...associated with, and we're very proud to work with. Doing the presentation today is Greg Woods, the CEO, and the new CFO, Tom DeByle. So, why don't I turn it over to them? Before I finish, there is a spot for questions on your screen. Feel free to ask to send them in, and the plan is basically here to have a 20-25-minute presentation, and then open it up for questions. With that, let me turn it over to Greg. Go ahead, sir.
Great. Thank you, Peter, and thanks, everyone, for joining us here today. We've got, as Peter mentioned, a presentation. We'll walk you through, give you a little orientation of the company for people who may not be familiar, and then be happy to take your questions at the end. So just a quick warning on forward-looking statements. In addition to point out to people today who aren't familiar with the company, we are a January 31 year-end, so we did release our Q1 numbers, and I'll refer to those as well as the full year, FY 2024, which was last year for us. Just to give you guys proper perspective, and of course, we can't talk about Q2 during today's call.
Looking at FY 2024, giving you an overview there, the company finished just over $148 million in revenue with 365 employees. We did do an acquisition, which I'll get to a little bit later, which adds to those numbers. Customers pretty well, you know, cover the world with our aerospace business, test measurement business, and our product identification product lines. This growth playbook that we've had, we've been following for a number of years, and it's really made up with different these four elements that you see on the screen here. Product innovation, which we've got a very strong engineering team, that we've grown organically as well as through our acquisitions.
Acquisitions are a part of our strategy, so it's a combination of organic growth with strategic M & A, and we've done 6 transactions so far in recent history. Expanding out geographically, you know, you saw on the first slide, we've got things in over 150 countries, so we're pretty well covered. We'd look to further enhance our presence in different areas of the world, where we see future growth opportunity, and then all these items, by the way, there'll be more in detail in the presentation. The fourth element is the operational excellence, which is what we call the AstroNova Operating System that we use as the overall way we run our business here at AstroNova.
To give you an idea how the revenue breaks up, and it was kind of a typical year, a little bit light on the test and measurement percentage, but these are pretty typical numbers. You know, of that $148 million, you know, 30% was test and measurement segment, and 70% in the product identification segment. And then you look at the type of revenue within that, supplies is a big part of our business. It ranges, you know, kind of in the low 50s to high 50s. Typically, it was 54% last year of our business, and then another 13% was kind of recurring revenue. It's service and other, we call it. So you can see that, one-third of our business is, non-recurring in the hardware section, and two-thirds, roughly, is, recurring type revenue.
To give you an idea of the segments, so our product identification segment, that's on the left, in the kind of the purple color there. And the primary part of that business today, the largest volume, is in the label business. So we make both inkjet and toner-based printers in a wide variety of sizes. I'll talk about all of this later on in more detail, but just to give you the overview. And we make both tabletop and then professional press size units as well. And besides labeling, we also do a direct-to-package, where we can print on packages and boxes, mail, et cetera. And then we have a thermal transfer part of that business that does more rugged printing.
For example, for tire industry, you know, where it's a very rugged environment, you can't use inks and toners in that typical environment. And then with the recent MTEX acquisition, which I'll talk about, we actually add direct-to-package printing, and direct-to-fabric printing. And we also can print on flexible material, that's used in pouches and things like that. Switching to the test and measurement segment, there's actually two product lines within that, so we break them out just to give you a feel for that. That's all aerospace and defense related, but the, what we call aerospace, are products that actually go on airplanes, and that's could be military, business, commercial, et cetera. So primarily, the biggest product line there within that aerospace section is the flight deck printers, and we cover a wide range of market.
It's probably rare you'd be on a plane that does not have one of our products. We also make Ethernet switches, which are hardened switches that we have kind of a commercial and military grade of those switches. The test and measurement part of that test and measurement segment. And by the way, we call it test and measurement segment for historical reasons, 'cause that's really where the company started. Back in 1969, Astro- Med, at the time the company was called, did work for NASA on rocket telemetry, you know, firing the rocket up and collecting the data. Today, we still do that for actually most Western militaries and anyone else shooting up a rocket, you know, or missile, uses our tracking equipment for that.
And there's a wide variety of other uses for that today as well, which we'll get into. So that's a quick overview of the two segments of our business that we report on. So switching to that, acquisition timeline, so you can see that... We started out with two acquisitions in the aerospace line, and then followed up with our first acquisition of TrojanLabel in Denmark for the product identification side, moving us into kind of a higher production rate versus our tabletop business. And then in 2017, we kind of finished what we had to our planned consolidation of that flight deck printer business with the acquisition of the product lines from Honeywell, which Honeywell at the time, and now of course we have it, is for the 737 and A320 aircraft.
So that gave us a big chunk of the overall market when we finished that third acquisition. Then, roughly, actually it was two years ago this August, the beginning of August, we acquired a company in Chicago called Astro Machine, which focused on... One-third of the business was labeling, the other part was mail handling and direct-to-package printing. Then just this May, May 6th, actually, we acquired a company in Portugal called MTEX, and I'll give you more information on that one. But they have a wide variety of products, mostly larger products, for bigger production operations, again, in the label printing as well as direct-to-package printing markets. To give you an idea how we're set up around the world, we have, we have three regions of the world.
The way we set it up right now, our headquarters is right here in West Warwick, Rhode Island. We have a factory and a production facility and headquarters for EMEA, based just outside of Frankfurt, in Germany. And then in Asia, we have our headquarters in... We actually have two headquarters there. We have the Asia headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, with distribution facilities in Shanghai. And then for aerospace, it's based out of Singapore. And this map just gives you a flavor for where we have our products and customers today around the world. So pretty well covering the major economies of the world. And now a little more detail on the different segments of our business. Looking first at the larger, the product identification business.
You can see on the left, we have the annual growth in the column charts, and then in the red line, you can see the growth, the operating margin, you know, year to year for the different businesses. And in here, I did break out the Q1 year-over-year comparisons. And again, that's all we can talk about today. We'll finish—We've already finished our Q2. We'll report on that on September 11th. But you can see revenue was down a little bit year- over- year for the quarter. Had to do with some delivery issues on some supplies, part of that business. But in spite of that, you can see the nice improvements we made on the operating profit side of that business.
Of course, as revenue continues to grow, we expect that that improvement would continue. Part of that was driven by this acquisition. We didn't announce this previously, but just to kind of recap it here, once we had Astro Machine about a year of ownership, we went through and looked at overlap between products, systems, employees, manufacturing capabilities, et cetera, and did a bit of a consolidation there to make sure we didn't have too much overlap, and to make the business more efficient. You can see the different bullets here. This presentation, by the way, is online, so you can download it from our website for the investor section.
We did consolidate a number of our facilities, and a lot of the manufacturing that we had both in Asia and here in West Warwick, we consolidated to Chicago, where Astro Machine was located. Because they have a much larger, extensive set of equipment, personnel, and it made more sense to have them take over that manufacturing rather than do it in multiple places. A lot of times people ask, you know, "What's your growth strategy? Why do you guys do so well in the product identification space?" It's part of it really comes back to the genesis of the first digital label printer that was invented by AstroMed at the time back in 1994. Because of that, they had to put a whole network of support services around that.
So obviously, we make the printer and the software that goes with it, but also the label, you know, supplies, which could be, you know, ink, toner, thermal transfer ribbons, but then the support services that go with that. So the beauty of that is the customer gets that full solution, and then it's very kind of a seamless operation for them. So you get a printer from us, you know, it's our support, it's our material, and we're one of the largest producers of label inkjet-receptive label material in the world. And if you look at the acquisitions that we've done within this space, you know, we have kind of covering all in our internal organic development as well.
You've got from an entry-level product, which is in the, you know, sub-$2,000 level, to some of the larger machines. As you move up into the light production, which was the Trojan acquisition, you're kind of now in the $20,000-$30,000 range. Then very large production machines from the MTEX acquisition, which goes, you know, up into, you know, $60,000-$70,000, and up to, you know, several hundred thousand dollars, depending on the machine type that you're looking at. And they can do full systems. Again, we'll have a little bit more of MTEX on the next slide. So why are we interested in MTEX? It's a company based in Portugal. We've known them for a number of years.
Matter of fact, we looked at them very closely when we did the Trojan acquisition back in 2017. At that point, they didn't have some of the technology that they have today, and it became much more interesting to us over the last year or so. Got to know them better and, actually, closed the deal in May 6th of this year. Very nice production. You can see an overview of their factory here in the top picture on the right. You know, large production facility, great engineering technical team. They've developed some fantastic products. Some things that we had on our drawing board that they actually had done and shipped, so they're really cut our development time down by a number of years. So pretty excited about that.
They add 76 employees to our overall population, so now I think we're at 440-ish right now. And the other thing that was nice about them, it's a similar model, right? In terms of you're selling the hardware, and they've got a large recurring revenue piece of it, largely driven off of the ink and supplies that goes into the machines and some of the wear parts that are in those machines. And they added some nice distribution for us. We're always kind of weak in the Iberian Peninsula area, and of course, they're located there, so that's very strong, as well as some Middle East dealers that they added to the picture.
What we're looking at them to add, you know, in the range of $8 million-$10 million in revenue for us this fiscal year, even though it's a partial year. Switching to the test and measurement segment, you can see, again, the same types of graphs here. Yeah, this business is actually ramping up better than what it shows on these Q1 results. In Q1 we had, and I talked about this in the press release that we put out there, we had $several million of product that we weren't able to ship due to a supplier that didn't deliver some key components to us.
We've got most of that taken care of now, and, you know, in Q2, Q3, I think by the end of Q3, we'll probably have all of that caught up, you know, in the aerospace business. So one thing that people always ask me, I should put in a presentation now, "Why are there printers in the airplane? Yeah, what are the pilots doing with them?" So if you look in the cockpit, next time you get in, take a turn to the left, look in the cockpit, you'll see one of our printers. Pretty much every plane you might fly on will have one. They're either an 8-inch wide or 4-inch wide, and the primary purpose is it's a workload and safety issue for the pilots.
There's certain things you get on your screens, but they don't wanna have, you know, some of these text messages and a lot of detail about, runway closure, crane operating near the runway, a lot of these things that are, you know, they're not always known before the plane takes off, and they can change while you're in the air. The printer can just run and give that out to the pilots, as well as other things that are, you know, noted here in the side, you know, weather and flight plan information, Notice to Airmen , which is, things like I was mentioning, like the cranes operating near the runway, or we have lighting system out, that type of thing.
They want a hard copy of that, so they have a, you know, reference when they're doing their, you know, basic flight reviews. They're gonna do their, dialogues before they have landings, that they're gonna go through, and they wanna have that in writing, make notes on it. You know, if people aren't familiar, English is the international language of flying, but not, all countries are as proficient in English as most Americans are. So they might jot notes down in their, in their foreign language on the paper as well, to help them, with better understanding of what the messages are saying. It's also required for certain flights, especially over water, you have to have a printer for a variety of reasons, which I don't have time to go into today.
The one on the right is just a sample message. If you can read it there, it's a little small on screen, but it essentially is telling the pilots and basically all the pilots in a certain region, all the airplanes, you know, and this could be thousands of airplanes, can get the message simultaneously on a printer, which you couldn't do that verbally calling out. And it says, "Your report of large white balloon in vicinity," and it gives the coordinates of it, "between flight level, you know, 400, which is 40,000 feet- 50,000 feet." I think everyone knows what that white balloon was all about, but that's a way to warn everyone because there's no...
Between, in that space, it's all controlled, but, you know, the balloon is detectable necessarily by radar, so they wanna make sure the pilots were looking out for it. Just an example. So if you take a look at, one of our big strategic, elements here. So I showed before, we did the three acquisitions, in the, aerospace, business. The Honeywell was the largest, market share. ToughWriter is our brand, and we also had the RITEC brand and the Miltope brand. So we've got a program that's underway. We've already made some good progress on it to consolidate as much as possible to the ToughWriter brand, to simplify our manufacturing. Our product is very new and up-to-date. It's a much better product. The Honeywell, for example, was designed in the eighties, to give you an idea.
So ours, you know, weighs less, it prints better, has a lot of new features that the pilots like. So we got programs going on with a number of the different aircraft OEMs, as well as airlines, to make this transition. We expect to complete it by fiscal year 2027, which will have some great operational efficiencies for us, will certainly improve our margins as we make the switch to ToughWriter brand and products. And just to give you an idea of where we sell these products, so, you know, the aircraft OEM, that's a, you know, like a Boeing or an Airbus, for example. And then there's a tier one players who sell to the OEMs. These are all our customers, so they could be a Honeywell, Collins, you know, Safran, Thales, Astronics, and TransDigm.
So we sell to those guys, and then we sell to about 240 airlines directly. So we've got quite an extensive presence in the aerospace business, and I won't go through these, but these are different models that we are actually standard on. And, you know, we're in the commercial space, any plane you might go on, and then business regional jets, and the smaller ones, Embraer. Probably a lot of people have flown those, ATRs. And then and military as well. So the larger military aircraft, C-130, C-17s, tankers. And the fourth area, which, you know, is not as big of a segment for us, is some of the in-flight entertainment systems are actually have printers, have our printers built into those.
So that gives you the full range of where we go with that. And the other product line within that test and measurement and reporting segment is the data acquisition business. Jim mentioned that's where we started, and I just happened to be the last couple of days out in White Sands Missile Range working with- They're doing a major upgrade of our equipment out there, and it's pretty impressive to see, you know, a lot of our equipment and a variety of buildings out there, and one of the bigger test sites in the U.S. So that's a big part of it, and we've diversified out a bit, too, 'cause it's kind of the gold standard in the test and measurement world.
So we've got rail applications, some industrial applications, and then more recently, quite a bit in power and utility, including data centers, where it's very important to them to measure exactly what's going on with their systems, and to check the operation of, look at UPS. If they have a power glitch, they wanna be able to detect that right away and be able to take proper action. So that's a quick overview of our business segments. Just to take a look at our FY 25 targets, which is—this is the year that we're in. We're looking at mid-single digit organic growth over that $148 million that we had last year. And we're looking at the adjusted EBITDA margin within that to be in the 13%-14% when we finish the year.
And to look at another 100 basis points per year growth after that, for at least the next 2 years, is really what we've got in our strategic plan. And for all the investors out there, you know, reasons to, you know, think about making a further investment or initial investment in AstroNova is the strong end-market positions that we're in. You know, in the PI segment, I mentioned, you know, we actually invented that on-site digital label business back in 1994, so we're very strong in that business. Of course, aerospace, I spent a little bit of time giving you that idea, that you know, we're well entrenched there as well. And we do have a lot of new products coming out.
If you watch our press releases or go back and take a look at our investor site, you'll see typically, in any given year, 2-4 major products being released, and then, a handful of accessory or smaller projects as well, coming out, on a, you know, sometimes a quarterly basis. And one of the things that, we love, about our business model is the high recurring revenue percentage. And it's part of giving our customers that full solution, and it works out really well for us, in terms of keeping in touch with our customers and then growing the business over the long run. And finally, the M&A piece, which we've talked about there. So with that, that's what I have for the presentation today, and be happy to take, any questions, so Peter, that people may have.
Okay, I think we're ready. Just some general questions. One of the questions is just about Boeing and its difficulties, and how it's affecting you at this point.
Yeah, we'd love to see them do better. Well, I think as people who followed us in the past know, we kind of went, we had the, MAX crashes, and then Covid. So we had, three tough years in the aerospace business. But the MAX is a great aircraft. Yeah, they do have some production issues, they're going through right now. They need to get a third line, production line set up for that. That's not actually been approved by the FAA yet, so their rates are in the mid-30s per month, maybe ticking up to high 30s. Whereas compared to Airbus, and they're in the 60s, and we'd love to see, Boeing get back up to that... It sounds like they're doing the right things.
They've got, you know, a change in the CEO, which, we are happy to see. We think, getting an operations/engineering type, individual there was a good move. And I think they'll get it done pretty rapidly. And it's, it's a great company. The, the, you know, the products are great, and we just wanna see them ramp up. We're, we're on a number of their platforms, actually. We're designed in, in the 777X, which is yet to be approved for standard equipment on that. But the 787 business, we're seeing that coming back, pretty strongly now. So I think it'll ramp up, and, you know, as that continues to ramp, that'll be good for our business as well.
Just in general, it seems like that's a razor and razor blade type business, that the supply needs are still pretty important once you've sold the product.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we... And, you know, unlike the razor, razor blade business, we like to make our money on the razor as well as the razor blades, but
Right.
Yeah, we, you know, that is our model. We look for businesses like that. If you look at our acquisitions, they kind of all fit that, model. And, yeah, the thing that's different about us in the product identification business, where we have the most, recurring revenue from the supplies, is that, we're about the only one in our business. Any competitor, none of our competitors really do this. Is that we are a huge supplier of the label media, and we've developed that, and we have a website now. People can order, and they get product, in 5-7 days. We have over 100. You know, things from, you know, cryogenic labels for medical applications, things for different food safe applications. So we can get customers exactly what they need, when they need it.
Okay. And you mentioned earlier, and in the first quarter, you had some difficulties with your suppliers. Have those been resolved at this point in time? And does that mean that you know, you may see a little bit of a bump in revenues here in the second and the third quarter as a result?
Yeah, so they are resolved. No, it was late in this quarter that we got it back on. You know, if I look at the big ones, you know, there's always little ones, but the big ones that impacted us, we have gotten deliveries now, and we've got their quality approved. So you see some impact in Q2. And like I said in the presentation there, I think by the end of Q3, we should have most of that back online. A little might trickle into Q4, but you know, for the kind of the last several weeks of Q2, and then in through Q3, we should be getting all those shipments.
That's great. Tom, you're the new CFO, and you've been there a little while. Where do you see the opportunities in terms of, for the company at this point in time?
I think, continuing the M&A would be one area. I think there's some operational improvements that we can put in place, some better cash management. So those are the kind of the things that I'm focusing on right now.
That's great. And in terms of acquisitions, I guess, Greg, what are you seeing out there in terms of prices and availability?
So, well, in the aerospace area, the prices are hugely high, and there's not as much availability as we would like, you know, if I look at that segment. We have seen a few things that, for example, one that one of the investment bankers brought to us was for, windshield wipers on airplanes. But, you know, that's I guess it was recurring revenue on the rubber there or something, I don't know. But that didn't fit our stream.
We turned that one down, but, you know, we've got a couple that we're looking at there now, and then we actually have, you know, quite a number that we're looking at in product identification and the test and measurement product line, where there's a lot more activity, a lot more companies to kind of fit our window, which, you know, we're kind of in the—if I talk about from a revenue point of view, you know, things that are in the $20 million-$60 million in revenue is kind of our sweet spot.
Right.
You know, we could go above, above that if we need to, if the numbers justify it, but that's kind of the business that we're looking at right now.
Okay, there seem to be a lot of questions about margins. I guess the easy thing is to start with pricing. How are you seeing it? How are you seeing the competitive environments in your, you know, in these two business segments at this point?
Yeah, so if we look at the two different segments, so we have less direct competition in the test and measurement segment, you know, aerospace and T&M product lines. And you know, we're very well-established there. So for those particular products, some of it's regulated by contract, because we have long-term contracts with some of the airlines. So we're limited sometimes to the PPI, for example, in terms of how much we can raise prices there. In the PI business, it's more flexible, but we also have more competition there. So we typically, you know, look at annual price raises that are above PPI, you know, where we can justify it or where we come out with a new product. As part of...
We try to run that product innovation cycle such that we can deliver a better value to the customer, but also it improves our margin as we develop better technologies that kind of lowers our cost to manufacture.
Okay. How about on the cost side? What are you seeing on the cost side at this point, particularly labor?
Labor for us is, yeah, it's kind of, you know, kind of what you see in the general economy. You know, you know, in the single digit, kind of, I think it's in the mid-single digit kind of range, you know, where we see price increases around that. You know, one nice thing about the Portugal acquisition is that the labor rates there are much lower than they are in other parts of the world, including the U.S. So you get, you know, very high quality individuals, and, you know, just because of the going rate in that part of the world is a little bit lower, that does lower our labor costs a bit.
Okay, we're running low, a little bit low on time, but so I'll ask you a very specific question here that was asked, which is: Do you plan to increase the capacity at your Chicago plant?
We will have to do that. We're already looking at if we can move some of the inventory to another location to, you know, utilize that space better for manufacturing and not so much storage. I think we've got about roughly 30% of the space is, you know, storage-type areas. So we might be doing that in the near term. Maybe it's a realtor broker that was asking about space, I don't know, but-
I know, but somebody who knows your storage much better than I do at this point, or knows that-
Yes
... much better than me.
We like our location, and, you know, we're happy with that space. It's just that, we only can move the walls out so far in.
Okay. All right, I guess we're coming to the end. Are there any closing comments you or Tom would like to make?
No, the only thing I would say from a closing point of view is, if you're not on our schedule today, at the Sidoti Conference, you know, feel free to reach out to us. We'd, you know, love to talk to you. We're pretty open in terms of inviting people to visit the facility as well. If you're in the New England area, you know, feel free to, you know, give us a call, and we'll set something up for you.
All right, I really appreciate it, and anyone who knows me knows that I like cash flow a great deal.
Good.
So it's always, it's always good to have you on board. All right, I'd like to thank everybody for attending. I'd like to thank both Tom and you, Greg, for being part of our conference once again, and like, we'd like to wish everybody a great, great day. Thank you, all.
Thanks, Peter.
Thanks, Peter.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Bye now.
Bye-bye.