimizing processes, simplifying tasks, and leveraging technology to drive a better customer experience. Customers expect us to have a broad assortment of quality products and our best-in-class merchandising team partners with leading suppliers to deliver innovation, exclusivity, and everyday value.
Nothing speaks to the vitality of our business more than our commitment to open new stores. During our Investor and Analyst Conference in 2023, we announced plans to build 80 new stores over a five-year period. We are building these stores in geographic areas that have experienced significant population growth, or where we need to relieve pressure on existing high-volume stores. The performance in the 37 new stores we have built over the past three years is exceeding our expectations, which is why at our 2025 Investor and Analyst Conference we announced that following the completion of our approximately 80 new stores plan in 2027, we anticipate that we will continue to build 15 to 20 stores per year for the foreseeable future.
While our stores are the center of our ecosystem, it's our orange-blooded associates and culture that bring them to life every day. Our Culture has guided us as we revolutionized home improvement, and it will continue to guide us as our business evolves. Our Values Wheel is our North Star, and our Inverted Pyramid reminds us who matters most - our customers and our associates.
Deliver a Frictionless Interconnected Experience
We know our customers navigate between our physical and digital assets and it is our intent to deliver a frictionless interconnected customer experience regardless of how our customers choose to engage and shop with us. This year, a key focus area was speed of delivery. Through investments in inventory, technology, and our nearly 200 last-mile distribution assets, we achieved the fastest delivery speeds in our history. We accomplished this by using ship from best location, a proprietary algorithm that looks across all of our distribution assets, including our stores, to optimize speed, determining when, where and how to most effectively ship products to our customers. Despite our delivery volumes' rapid growth in 2025, over half of our deliveries on products we stock are now same day or next day.
In addition to the progress we have made around delivery, we have made similar strides with the customer experience across our digital assets by leveraging technology. These investments include everything from search, recommendations, compatibility, cart building, catalog data, sourcing logic, delivery route intelligence, to post-purchase support, and more. One of our investments, Magic Apron, is a suite of proprietary generative AI products that help our customers with their online shopping journey. Customers use Magic Apron for that same type of orange apron in-store assistance online, whether it is a product or project inquiry, customer feedback, or as a shopping assistant. As a result, Magic Apron has improved the customer experience meaningfully, which is translating into higher levels of conversion and sales.
These enhancements are contributing to the double-digit growth we have seen in our online business, supported by the highest conversion rates in company history, an increase in customer satisfaction, and incremental spend across channels with customers who are more frequently engaging with our enhanced capabilities. We will continue to invest to drive growth across the business, focusing on the site experience, delivery experience, and every aspect of the interconnected shopping experience.
Win the Pro
We have an enormous opportunity to grow our share of the Pro's wallet. Nearly all Pros shop at The Home Depot, and we are building differentiated capabilities to better serve them. Our stores have always been a destination for Pros and our value proposition has been simple - we have the brands, categories and quantities that Pros need, at everyday low prices, conveniently located in one store location. Our Pros' expectations have evolved over the years and we have continued to invest to enhance the store experience. We are focused on ensuring we have the brands our Pros want and in the quantities they need, while developing incremental capabilities to better serve them, like investing in a unified Pro team that helps drive engagement. The beauty of these investments is that they enhance the shopping experience for all Pros, whether they shop our stores for all their project needs or for urgent and fill-in occasions.
We also have a significant growth opportunity ahead of us with the medium to large Pro that shops across categories and works on complex projects. At The Home Depot, we can simplify their experience by reducing complexity, including the number of suppliers they need to transact with, saving them time and money. While we are investing across our entire ecosystem of products and services, there are six capabilities these larger Pros expect that we have not typically offered in the past. These include a professional sales force, enhanced delivery capabilities, trade credit, preferred pricing programs, order management, and a best-in-class digital experience. Today we have many of these capabilities in some of our top Pro markets, which are all in different stages of maturity. And as our Pros utilize our ecosystem of capabilities, we see increased engagement and incremental spend.
In addition, with SRS, we are now able to better serve the specialty trades Pros. These are Pros who tend to have a narrower focus and need very deep assortments in their specific categories. SRS is an extraordinary specialty platform, with leading market positions and growth opportunities across all of their verticals. Our combined capabilities create greater value by sharing each other's respective product catalogs, leveraging each other's logistics and supply chain and each other's competitive advantages. In fiscal 2025, SRS completed the acquisition of GMS, adding a highly complementary and adjacent vertical to SRS's business with differentiated capabilities, product categories and customer relationships. SRS and GMS are already finding ways to better serve their customers and grow sales together. By bundling GMS's interior products with SRS's exterior offerings, we can now provide customers more solutions, increasing wallet share and customer retention. Together, these Pro assets and capabilities represent an unrivaled Pro ecosystem. And as we continue to align all of our assets, we drive growth. By coordinating sales teams and customer lists, product catalogs and inventory, and supply chains and delivery assets, we are able to cross-sell larger Pros with broader product offerings and service capabilities all across the country.
Throughout the year our associates displayed strength, resilience and engagement, and I want to thank them and our supplier partners for their hard work and dedication to serving our customers and communities.
As we look to fiscal 2026, we will continue to leverage our distinct competitive advantages to capitalize on compelling growth opportunities in our space. The investments we have made and will continue to make in differentiated capabilities throughout the business will deliver a value proposition that we believe is unique in the marketplace, allowing us to grow faster than the market over time.
Ted Decker