All right, hello and welcome back, everyone, to the Titomic Fireside Chat. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham Partners, and today I have the pleasure of moderating a Q&A discussion with Jim Simpson, the company's Chief Executive Officer, and Geoff Hollis, Titomic's Chief Financial Officer. For those not familiar, the company primarily trades in Australia under the ticker TTT. Gentlemen, welcome.
Thanks, Robert. Appreciate it.
Fantastic. Let's jump right in. Provide an overview of the company and maybe how both of your respective backgrounds have guided the company's strategic direction going forward here.
Sure. First of all, Titomic is the world's largest cold spray and kinetic fusion additive manufacturing company. The reason I bring up both cold spray and kinetic fusion additive manufacturing is that a lot of people have heard the term cold spray, but in reality, we really do a kinetic fusion where we actually use the physical velocity of powders and impacting onto a substrate or a mandrel to be Aibel to create our coatings or our products. I think that's an important aspect to know right off the bat. What we're doing right now is that the company has transitioned from a machine-centric sales model. This doesn't mean that we don't sell machines, but the focus is becoming more on a fully integrated advanced manufacturing and service provider. Our leadership team, including myself, is from aerospace and defense.
We have a lot of government veterans, and those new infusion of people in the team have allowed us to be able to do this kind of a shift. It has been instrumental in repositioning our company towards high-value government and industrial contracts, particularly in defense, aerospace, energy, and MRO sectors.
Geoff, you think it's worth adding Jim and new leadership, particularly Patti Dare , who's our President and Global Head of Sales in the U.S. g iven their backgrounds, they're really assisting us in opening the door for these new opportunities in the sectors that Jim mentioned, particularly defense and aerospace. They're able to consolidate our existing relationships. They have the ability to open the right doors, speak to the right people. It's something we're already seeing in their short tenure with us that Titomic's really benefiting from having them on board immensely.
All right, fantastic. Let's get into the technology a little bit more. Talk about sort of this cold spray process. What are the unique advantages in terms of speed, sort of material versatility, cost effectiveness, and especially when you sort of look at it from a relative comparative standpoint versus the competition out there?
Yeah. Titomic's cold spray additive manufacturing, particularly its properties for the Titomic Kinetic Fusion process, we accelerate metal powders to supersonic speeds to bond them without melting. We can actually spray powders up to 12 km per second, which, to put it in perspective, low Earth orbit satellites actually travel around the earth at 12 km per second. This avoids heat distortion and thermal degradation. It actually preserves the original material properties, enables rapid deposition, and near net shape production. It allows the bonding of dissimilar metals such as nickel and titanium or Inconel and titanium. It is ideal for on-site mobile repair solutions. Our Kinetic Fusion high particle velocity allows for deposition of refractory and high performance metals like titanium and tantalum, which really distinguishes us from others.
Those materials are often impossible to cast or weld, and we can manufacture a part in weeks rather than months using traditional methods. For example, we can build a part as big as 200 kg in less than three days, whereas using investment casting or forging, which are some of the traditional methods, this could take months to be able to do something like that in some type of a pressure vessel. That is providing supply chain benefits that are in high demand. For example, we're able to use titanium powders that are not spherical. Therefore, we're able to do certain things utilizing titanium capability that might not be utilized by other types of capabilities.
Geoff, worth adding, we have a suite of Titomic Kinetic Fusion systems. We've got a high-pressure cold spray system, which is mainly used for production, using the production of parts, using those high-performance metals that Jim alluded to, like titanium and tantalum. We also have two other systems, a low and medium pressure solution. These are using the softer metals for the coating and repair, like the on-site mobile repair solutions and the bonding of dissimilar metals for corrosion protection, for example, out on oil rigs and the like. We have really got the full suite of cold spray, which is something other companies do not have in this sector.
Let's dive into that a little bit more. You and Jim mentioned at the beginning, which is some of the end markets that you're looking to go after, aerospace, defense, maybe oil and gas. Talk about sort of these markets that your technology is maybe ideally suited to serve and sort of why and how that ability to work with these sort of high performance metals, like you mentioned, titanium and others, sort of position you to address maybe the very specific needs in each of those end markets.
Sure. I think if you look at aerospace and defense, for example, aside from aluminum, titaniums probably the most used metal in aerospace and defense. We're seeing that some of the problems that we're facing right now is the supply chain. If you recall that obviously we're not in the U.S. and we're not utilizing the titanium from China or from Russia, we're able to be able to use the U.S. capability.
Because the efficiency of our system that we are scraps less than 15% and we can recycle, that we're starting to see that the economics enabled by us being able to efficiently use the titaniums and the tantalums is really something that's very important. Also the other key is that the foundries for investment casting and forging, et cetera, there are significant weights on those activities as well as building the molds, et cetera.
We are looking at parts that aerospace had to wait months for to build, and we can build those now within weeks. Seeing that being able to use titanium or tantalum or refractory metals and being able to build them in a very short period of time and very efficiently without much scrap and without heat distortion is a huge deal for the defense and aerospace business and why we focused in that area.
In the MRO areas and actually in the energy areas, we're looking at using our lower pressure machines such as the D523 and the D623 and being able to utilize the more malleable materials such as copper, aluminum, stainless steel, et cetera, and being able to eliminate corrosion resistance or eliminate scratches in aluminum or fix areas that, quite frankly, you'd have to scrap parts previously whereas now you can repair those parts and save a substantial amount from an inventory perspective. Those are the types of things that we're doing now.
That's why in the MRO field, not having to scrap, be able to repair non-flight critical parts or be able to solve corrosion resistance in the oil and gas area and then create parts in the aerospace and defense segment with really high performance materials such as titanium and tantalum.
All right. I think it's worth touching on too, Jim. We've got 10 of our machines that were purchased by the Dutch Army in the middle of 2024 with nine of them deployed into Ukraine for in-field repair. We've got some significant interest from the global armies because of the portability of our, we call it the D523, our low-pressure system that is really capable out in the field for in-field repair for crack leaking radiators and the like. Where you can actually spray onto leaking radiators without emptying them and real portability and getting vehicles back in the field in an instant rather than them being shipped off for months and repaired.
Geoff has a really good point is that one of the things that makes our ability to be able to, for example, do corrosion resistance on an oil and gas rig where because we don't heat up the material, you don't have to evacuate an oil rig because of where you'd have to do it with welding because obviously some kind of a spark or something could be a really bad thing on an oil rig. Similarly, our capabilities because we don't have to use welding, et cetera, are very important in situ in the field for defense applications, repairing ground transportation, repairing things in the field that allows them to keep moving. We are seeing much more of a use for that. Now, we do sell the machines to them.
We also lease machines to them as well as providing the training, the powders, and also a 24-hour help center.
All right. That's a good segue here, which is you just mentioned sort of selling the machines. You mentioned a number of them being sold to the, I think it was the Dutch Army you mentioned. You mentioned at the beginning you're sort of shifting away from selling machines to sort of focusing on sort of high value add services and manufacturing side. What sort of prompted this strategic shift and how has this sort of change expanded the value proposition really that you're providing to your customers?
Part of the activities that we were looking at was that we shifted because the shift was driven by the market feedback that we were seeing that the customers preferred integrated solutions over just hardware, the realization that the repair, coating, and hybrid part manufacturing offered faster recurring revenue, and the need to unlock the $400 billion plus addressable market across aerospace, defense, and energy and MROs. This pivot enhances Titomic's customer value by offering not only technology, but also execution through lease systems, powder supply, training, and on-demand part manufacturing. Geoff, do you have some comments?
I think we'll still sell machines. We've still got demand from research institutions, universities for our high pressure solutions. We'll still have customers for our low and medium pressure solutions like the Dutch Army that want to purchase these machines on CapEx. We do feel that, pardon me, we do feel that a lot of these larger corporates, your Woodsides and Airbuses and other companies we're working with, will probably want to actually get these on their OpEx and just buy a full suite of services, the machines, the training, the powder, the 24-hour help desk on OpEx account over three and five years. That's what we're really geared for. We want to be producing for people. We don't want the one-off machine sale. That's the end of the relationship. We train them up and away they go.
Too many companies have not made enough money and gone out of business prematurely while other companies have gone forward using other people's technology. We want to use our technology for us. That is critical going forward and critical for this pivot.
That makes sense. Maybe just to expand upon that slightly, how do you look into balancing sort of your expertise in the development of the machines versus your scaling up of this sort of broader service offerings? How do you sort of balance the two, which can at times be quite different?
Yeah. The way that we maintain the balance is that we have continued research and development on our next generation systems like the D523 and the 623, our low and medium pressure machines, and also our high pressure kinetic fusion units. In addition to that, we have dedicated engineering teams in Australia, Europe, and the United States. We've been partnering with universities such as the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Auburn for qualification and process motivation. I mean, sorry, motivation, innovation. Oh my God. Modular product lines and leasing programs that will allow both sales and services to scale in parallel. Those are the ways that we're doing that.
Yeah. Titomic purchased a Dutch business just over three and a half years ago. Our Dutch business produces our D523 and D623 capabilities globally at present. When we purchased them, they only had the D523, our low-pressure capabilities. They have developed and innovated a D623, our medium-pressure TKF machine that actually has a 30 times higher deposition rate. It's quite a game changer in terms of the innovation that we've been able to make with this cold spray solution. That's just sort of one example of what we have been doing over the last three years and what Jim and the team's focus on going forward is to continually innovate to make sure we've got leading-edge systems, but also really focusing on the service side of things.
All right. Yeah, please go ahead, Jim.
No, I just wanted a kind of quick thing is that Geoff talked about the 623 actually being able to put out 30 times the amount of powder relative to the 523. And what that did is that both of those are handheld devices. So when somebody's doing MRO or repair types of activities, being able to cover a larger surface rather quickly is a big deal because you don't want to have the technician thinking that this is too laborious or not to be able to do the activities in a quick timely manner. We're competing in many ways relative to paint or other applications that can be done rather quickly.
Because the D623 is able to deposit at such a high rate, we're able to, first of all, provide a substantially better corrosion or protection resistance than a paint or some other approaches, but also we're able to do it at the same type of time. That's a real big deal.
Makes sense. Let's move on to some of the customers here. You've mentioned a few already. When you look to sort of the future for those maybe that aren't familiar intimately with the company here, talk about sort of who the customers are today, but maybe where you see the customer base evolving in the future given maybe the shift towards maybe more services versus machine sales or maybe they become almost one and the same. Expand on that.
I think that what we're looking at right now is from a machine sale perspective, we like to focus on providing those to the research and development and the universities, areas that can cultivate new capabilities for the kinetic fusion activities. From a leasing perspective, from a products perspective, our customers are really the government entities such as NAVSEA, U.S. Navy, Missile Defense Agency, European and Australian defense organizations, large OEMs such as Boeing, Airbus, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Moog, ASML, and others. In the energy clients, oil and gas people such as Woodside or Equinor and Able. Our future evolution will continue to focus on tier one OEMs and defense primes alongside with growing penetration into the MRO service providers and energy infrastructure players. That is our objective.
Obviously, we're working with others as well, the tier twos, but our focus right now is with the tier one customers.
All right. Let's talk about some partnerships, collaborations. What are some of those that you've sort of entered into in the past and maybe some that could be sort of a pivotal gateway for customer acquisition going forward?
Sure. Some of our key partnerships that we have include DESE Research. They're providing us engineering support and U.S. government relationship building. Stellar Solutions, they've provided us the independent certification and quality validation. As we pivot to the oil and gas and the defense and aerospace area, certification and qualification becomes absolutely essential to be able to utilize these types of capabilities that we have for kinetic fusion. Stellar is helping us get match fit for the larger defense and aerospace primes. We also have collaboration with the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Auburn University on powder validation and R&D testing. We also are collaborating with many of the titanium powder builders in the United States to make sure that we can certify their powders into our systems.
We have a very unique strategic advisory group created with senior U.S. defense and aerospace leaders advising us on our customer engagement and program execution. People like retired General Trey Obering, who used to run Missile Defense Agency, Dr. John Stopher, who was previously the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space, John Schumacher, who was previously the chief of staff at NASA. These are just examples of the people that we have on the board. They are helping us really tailor and make the pivot that we're looking for. These relationships are significantly helping us accelerate ourselves in the defense and industrial sectors.
Yeah. These partnerships and relationships and others have sort of led to some really significant customer relationships at the moment as well. For one of the major airlines, we're using our Titomic Kinetic Fusion to replace aluminum castings for parts on their planes that have gone out of production but are still in use in strategic assets and pressurized components. There's a major defense OEM that are grappling with 12-24 month delivery times on critical titanium components that we can do, like Jim alluded to, we can spray one of these parts in two to three days. By the time we machine it, it's like a two or three week start to finish to get a finalized part. We are seeing some real interest in that. Airbus, they're using our coating and repair. They're using our medium pressure D623.
They're qualifying various use cases for non-critical plane repairs. They're also exploring powder shipping, doing short quality within their supply chain. On our powder feeders for our D623, Airbus have requested that we actually look into a way that we can ship that. We ship them a whole powder feeder filled with the powder that they need for their repair process. Their technicians globally cannot use any other source of powder. It won't work with the machine. They can control their quality within their supply chain. Eventually, Airbus will deploy Titomic systems across a large proportion of their, they've got 400 maintenance repair organizations globally, 40 large ones. We see that sort of growing as this technology takes hold. I think we've talked about Woodside.
They're repairing some crane components on oil rigs with our low and medium pressure systems, particularly focusing on corrosion protection. NAVSEA, I think Jim touched on, we're doing some field deployed coating and corrosion protection systems for ships. We've got an ever-growing pipeline of work out of the U.S., out of Australia, out of the Netherlands. As an ASX-listed company, we really look forward to starting to share more of those relationships over the coming months and years. I don't know, Jim, if you want to touch on any more of them.
I think that you hit that pretty well. I think one of the things that you did bring up was that part of our objective right now is that we're actually moving from research and development into qualification of components and coatings and other applications so that we can go into the mainstream, whether it be full operations in the MRO area or being able to qualify parts for aerospace and defense. That evolution is something that we're really working very hard on in this next year. That is where the pivot really comes into play.
That's good to understand. Maybe it's something I should have asked at the very beginning here, but talk about sort of where operations are based. You've mentioned Alabama, Huntsville a few times, Auburn. You've mentioned Australia. You've mentioned Europe. Talk about the different locations and how sort of your desire to have maybe this infrastructure that really is in different areas maybe plays into even especially in the U.S. here, a lot of the discussion around sort of security materials and supply chains and things of that sort.
Yeah. I think that it is important is that we are a pretty global company. We've just recently purchased a facility in Huntsville, Alabama. It's a 59,000 sq ft facility position. The reason we selected Huntsville, Alabama is a lot of people don't know, but it actually has more PhDs per populace in the city of Huntsville than any other city in the United States. We have in Huntsville the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the Missile Defense Agency, Redstone Arsenal, and virtually every major aerospace and defense company.
In addition to that, we have a very encouraged congressional group, both at the senatorial and the representative levels. They are very pro aerospace and defense and very supportive of our additive activities. We recently leased a large facility in Aachen, Netherlands to move out of our current facility because it was getting too small.
Aachen, Netherlands is near Heerlen. It supports a lot of our European OEMs, such as Airbus, such as Equinor and others. It also, though, is the major hub for building our low and medium pressure machines. Where Geoff is, and actually I am right now, is Melbourne, Australia. We do a lot of R&D and prototype development. A substantial amount of our high temperature refractory metal work, our titanium work, and our product work is being done right now in Melbourne. Melbourne does have the capability of the breadth of all, as all of these facilities do have, is to do the low pressure and the medium pressure and the high pressure capabilities. The focus of the high pressure actually came from Melbourne.
Obviously, as you pointed out, Robert, that because of the activities going on in the politics of the United States, that it became very important if we're really going to be focused on defense and aerospace that we have a major position in Huntsville, Alabama, or the United States.
I think we're really set up with Huntsville, obviously, to service Americas and really tick those onshoring capabilities and make sure we have a local supply chain to be able to produce local-made parts. We've got the same in the Netherlands now with European defense agencies sort of speaking a lot lately with what's going on. We are very happy to have a European-based facility and we're well covered here in Asia-Pacific as well.
Yeah. Obviously, the emergence of the European Union as far as funding's for defense is that the funding for defense is greater than it has ever been since World War II. Definitely we are positioned here in the Netherlands for that type of applications as well.
All right. Very good. About two minutes left here. Sort of look at the outlook here as you look sort of three to five years out. What does sort of the financial performance of the company look like?
Yeah. In fiscal year 2025, the revenues are expected to be substantially higher than they were in FY 2024, which were roughly AUD 5.9 million. We're still somewhat a bit lumpy as far as phase, as far as machine sales, R&D work, etc. We feel this is starting to shift. As we move into 2026, particularly the second half, our revenue mix will change dramatically from where we are today. We will see far more repetitive production contracts as we move into the qualification, low rate initial production, and ongoing production. In addition, we will see more coating and repair revenues and multiple machines being leased and/or sold. In 2027 and beyond, our goal is to have sales of $750 million by 2030, an EBITDA margin greater than 50%. Our cash conversion is going to be greater than 80%.
Frankly, a lot of people suddenly go, "Well, wow, that seems pretty aggressive." If you start to look at some of the products that we're actually looking at that we're moving from R&D and into qualification into production, it isn't very unrealistic. We're looking at one of our product lines that could be a million kilograms of titanium. To put that in perspective, a million kilograms of titanium is roughly $80 per kg. That's if we're using our non-spherical powders. We put in a value added of roughly four to five times that, just the powder. That program alone going to production, and we anticipated going into production in late 2026, could bring as much as $400 million of revenue. We're looking, that's just one example.
When we multiply that by four to five or more, then this number does not look too unrealistic. In fact, we think it's very realistic. Transitioning from the pilot R&D to full rate production and recurring MRO contracts is key. A strong pipeline of qualified projects with tier one OEMs, defense clients, indicates a significant growth potential that we have right now. In summary, we have a significant market opportunity. Kinetic Fusion is not just a way to restore components. It is a way to restore control over schedules, supply chain, material sourcing, and mission readiness. It enables us to replace castings and forgings when these lines are closed. It allows us to restore legacy assets when no replacements exist. We can engineer high-performance systems with precision, speed, and sustainability. We're just not improving how we build.
We are actually changing how we think about what's possible. We are really excited about the future with Titomic.
Fantastic. Look, we're out of time here. Jim, Geoff, thank you very much for your participation in the summit here today. Greatly appreciate it. I want to obviously thank everybody who participated and was watching throughout the day today. If I can be helpful in coordinating any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with management here, please send me an email. That's blum@lythampartners.com. Jim, Geoff, thank you so much for your time today.
No, Robert, thank you.
Fantastic.
Appreciate it, Robert. Thank you.
All right, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.
Take care.
All right. That's a wrap on the Lytham Partners Industrials and Basic Materials Summit. Big thank you to all of our viewers, participating companies, and our guest panelists for joining us today. If you missed anything, don't worry. The entire event will be available on demand right after this. All webcasts will also be available on our YouTube channel in the coming days. Again, feel free to follow us on LinkedIn so you're the first to know about all future events. If you'd like to learn more about Lytham Partners, visit our website at lythampartners.com. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.