Okay, we're just giving everyone a second here to get in from the lobby, then we'll get started. Okay, my name is Greg Burns. I'm an analyst at Sidoti. Happy to have Greg Woods here, the CEO of AstroNova, presenting for us this morning. We're going to let him go through a presentation, and then we'll get to as much Q&A at the end. If you do have a question, please enter it through the function in Zoom, and we'll address as many as we can at the end of Greg's presentation. So with that, I will hand it over to Greg.
All right. Yeah, thanks, Greg, and welcome, everyone. I'll jump right into the presentation after just a quick reminder on the Safe Harbor statement. By the way, this whole presentation is available on our website, so you can download that, and it'll also be posted at Sidoti, so you can get it from either of those two locations. So I won't spend a lot of time on slides, try to hit the highlights, and then leave some time for questions at the end. So I know some people are not familiar with the story, so we'll kind of cover it in that perspective, and then, you know, we'll kind of move through this at a pretty good pace. So if you're not familiar with AstroNova, you know, our focus is on what we call data visualization technology.
Essentially, it's taking data, processing it very accurately and very rapidly, and turning it into a human-usable format. That's a quick synopsis of that. Give you an idea of the size of the company. By the way, these are all based on our last fiscal year. We're a January 31 company, so this is going to be as of, you know, January 31 of this year, which is what we call our fiscal 2024 year. So just under $150 million in revenue, 365 employees, all over the world. Our headquarters is in West Warwick, Rhode Island. And we have customers in over 150 countries. So the company was actually founded in 1969, so it's been around for a while. If you take a look at how the revenue breaks up, we've got two different segments. Let's see, one slide back there. There's a little delay in this thing.
Sorry about that. So looking at the revenue, we have two reporting segments, what we call test and measurement, where the company started, as I mentioned, in 1969. We don't work for NASA and rocket telemetry. So the rocket goes up, you gather data and print it out, for the engineers. Back in those days, it was pen plotters. Of course, we don't do that anymore, but we still do a lot of work for anyone launching rockets, in the Western world or missiles. That's still a good part of our business. So test and measurement today is primarily aerospace and defense related. And then the larger part of our business, what we call product identification, which is focused on prime labeling. And we'll talk more about that as we get into the segments.
It's important for you guys to see that a large portion of our revenue is actually based on recurring elements, supplies being the biggest one. And then secondarily would be the kind of MRO function of our business, you know, service contracts and repairs and such. So roughly a third of it is new hardware sales. The growth playbook is something that we've been using for the last several years. We really haven't made changes to this overall strategy, which is focused on, you know, number one, product innovation. So we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest technologies out there that makes things as efficient as possible for our customers. We augment that via strategic M&A, where that makes sense. We can add technology, products, geographic reach needs to fit through our filters there, of course, from a financial point of view as well.
And the third element is the operational excellence, a portion of our business, which is based on something called the AstroNova Operating System. I'll touch on that a little bit as we go through the deck here. Then, of course, geographic expansion, getting into more locations, more types of distribution channels around the world to grow our business. So just to get an idea of what are these two segments all about, Product Identification, as I said, is, you know, what we call prime labeling. This is things you'd see when you're buying a consumer product, you know, or it could be an industrial product, but it's on the end product itself, something you'd see on a store shelf, for example. And we have a variety of products in that space. Then if I look at the Test and Measurement segment, there's two components to that.
And again, it's primarily aerospace and defense related. The test and measurement piece on the right is built from their legacy business I talked about via NASA. And still today, we're recognized as one of the highest quality suppliers in this area of collecting data and reporting it very rapidly and very accurately. And the bigger piece of that business these days is the flight deck printer business. So that's what you see in the middle of what we call aerospace product line. And both of those are within the test and measurement segment from a reporting point of view. We mentioned acquisitions. You can kind of see here the most recent acquisitions in our space, three of them in the aerospace area and two in the product identification space.
The most recent of which was in August of 2022, where we acquired a company called Astro Machine in Chicago, and we've since moved a fair amount of our manufacturing to that facility. It's got a very state-of-the-art vertical manufacturing operation. The AstroNova Operating System I mentioned really guides everything we do in the business, starting with our five core values in the center. And you can see we put customer number one there, and then we've got innovation, building value for our stakeholders. And then we've got facilities around the world. Now I'll show that in a map coming up. But this one global team concept where we get the best inputs we can from all of our team members. And then the continuous improvement piece, which has to do with the typical lean manufacturing tools that you might be familiar with.
Taking a look at that map, our headquarters is in West Warwick, Rhode Island, and you can see that, in the Americas section. So we've got kind of the three sections of the world divided up, with three main hubs. So North America and South America is handled via the West Warwick, Rhode Island facility. And Frankfurt, Germany, we've got it, the European hub that handles the EMEA. And then in Shanghai, we have a hub location, and we also have support facilities for that hub in Kuala Lumpur for product identification and in Singapore for aerospace. If you look at, now jumping into kind of the product distribution, I mentioned over 150 countries, and you can kind of see in the map, the purple shaded areas are where we have products right now being sold or have been sold.
So let's take a look now at each of the two segments, starting with the biggest, which is Product Identification. You can see some of our products there. But let me point out an important piece here, which is what makes us unique in this space. So in the label printing area, essentially what we do, and it ties back to our slogan, is the labels you want when you need them. And that is, this is moving digital label printing into the facility, typically where they manufacture or distribute the product, as opposed to a commercial printer who might print out a big batch of labels and ship it to the company. And this way, people can do exactly what they want. Every label that comes out of the machine can be different because it's digital. So they can have a lot of flexibility, reduce their inventory.
The thing that makes it unique for AstroNova, as we actually created this business back in 1994, is that we had to put the whole ecosystem around it. So not only do we have the printer and the ink or toner that goes into it, but then upstream, we have our own software that is unique in this business, that it runs the machine, all the machine functions as well as the design functions, and keeps the library of label artwork available for the customer. And then on the back end, you know, we are the largest producer of inkjet receptive label material. So we give the customer exactly what they need. We have over, oh, because now it was getting close to 100 types of raw material, you know, thousands of SKUs that we're able to deliver typically in 10-15 days from order.
So customers can get exactly what they need to run their machines. And it's all guaranteed to work together, and it's supported by our global service team as well. So it's kind of end-to-end solution. And this slide, you can, you know, kind of read it offline, but it gives you an idea of, you know, what those four key functions are in that total solution. And again, it makes us unique in this business. And also having been in this business since it started, you know, when we started it, we've got a full range of products from kind of entry-level in the sub-$2,000 range up into, you know, light commercial production facilities, printers that maybe in the $100,000, $100,000 plus range. And, you know, in a variety of different applications so they can have the right product for the customer regardless of what their in-house needs are.
On that low end, that was something we just started last year. We want to have something that even somebody getting right off the bat can grab a printer, you know, they can buy it on their credit card and get into, you know, in-house label printing. We've sold quite a few of these now, and then it's designed so that you can take the same media out of that printer and put it in one of our larger printers as your business grows. We also introduced last year some higher-end products, a high-end desktop product called the QL-900, which can print, you know, wider format, 8-inch-wide essentially labels. Then our T2-PRO, which is kind of our flagship product now, very high volume, rivals, you know, commercial printers.
You know, you can print up to 13 inches wide on that, and very large runs are supported. The last one there, called the T3-PRO, is one of our OEM products. If you take a look at our website, we also introduced last year, as we're doing more and more of this business, an OEM section where we'll actually design print engines into the OEM's machine and handle that function for them. They'll just buy that and then sell that, you know, with their whole machine. This slide just shows some more on the products. I'll, you know, let you look at that offline. Just for, again, people who are not familiar with our business, I want to show some of the labeling applications. The biggest segment for us is food and beverage.
It's been that way for quite a while, and it's a range of customer sizes too, from, you know, small, you know, kind of, local bakery, you know, sandwich shop type companies, all the way up to very large, you know, Fortune 500 type, suppliers that want unique, fits for highly variable type markets. And then you see cleaning supplies and medical is big for us. Also, you know, medical, DIY, for example, things if you go into, you know, Home Depot or Lowe's, you'll see a lot of those packages now that have a photographic-type picture on there. You know, it's an elbow joint or a, you know, a different screw fastener so people can just match up the picture.
You see that a bit in retail too, like on shoe boxes instead of just saying, you know, black and white label telling you what kind of shoe it is. Now you can see the picture right in the box. So it's definitely a growing business, across the spectrum there. And with the addition of Astro Machine, so Astro Machine's acquisition, mentioned back in August of 2022, they also made label printers for some of our competitors. And they broadened their product line within labels, but they also had part of the business that's in adjacency, which we weren't in, which is kind of the flat pack, printing, especially for the mail and mail handling business. Now that in the US we're getting into the campaign season, you'll start to see these postcards come out. Most of those are printed on this type of equipment.
It lets you know some of the bigger producers, and you would know their names. Big mail handling companies are our customers in that space. The other thing we do with these type of products and like that OEM T3-PRO I mentioned is we can print directly on packages. So not only a label that can go on the product, but the package material itself. Paper bags is a big thing now with you know a lot of environmentally conscious areas wanting to get away from plastic bags, going to paper bags. So we have a number of OEMs who make paper bag manufacturing machines now integrating our print engine into those machines so they can come out pre-printed. Another big growth driver in this PI market is the e-commerce part of it.
So e-commerce more and more, you want things delivered to you that are branded on the outside. So we're seeing a big uptick on that for our overprinter business as well. And kind of speaking of e-commerce, we did launch last year our own web platform. So our customers, both new and existing, can go on, they can buy products there, they can reorder, they can pay their invoices. So we've opened that service up. It's been a nice thing for our existing customers, but also from a lead development point of view for new customers. And just looking at the financials, just kind of a top-level review. You can see that, you know, revenue was a bit, you know, slow growth last year because we had this supply issue I talked about on earlier calls.
You know, one of our ink suppliers had some issues that did hurt us last year. That's coming back online this year. But you did see that, through the restructuring that we did as well as focusing on higher margin products, our margins are up dramatically in this business. You know, going on a year-over-year basis, essentially almost doubling, you know, from 6.6% to 12.2%. And this slide talks a little bit about that transaction. I did that on earlier calls, so I won't go over it again today. But that's working out pretty much right on plan, even ahead of plan on what we had for that restructuring. Let me switch now to the test and measurement segment, so we can, you know, go through that, and then I'll open up for questions.
So this business is a little more straightforward in that, we know exactly who the customers are. They're either manufacturing a plane or they're flying a plane. And I always get this question, so I put the slide in here now to give you an idea of where the printers are located. Typically, it's that pedestal between the pilot and co-pilot. And you pretty much won't be on a plane that does not have our printer. So if there's a printer on the plane, and most aircraft, commercial, military, business, have flight deck printers, they're manufactured by, AstroNova. It could be one of the acquired brands, and I'll talk about that in a second. But, you know, take a look next time in your airplane, take a peek in the cockpit, you'll see those. Why do they have them?
It's a question I get up very often for people who are not familiar with the aviation world. It's a safety and workload reduction feature for the pilots. And one of the unique features of the printer is that it lets air traffic control send messages to all aircraft in a certain area or worldwide, for that matter, simultaneously, which you can't do one by one calling them up on the radio. It also gives the pilots nice—they like to have written documentation for certain things, even though they might be able to find it, you know, four levels deep into a screen, but they like to keep certain things always in front of them. And they would have this on paper.
this example, you can blow it up and look at it later on, but basically what it's saying is in a certain sector, it's saying, "Hey, everyone be on lookout between 40 and 50,000 feet for a large white balloon." And I think you guys know what that's about. So let me just jump to what we're doing in this space to increase efficiencies and profitability. So you see on the left pie chart, we acquired three different product lines, the biggest of which came from Honeywell. They had the A320 and the 737 contract. We also acquired product lines from Miltope and RITEC. And the red is our ToughWriter brand, which is the newest state-of-the-art product. And what we're doing is going back to these manufacturers and then working out, it's obviously a highly regulated industry, getting these things transitioned to ToughWriter brand.
That's where on the right side, where we expect to be, kind of that Pac-Man has eaten up most of it by the ToughWriter brand. So we have, we can go from 55 SKUs down to, you know, a handful. And, you know, a lot of commonality in parts , which will let us reduce our inventory. We have to keep a high amount of inventory in this business because of the requirements of the contracts that we support the aircraft type, for example, 737, until there's 3 left anywhere in the world. So that requires us a lot of end-of-life things to buy out a lot of product. This will make us more efficient and let us reduce our inventory. And in this slide, again, you can take a look at it, but we pretty much cover the waterfront, or I should say airfront, maybe for aerospace.
Anyone making or supporting aircraft builds or operation typically are our customers. And it's good news for the aerospace industry now. We went through the MAX crash and COVID, which were some down years, but now it's in a nice upward trend, and this just gives you an idea of how that trend is running, from, you know, production point of view, just for the two biggest programs, the 737 and the A320, which make up roughly 60% of commercial aircraft deliveries. You see that, and you can see on this next slide, you know, commercial is the biggest part of our new aircraft deliveries, but we're also in the business and regional jet, military, and actually in some in-flight entertainment systems. We're at the purser station, and some of those will have a printer as well.
The other part of the test and measurement segment are these data acquisition systems, which kind of built out the NASA legacy I talked about. We've expanded that out in the last year or two, for other industries that need very high-performance data acquisition, you know, similar to what is required for rocket telemetry. So we've got some of that in, the biggest space now is in the power generation area, whether it's solar or nuclear. Those are our two big fields there. And there's some, you know, light rail applications as well. That just shows that. And then again, similar story here in terms of growth, a little bit faster growth in the aerospace area, but also nice improvements in the margin picture. And again, it's showing Q4 over Q4, so you get a feel for that. So let me just close with why AstroNova.
You know, it's the four parts of our strategy that I mentioned earlier. And again, without going through the text there, let me just wrap up with reasons you may want to invest. So key market positions, you know, it's pretty clear to see where that is in aerospace. And also we invented that, on-site digital label printing segment a while ago. We're the strongest there. We're the only ones that provide that unique solution that I talked about, which includes everything from the software through to the label media and support services for our customers. High recurring revenue has been a theme for a while. It's typically in the high 50% range of our business.
And then, looking at capitalization on these secular trends, which basically what it means is the aerospace market's growing, consumer products, more people want to have different varieties driving down to lower economic quantities in terms of, "I want to have, Bill and Mary's wedding. I want a case of wine for that," so they could do things like that that they couldn't do before. And you know, a wide variety of different, customizations that people can do in the product identification space. And then we've got the nice track record of M&A, and we continue to look for new opportunities there. So with that, let me just wrap it up and open up for any questions you guys may have.
All right, great. Thanks, Greg. Let me just start. It sounds like you're still seeing growth in the aerospace industry, but are the issues at Boeing impacting their production, or do they have any impact on your business?
Yeah, well, it's not growing as fast as it we would like it to grow. We probably projected early, but, you know, our line of balance, the forecasts that we get from Boeing, are consistent. You know, they're not just not growing as fast. They have been decreased, let's put it that way. And they're actually increasing in some product lines like the 787. So, yeah, we're hoping that they get that additional production online soon. But a big part of that business is also the MRO function, right? So we have tens of thousands of these printers all over the world. You know, and yeah, they're high quality.
They have a five-year warranty typically, but, you know, they do wear out and break. So the MRO piece of our business is a big part of that as well.
Okay, can you just talk about maybe market penetration of maybe in-house label printing versus the use of commercial, like outsourced commercial, and what the opportunity is for, I guess, further adoption of some of your in-house printing solutions?
Sure. Yeah, it's still today our quote-unquote biggest competitor are the commercial printers. You know, somewhere in the 85%-90% of the market for digital label printing is done by large commercial printers who buy these multimillion-dollar machines that do high volume. They're typically focused on keeping those machines running at a high volume pace.
So people who need, you know, 10,000, 20,000, maybe even 50,000 labels are kind of second-class citizens a lot, and they can't get things turned as quickly as they might like. Plus, if you go the commercial label route, then you've got, you know, kind of these big rooms of all the different labels for all your different products. And the benefit, for us in that kind of 10%-15% space is they can print what they need when they want it. They have a smaller inventory. You know, you have generic labels. You know, we have all different types, but you only keep, you know, raw material there and you print it on demand. So we're seeing more and more growth in that.
The e-commerce is one of the big drivers, like I mentioned in the presentation, where people want to have more and more products going through, you know, companies like Amazon. And because of that, they've got to have, you know, their order rates jump around a lot, and they can, it d oesn't really matter because whatever the orders they get that day, they can print the labels that day.
Okay. This question here around the company's revenue comes from consumables. Oh, how much of the revenue comes from consumables or sources outside of hardware, and what is the margin difference between those?
Yeah, we don't break out the margin differential on that, but like I showed in the deck, we have only about a third of our business is hardware, and that's, you know, we don't break that out between product identification and test and measurement. So.
I think we lost Greg here. Oh, maybe I'll hop back on.
Did you catch that or no?
No, sorry, you froze for a second. Looks like we're having some connection issues. Yeah, you there?
I'll try to cut the video, see if that helps.
Okay. All right, I hear you. Okay. Yeah.
We'll turn the video off, and then that'll help, I think.
Okay.
Did you get the answer or I need to repeat it?
Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah. No, you got cut off.
Okay. Yeah, so typically 1/3 hardware, 55% is going to be supplies, and then another, you know, remainder is going to be service agreements and spare parts.
Okay. You mentioned, I guess, the introduction of a lower-end printing solution. How much does that expand your addressable market? Do you see that as like a kind of a tip of the spear opportunity to just get in with accounts and maybe expand to higher-end solutions beyond that?
Yeah, Greg, that's exactly it. All we found is a lot of our, you know, lead generation activities, once we sold them at the, you know, start entry-level printer for us at that time was like, you know, $6,000. People would hang up or they'd drop off. And then, you know, we did some market research on that and found out that there's a lot of customers that we could pick up in this, you know, sub-$2,000 range where they can just put in their credit card. And it's a mix now, what we found out now that we're in this space. It's doing a few things for us.
It's capturing these low-end customers, some of which who then say, "Hey, you know, I'm paying a lot for the ink because the ink costs more per print on the smaller end." But then as their volumes grow, they're better off moving into a higher-level product, and we've got a nice, you know, migration path there. It's kind of like you start out with a Civic, and we hope that they're going to buy an, you know, MDX one day or something.
Yeah, yeah, no, okay, makes sense. There's a question here around your operating margins. I guess, you know, they were relatively strong in the fourth quarter. Is that sustainable as you look into this year and beyond?
Yeah, and our forecast is for that to be, you know, slightly increasing for the year, for the full-year. I mean, you know, quarter-to-quarter could move around a little bit based on the mix, but yeah, the trends are good. Aerospace looks solid and will continue growing. And then, you know, we've got a nice margin on the mix of products that we have in product identification.
Okay, and I guess a corollary to this, do you have longer-term margin targets for each segment or the business as a whole?
We do internally, and you know, we did release something in the, you know, last quarter's report where we did talk about looking to increase that, you know, 13%-14% is where our target is, and then looking to go beyond that, you know, slight increases, you know, in the years after that as well.
Okay. And what are your capital allocation priorities? It doesn't look like you pay dividend, but do you buy back stock or, you know, what are you doing with your cash flow?
Yeah, so in the past, we did do both of those. And then what we're focused on now is that, first of all, you know, what do we need for the business, you know, for normal operations? It's not a capital-intensive business. So typically, it's going to be, you know, for planning purposes, people can look at, you know, probably less than $2 million, you know, which is less than depreciation for our regular business needs. And then we look at, well, where's the best investment? Whether it's an M&A, is it, you know, it's kind of a capital allocation question. We're looking to grow the business. So we want to grow the top line as quickly as we can to get more leverage.
So that could be organically or inorganically. So that's the next investment. It could be an R&D, for example, or it could be through an acquisition.
Okay, are you comfortable with the company's amount of leverage, or would you be willing to increase it for the right acquisition? How do you view that?
Yeah, as you can see from our last statement, you know, we did pay down a fair amount of our debt, so we're in a very good position right now. So certainly, we could handle more leverage. You know, we're not that levered right now. But, you know, we don't want to go, you know, too far north of 3X, let's put it that way.
Okay. All right, well, it looks like we're right up at the end of our allotted time. So I just want to thank you, Greg, for presenting here for us this afternoon or this morning. Everyone else for listening in, if you didn't have a question answered, hopefully you could get that done in a one-on-one session with Greg. So with that, we will wrap it up.
Thanks, Greg. Yeah, and thanks everyone for attending. And if you didn't have a one-on-one, you can feel free to reach out to us, and we'll try to set something up after the conference.
All right. Thanks, everyone. Bye.