Welcome to Carlisle’s 2011 fourth quarter and year-end conference call. On the call with me is our CFO, Steven Ford; our Chief Accounting Officer, Kevin Zdimal; and our Treasurer, Julie Chandler [ph]. On the website, you will find a slide deck that details our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year. During this call, I’ll provide you additional color on the slides. But before I start reviewing the slides, let me just say that we consider 2011 as a very good year, both operationally and strategically.
In 2011, our sales were a record $3.225 billion. 2011 was also a record earnings year when the gain from the 2000 sale of Icapel [ph] is excluded from our 2007 earnings. 2011 earnings from continuing operations were also an all-time at $182 million.
Our sales and earnings came in a year where daily news reports constrain the economy brought uncertainty in all of our markets where raw material inflation was out of control during the first three quarters of the year where new non-residential construction continued to suffer its worse economic downturn since the Great Depression and where restaurants for the third year in a row saw store traffic lower than it was in 2007. Top that with the startup issues we had in our new tire factory in Jackson, Tennessee. I think most of you will agree our overall performance was very good in 2011. And 2011 performance is just setting the stage for a very good 2012.
Let’s turn to the slides that will provide with a background data for today’s conference call. As we get prepared to get started, please review slide two titled Forward-Looking Statements to help you understand the risks of investing in our company. After reviewing that, let’s turn to slide three.
The fourth quarter review begins on slide three. And our fourth quarter sales were up 26% to $790 million. 13% of our growth was organic, driven by strong demand for our braking, construction materials, and interconnect technologies products. 13% or $18 million of our growth came from the combined sales of the Hawk acquisition that was completed in December of 2010, the PDT acquisition completed in August of 2011, and the Tri-Star acquisition, which we completed in December of last year.
EBITDA was $53 million compared to $27 million in 2010, an increase of 97%. EBIT margin in the fourth quarter was 6.7%, positively impacted by selling price and raw material parity within construction materials and higher margin performance in CBS and CIT. Our gains in margin were offset by $4.2 million of one-time acquisition costs and lower volume in the food service business.
Slide four details the components of our revenue growth. Our growth by segment is detailed in this center of the graph. As can be seen, Interconnect Technologies enjoyed 20% growth, Construction Materials was up 18%, Brake & Friction 15%, and Transportation Products was up 5%. Sales growth in FoodService continued to be a challenge as its sales declined 5% in the quarter. We have not seen any economic recovery in the food service marketplace in 2011, but the most recent NRA Index has been above 100 for the past five months, and that should bode well for 2012.
As we turn to slide five, you will see our margin dollars growing 97% from $27 million to $53 million. Detailed in the bridge for the fourth quarter, you will see that net charges, which are the difference between the acquisition cost to purchase Hawk in 2010 and the cost to purchase PDT and Tri-Star in 2011 was a 1.3% gain to margin. EBIT generation from these acquisitions added 1.2%, volume represented 0.6%, and COS savings another 0.4%. Pricing net of raw materials was negative 1.2%, and the vast majority of that raw material variance came in Transportation products with smaller amounts in CIT and Food Service.
Please turn to slide six. We’ll begin reviewing each of the businesses individually. The first segment slide provides color on the performance of Construction Materials. The fourth quarter was a superb quarter in this segment. We reached price parity with raw material in the fourth quarter, allowing us to leverage our sales for the first time in 2011. With sales growing 23%, our EBIT grew 32%. Our leverage would have been even greater had it not been for the $2.1 million in step-up charge for the inventory from the purchase of PDT earlier in the year.
Warm weather across the country in the fourth quarter extended the roofing season, which was reflected in our sales. The vast majority of our sales growth was organic, with PDT contributing 5% overall in the growth – of the growth in the quarter. Another bright spot in Construction Materials was that PDT has grown 24% since we acquired the company in August. The EPDM market is growing in Northern Europe despite the soft economic conditions on the continent.
Turn to slide seven and we’ll take a look at Transportation Products, which grew 5%, but that growth was all price. Volume was actually down in the quarter as sales in outdoor power equipment and drive belts was lower than they had been during the fourth quarter of 2010. Outdoor power equipment continues to suffer from an anemic residential housing market.
Fourth quarter EBIT was a loss of $4 million, as we sold inventory containing higher priced natural and synthetic rubber, which was purchased earlier in the year, plus lower volumes in our factories as the outdoor power equipment does struggle to growth. The good news coming on our Transportation Products is related to our Jackson, Tennessee plant where productivity continues to climb and our scrap rates are dropping like a rock.
Our fourth quarter scrap rates were less than 2% and our January 2012 scrap rate was 0.7%, all while our operating efficiency reached 74% in the fourth quarter. For comparison purposes, in the second quarter of 2011, our scrap rate was in excess of 6% and operating efficiency approximately 50%. Our current levels of productivity are now on par with the outputs in our other tire manufacturing facilities. These improvements will pay dividends in way of higher earnings in 2012.
