On top of that, the IPO expunged the balance sheet of all debt, so we have no debt on the balance sh

Well, good morning, and welcome to Spirit Airlines 2013 Analyst Conference. Thank you for joining us today. I also want to say thank you to the Spirit and NASDAQ team members who helped me with this event. We're going to start with presentations by Ben Baldanza, Spirit's Chief Executive Officer; delta airline tickets followed by Ted Christie, our Chief Financial Officer, then we'll have a short coffee break. Then Barry Biffle, delta airline tickets our Chief Marketing delta airline tickets Officer; will have a presentation, then we'll come up with some closing remarks, and then we'll have a group question-and-answer session. We are asking delta airline tickets that you hold all your questions until the group panel session, in which time we'll address those. And if you've been to the movies lately, you know not to leave until the final credits delta airline tickets roll after we do lunch today. Now [indiscernible].
Our remarks today may contain forward-looking information, now that sucks you off. Actual results could differ materially. We encourage you to read the risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K and other SEC filings. Please note that this presentation, including the Q A session, will be recorded and [indiscernible] webcast via our website. The replay of today's presentation will be available on our website under the Investor Relations section for the next 30 days.
Thanks, Deanne. [indiscernible] is working, so that's good. I really thank all of you for taking some of your day-to-day and spending delta airline tickets it with us. We're happy to be here and happy to talk about the company, and maybe a little bit broader terms than we're able to do in our earnings calls, a little bit more about where the cost structure is going, how we're growing, things like that, and so that will be very good. I also say that it's -- we're basically 2 years since we went public. We went public in May of 2011. And so we've been public for 2 years now and the stock price has done well, in that time obviously, with an ideal price of $12, and now we are north of $28. Yet, if you go to our offices, there's still sort of a frustration with angst, then why isn't it better way and why are the costs lower, and why aren't the revenues higher, what isn't the stock at $50, and things like that, and I think that's delta airline tickets really good, that's a real positive energy in that we believe so much in the business model. We are so bullish about the growth of the company, where we can go, that it keeps us focused delta airline tickets on trying to make sure that everything works really well.
And that focus, principally is, on shareholder returns, and that's what we try to do, by pushing our ROIC calculations and keeping earnings high and being willing to move the schedule to keep the model working where it goes.
So as you most of you probably know, we are absolutely the lowest cost producer in the markets we serve. We have the highest margin performance against all of our primary competitors, and yet, a I'm too [indiscernible] we have a very disciplined growth strategy. Barry and his team do a very methodic, quantitatively-based job of deciding where the next place to go will be, the level of frequency, the gauge, delta airline tickets whether it'd be a 319 (sic) [A319] or a 320 (sic) [A320], and that has resulted in positive net margins over the 5 -- last 5 years even though we got oil go to $147 a barrel or economic recession, at least for business travelers, or even in 2010, in the case of our own pilot strike where we didn't operate for 5 days, and yet still in that year, we still led the industry in EBITDA margin.
We now have 49 airplanes, the biggest Spirit has ever been at this point, serving 125 markets, and yet, we have a lot of growth in front of us, and Barry's going to talk about sort of our formula for thinking about that growth.
We're also growing at a rate of 15% to 20% a year, so we're a company earning high margins, with high return on capital and growing to being 20%. That's the core of why we believe this is an investment strategy that people can be excited about and should be excited about.
On top of that, the IPO expunged the balance sheet of all debt, so we have no debt on the balance sheet. Of course, we have lease obligations for our airplanes, and at some point, I think the accounting rules will put that back on the balance sheet but there is no debt on the balance sheet today and we have a very high cash balance. And if you look at the ROIC targets, as you can see, the 2011, 2012, the last 12 months to now, sort of 28% to 30% pretax return on invested capital. We're very proud of this. It's the kind of numbers we like to produce. And we're also proud of the little tiny role that Spirit -- we think has helped play in encouraging this kind of metric to be used more broadly, as a measure of industry health and industry economic activity. This is -- a couple of airplanes have talked about the return on capital here and there, but we're seeing it more and more and we like to think that because we push it, that's helping that trend somewhat.
If you think about our route network, this is as generically as you can think about it. But if you look at the green circle and the green arrow, this is pretty much what Spirit was back in 2005, before we were the model that we are today, mostly in East coast of Florida Airline at that point. Between 2005 and 2010, most of the growth was sort of in that corridor. There was a lot of expansion into the Caribbean, into North and South America, and Central America in that time, but still basically building on the strength of the company as a North/South carrier traffic from big cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia area, Chicago, Detroit, Washington delta airline tickets and so on.
While all that was going on, other changes were happening in the industry. As you know in Delta with Northwest merged and that changed the dynamics delta airline tickets a little bit, certainly for cities like Memphis delta airline tickets and Cincinnati. And then United and Continental delta airline tickets merged and then AirTran bought -- I mean, Southwest bought AirTran. And now you see US Airways and American delta airline tickets getting together. And the result of that has been obviously positive for the industry, as all of you can model, it's resulted delta airline tickets in less total capacity, delta airline tickets fewer competitors per market payer, and generally, a more stable higher fare environment, that's been good for the industry. In 2012, the industry made money with almost the same kind of fuel prices as the industry had in 2008, when the industry docked $10 billion. So clearly, something good is happening structurally in the industry but that same effect has created an enormous delta airline tickets growth runway for Spirit. Because when it's gone, it's as fares get higher and as the industry is able to more sustainably attract the kind of payers to support their high-cost structures. At Spirit, it gives us the ability to come in underneath, price more and more markets at a lower rate, repricing to the market that traffic delta airline tickets that has been priced out because of higher fares and carry that growth. So the same consolidation that has stabilized the industry has also created delta airline tickets more growth opportunity for Spirit. And I can tell you, an airline that we all know and love in Southwest, they were the low-fare airline for many, many, many years, in the '80s and '90s, even in the early 2000s. You see they don't talk about fares so much anymore because their fares are actually quite high. And if you look at their most recent ads, they're very exciting to us, because you see their flight attendants dress in a very professional attire and you see them talking about, we're the airline for the business traveler and things. And that's great because delta airline tickets essentially, what Southwest appears to be doing, is just seeding to someone else, and that would be us, the sort of that discretionary, leisure kind of marketplace that they carried for the first 20 to 30 years of their existence. And we don't really see anybody else running to take that space and yet that's the space we're in. So we feel very bullish about the growth because the macroeconomics are right for it, the industry restructuring supports it, and even the single -- what you might think of as the single biggest threat of that is that the Southwest Airlines seems to be moving in another direction, and saying, the true leisure guys, that's not really our business anymore, but that is our business. And that's why you see this red circle, and that's why over the -- since 2011, our domestic is -- I mean, our growth has been more domestically focused, delta airline tickets not because we're tired of the international market, not because the international markets delta airline tickets don't produce positive worth, but the lower fruit on the tree right now is in the domestic U.S., as the industry have consolidated and created those opportunities.
So this is the actual route map today and basically through the rest of this year and really into next year, we're going to be focused more on connecting places that we already serve. We already serve over 80% of the biggest delta airline tickets places in the United delta airline tickets States. We're in Chicago, we're in the Bay Area, we're in LA, we're in Dallas and Houston, we're in New York, Boston, Philly, Washington, so we're in the big places today. So connecting these is going to be more the goal rather than adding a lot of new cities. This year, we added Philadelphia and New Orleans to the map, 2 good cities that can go a lot, so we can fly to from many more places than we fly right now. But you can see that, we're not really a national airline today, in a service sense, even though we tend to fly just 1, sometimes 2 flights a day. So again, if you're the kind of customer who's paying for your own ticket, if you're not traveling on a tiny sensitive schedule going to a business meeting or having to get home to see your family from the business meeting or something, we are the best value out there. When you look at the total price that customers delta airline tickets pay on Spirit, their fair, plus the extras that they actually buy, and you compare that to the total price on JetBlue, Southwest, American, United, Delta or anyone else, our fares are always the lowest.