Norsk Titanium AS (OSL:NTI)
Norway flag Norway · Delayed Price · Currency is NOK
0.9140
-0.0120 (-1.30%)
At close: Apr 24, 2026
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Small-Cap Growth Virtual Investor Conference 2024

Jun 13, 2024

Carl Johnson
CEO, Norsk Titanium US Inc

There has been more than $325 million of equity invested in the company. We were fortunate to win a grant from New York State that built our production facilities, valued at about $125 million. The company is, as I said, headquartered in Norway, founded by a very prominent innovation incubator called Scatec Innovation in Norway. This is just a picture of our production facilities. The rightmost is the technology center in Norway, which also serves as our headquarters. That's where all the brains and the engineering sits in the company. We have three printers there. Those printers are typically for development activities and new activities, such as new materials we're working with, new customers we're qualifying, and also our material lab sits there, which tests all the material that we print.

The picture in the middle is our production facility in upstate New York in Plattsburgh, houses 22 machines. The picture on the right is a second facility that's also in Plattsburgh, New York, right next to the other production facility. This is an air-gapped facility that does defense work as well. Let's talk about some of the macro factors that are kind of in the tailwinds of our company right now. As everybody knows, inflation has been a big problem over the past few years. Commodities are increasing, labor costs are increasing, energy inflation. What 3D printing and additive manufacturing actually promises is that it allows us to localize manufacturing to closer to our customers. Whether that's Boeing or Airbus, it allows us to be closer to our customers and in a cost-efficient manner.

Compounding the factor that geopolitical issues are also diminishing the titanium supply because titanium is used extensively in defense and aerospace markets. 70% of the world's titanium today comes from China and Russia. Most recently, with the conflict in Ukraine, Russian titanium. We're no longer allowed to use Russian titanium in most applications. So that takes a significant portion of the supply offline, which increases the cost of titanium. Since our technology can do the same parts for same parts with less material, it gives us an advantage over traditional manufacturing processes for customers to transition into an additive manufacturing kind of a manufacturing process. Okay. So one of the questions that we get a lot is, why did we start with commercial aerospace? I know 3D printing has been around for a long time, but we took a different approach to 3D printing.

We started with commercial aerospace, arguably the hardest place to start. But it is also, as you can see from this depiction, it is also the biggest market and with the highest addressable market for our technology. And it's very consolidated in two companies, Airbus and Boeing. But what it allows us to do is it allows us to establish and qualify our material to commercial aerospace-grade parts that can then it's easier for us to prove ourselves in whether we go into more complex markets like the defense and engines market or to more high-production, high-volume markets that don't require that are not as complex an industry like industrials. And we have some examples of that as well. So capturing the commercial aerospace market actually enables us to create barriers to entry from other 3D printers to come in.

But it also gives us the access to the biggest market and enables us to have the flexibility to go into other markets as well that are just as large. So the second question that we get mostly is, why parts and not machines? What we did is we spent 10-12 years to establish process qualifications, machine qualifications, and supplier qualifications with blue-chip companies like Boeing, Airbus, ASML, Northrop, all the logos that you see on this chart. It's a very significant lift to focus on purely application of 3D printing. So what we focused on was establishing material specifications, or at least materials that meet the specifications that have been in the industry for decades so that you're not creating new material, but you're just replacing one-for-one parts that exist in the supply chain with 3D printed parts that have a better value proposition to the OEMs.

So we spent 10 to 12 years doing that. Now, as we emerge from our material specification qualifications, we're now shifted into these gray boxes in the middle where we're now talking to our customers and bidding on parts and qualifying parts and getting them into production. That's a repeat cycle that we're going to focus on. Our entire revenue forecast is based on transitioning parts into production. All the way to the right is this green box that says parts in serial production. What parts represent is recurring revenue. When we are on aircraft platforms, these are platforms that have long production runs.

Let's take the 747, for example, that the Boeing 747 just went out of production, but it was in production for 54 years, which means that if you are a parts producer for that platform, you're delivering parts every year for the last 54 years. So it's a very sticky business to be in. And I'll have more illustrations for that as we go forward. All right. So who are our customers? We started, like I said, in the commercial aerospace market. Most of titanium parts are used on two aircrafts. The A350, it's a composite aircraft, as well as the Boeing 787, it's a composite aircraft. What we have gone and done is we've looked at the market sizes in these commercial markets, and we have identified, let's start with Airbus, about 500 parts on Airbus platforms.

That 500 part numbers, which are distinct part numbers, but when you deliver at rate to their production rates, those are about 125,000 pieces per year that you deliver to that you can deliver to Airbus. So that's about a $1 billion directly addressable opportunity for our technology. So Norsk Titanium, today, we have qualified our machine and process with Airbus. We have signed a Master Supply Agreement with Airbus. We have started to produce about 10 different part numbers for the A350 aircraft and delivering parts to them on a monthly basis. We're also in discussion with them on future parts that tackle more of these 500 part numbers that get us closer to those 125,000 parts that we're trying to penetrate. So our process is a direct replacement of titanium parts on all current Airbus programs. With Boeing, we have been in production with Boeing since 2017.

We deliver 7 part numbers to that 1,000 part numbers that you see on the chart. Again, large opportunity, 250,000 pieces per year are required, or at least are directly addressable by our technology. We have recently announced that we received a direct purchase order from Boeing for parts that are currently in serial production. It's a significant order. We have also re-engaged with Boeing Supply Chain. Of course, everybody understands Boeing's challenges in the past couple of years, but we have just re-engaged with them on transitioning additional parts that are found on the 787 program. So we've been in production with Boeing since 2017. And again, what we've learned is once you're turned on to one part, you deliver that part day after day, month after month on the planes that they're producing.

I mentioned ASML earlier in the call, but we work with ASML's tier one supplier called Hittech Group. Hittech is a machining house and produces parts. We replaced a part that's called the carrier tray, and it was traditionally produced out of a block that weighed about 220 kilograms. It was machined down to less than 10 kilograms, as you see on the picture on the right side. What we did is we went and we printed a near net shape form, what we call a near net shape form. The picture on the bottom in the blue is an 80-kilogram block. So we removed a significant amount of material on the near net shape we delivered to ASML. They produced this exact same finished part, which is less than 10 kilograms. So this is an interesting business case for us.

This is not necessarily flying this part on a plane where you're carrying passengers. So it is a critical application in a machine. But the reason ASML and Hittech were interested in applying our technology here was the reduction from 220 to 80, which allows them to get much more throughput out of the existing installed base that they have for machining. So that allowed them to avoid additional CapEx expenditure on the machining, but as well as increasing the throughput of those machines and installed base that they have. So that's a use case that we like demonstrating of additive manufacturing in our process. Defense applications. We continue to work with a variety of defense companies that are named on this chart. We've established qualification programs and material specifications with Northrop Grumman, with General Atomics.

We're working on a new material with Bechtel in Inconel-based superalloy that we're developing for our machines for applications in marine. We're positioning ourselves to be a specialty metals provider for national security needs as and when they come. Let's shift over to the business side. We have been around for a long time. As I mentioned, we've been establishing our material qualifications for the last 10-12 years. But we've made significant inroads into the commercial aerospace industrial and defense markets. We're now reaching an inflection point where we're transitioning into a production phase. We're transitioning parts into serial production. We have today 21 parts in serial production that we estimate have an annual recurring revenue of approximately $6 million.

By the end of 2024, we're looking at transitioning 60 new parts into production that create an annual recurring revenue of approximately $50 million as we go into 2025. We guide to a 2026 number where we think we reach a type of maturity, a stabilized maturity phase. So that's about 120 part numbers in production generating about $160 million in annual recurring revenue the following year. Okay. This year in 2024, we're going to reach about $15 million of revenue. This will be achieved through both development non-recurring activities we're doing with our customers as well as the 60 parts that we're transitioning into production, their pro-rata production for the rest of the year. Most of that is going to come from the industrial side, but with a significant penetration into the commercial aerospace markets in the second half of this year.

We're going to grow revenues in 2026 to about $150 million. $120 million of that will come from serial production parts, and about $30 million is expected to come from one-off non-recurring businesses or businesses. We think we're going to go into kind of the machine licensing JV type of business model. Our target is to do 50% in contribution margin as we increase scale and reach an EBITDA margin of approximately 30% by 2026. Again, I'm going to hit on one more point: why we decided to go into the parts business and not sell our machine and our technology. Parts create a multi-year backlog of revenue. The $15 million that we're going to do this year will give us a contract value of 2.5 times that $15 million going into next year. And it builds a multi-year backlog for our business.

So by the time we're in 2026 and we have 120 parts in production doing about $120 million in revenue, we're actually building four times the contract value in delivery of parts for the business. So essentially, we're building a very big funnel of parts coming for multi-years after the time we have transitioned them into production. So even though we just talked about 120 part numbers, what that really means is that's about 40,000 parts that are being delivered to customers, which we estimate is still less than 3% of a market penetration. And at $150 million revenue, we're really only using 50% of our capacity that we have installed today. So most of the money that we have or that we raise does not go into CapEx. We already have the CapEx available. We're just transitioning parts into production and financing our working capital growth right now.

I just want to leave you with some recent news that you might have heard of Norsk Titanium in the market. We signed an agreement with Airbus, a master supply agreement with Airbus to deliver parts. We've started delivering the second group of parts to Airbus. And we have also signed a direct supply agreement with Boeing as well. On the defense side, we're working on qualifications, completed our qualification, and have production orders with the defense industry and their prime contractors, Northrop Grumman being one of the main ones, and General Atomics. On the industrial side, we work with Hittech and ASML for the carrier trays we showed, or I just showed. And we have now ramped up those carrier trays to full rate production.

So we are delivering at a rate of about 15 carrier trays a month right now, which kind of represents about $2 million a year just from that one product line. We continue to work with Hittech and ASML to look at new parts to transition to production this year. Again, those are big parts that, again, carry the same type of recurring revenue stream for us. So that's it. This is kind of the slide. I'll leave it up here. It summarizes kind of where we are. We have 35 machines, which can print 700 tons. They can generate about $300 million of revenue. We have qualified our material specifications through the blue chip company you see on the right side of this chart. And we are a part supplier and delivering parts and continue to deliver parts to Airbus and Boeing platforms as we speak today. Any questions?

So the first question I see is how much revenue will we generate from Hittech ASML this year? I think we're targeting to hit about 20% of our target this year is going to be generated from Hittech ASML. They have been ramped up to full production this year. We are now at a steady stream delivery, like I said, of 15 parts a month. Okay. Another question I see is where do you source your 3D printers from? We have developed our own proprietary technology. We make our own machines. We have sub-suppliers who we work through who put together our machines, but we own the IP on how they're put together. We own the IP on the printhead itself and the control systems. We own the entire process. Okay. One good question.

Where do you source your titanium material for the 3D printing? So our raw material, so we buy titanium wire and plate. We source most of our titanium from Japan. And we make sure that those sources, because we're in a regulated industry, we have to identify the sources of the titanium. So we typically try to focus on Japanese titanium material. So another good question is, did you say that you're considering selling and licensing your 3D printing? This is an avenue that we have just started to explore with existing customers. So as I said, we have a huge amount of capacity that we've built.

The easiest and best, the best way for us to transition parts into production is to perhaps license our technology to our customers, our customer base, who can design their parts and just transition into a large manufacturing format at one of our facilities. So if we do look at licensing or selling our machines, it would only be in that kind of a context to kind of foster the transition of parts into our mass production format. Sorry, I'm going through the questions one more. Yeah. Okay. So here's a good question. How long does it take for a single part to move through the testing and validation process? How many parts with airline manufacturers could you validate in a year? That's a very good question. One of the charts that we presented here, it says three to six months to kind of go through parts.

So the industry, the way it's structured is first you have to qualify your material so that you show that it's the same as the existing titanium that's on the frame. So we've done that, and we've shown that our technology can produce that very easily. Now it's a matter of kind of a rinse and repeat business model where you can show that you can make the same part with the same materials that you've qualified and transition that into production. That's a 3-6-month process because you have to take that through the regulation as well. They have change boards at the OEMs, and you have to carry that through their change boards to show that. Obviously, we have to prove that there is a very strong business case for them to change. So that's a 3-6-month process. So currently, we have a sales pipeline.

We have a very large sales pipeline that is going through that process with several parts. So when we talk about our revenue projection, it's derived from that sales pipeline and where we are with those parts in the qualification process with the OEMs. So there's a question here. Do you experience increased political push with regards to deglobalization and reshoring of production that recently was produced overseas? I can't say that we directly know that as a response, but we definitely feel it. The velocity with which the customers have moved us through some of these qualifications in the past couple of years has been astonishing to us. And that really is that velocity that has encouraged us to kind of move into a faster production state. So directly, I can't say that we have felt that political push, but indirectly, we definitely feel it as a business.

Okay. Unfortunately, we are at time, and we'd have to end it there. Please feel free to reach out to me through the channels OTC Markets has created for one-on-one meetings. And we look forward to meeting you and talking to you more about Norsk Titanium. Thank you for your time.

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