Okay, up next, we're going to go ahead and get started with Ampco-Pittsburgh. It's one of our investor relations clients that's traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AP. On behalf of the company today, you will be presented by the CEO, Brett McBrayer, the CFO, Mike McAuley, and the presidents of the two operating businesses. Sam Lyons is the president of Union Electric Steel, and Dave Anderson, who is the president of Air and Liquid Processing, and recently was announced that he will be resuming the Chief Financial Officer role as of January 1. With that, I'll now hand the presentation over to Brett. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Just a quick snapshot of Ampco-Pittsburgh Corporation. Founded in 1929, roughly 1,500 employees. Revenue is a little over $400 million annually. Market cap now is a little over $50 million, so we've grown a little bit since we've done the presentation, so that's positive. If you look at our business, we're basically a holding company, so we have a mixed bag of businesses in our portfolio. We break it into two segments. Our largest segment is our forging, casting, and our product segment, and then our next biggest, which is growing rapidly, and you'll hear more about that, is our air and liquid processing. We're number one in the market in North America and Europe on our forging and cast products portfolio, and number one in North America with heat exchangers in our nuclear power plants. We're in 90% of all the nuclear power plants in North America, and we're a leading producer of pumps in the U.S. military. The strategic plan is pretty simple. Right now, we've been focused on getting rid of unprofitable assets in our portfolio. As of today, you'll see that we have no unprofitable businesses holding, and that just happened very recently in the last quarter. Improved from $78 million of annual EBITDA to the businesses with the removal of those unprofitable assets, growth in Air and Liquid Processing, and then also strengthening our balance sheet, and then continuing to grow through efficiencies in our operational footprint and seizing on the macro trends in North America and Europe. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Sam Lyon. He's going to talk a little bit more about his forging, casting, and product segment. Sam.
Good morning. I'm Sam Lyon. I run the Union Electric Steel, and as Brett said, we're the largest Western rolling mill roll manufacturer. If you exclude China, number one markets are—we're number one in North America and Europe, and roughly 70% of our sales goes into those two areas. As you'll see, that's where our footprint mainly is as well. We produce two, really three different products: backup rolls, work rolls, and then non-rolls. We call that forged engineered products. The majority of our sales is rolls, 90- ninety percent depending on the year, and forged engineered products are mainly used recently to fill our capacity up, but with the tariff situation, that's a tailwind for that product. Much of that was imported from low-cost countries, and with the 232 tariffs going from 25% to 50%, that's created a pretty big barrier for imports, and so we're seeing a lot of activity in that area. Our global footprint: North America and Europe mainly, and China. In North America, our melt facility and forge facility is just outside of Pittsburgh. We have a finishing facility as well in Carnegie, which is outside of Pittsburgh, and one in Valparaiso, Indiana, for our rolls. All the FEP product is made at the forge facility and melt facility in Pennsylvania. In Europe, we had two cast roll facilities. We just recently, as Brett alluded to, exited one of them as of October 14, and so we've reduced our footprint, and that was one of the unprofitable businesses that we had.
We have a plant in Strömsbruk, Sweden, which makes the cast rolls, and then we have two joint ventures in China, one of which we operate, and the other one we're kind of a silent partner on. The Chinese joint ventures, as I just talked about, ATR is the one that we operate. We own roughly 60% of that, and we use that to team up with our facility in Sweden. We offer to some of our large customers, such as ArcelorMittal, a mixed solution where two-thirds of the rolls come out of Sweden and a third come out of China, and that allows us to have a lower overall competitive bid for them, and that's how we leverage that facility. What's a rolling mill roll? If you think about a rolling pin for cooking, it's like that, squish the metal with it. Typically, there's two rolls. There's a work roll, which is what touches the metal, and then there's the backup roll, which provides force to the work roll. Look, the work rolls, they're all consumables, but the work rolls get consumed fairly quickly. You run X tons of metal through them, then you pull them out of the mill, you resurface them, put them back in the mill, and you do that until you use up about 3 inches of the mill, then they're no good anymore, then they get replaced. As the steel and aluminum markets grow, the need for rolls grows with that, and that's the—we like that a lot. It's a razor-blade kind of a model.
The backup rolls, they last much longer, but they're still consumables, so it's roughly maybe 12-15% of our rolls are backup rolls, and the rest are work rolls as a percentage of sales. We're about $300 million. The market's about two billion dollars annually for us. Two-thirds of the rolls are cast rolls, one-third are forged, or, yeah, forged rolls. The significance is cast rolls typically go into hot strip mills, and forged rolls go into cooled mills or finishing galvanized kind of operations. Forged rolls, we produce these all in America—America and Slovenia, and the process is that you melt the steel, you produce an ingot, you forge it, squish it between some work pieces to produce a structure, and then heat-treat it, and then finish it. Again, these go into cooled mill rolls, and we're very strong in the aluminum segment. Our rolls perform very well, which is a growing market. If you look at our competitors, mainly in the U.S.: Lehigh Heavy Forge, Superior Steel, and then Villares, which is in Brazil. In Europe, you can see the competitors there. With the 232 tariffs now applying to rolls, they got expanded. That helps in North America. These European suppliers have a big barrier to send stuff over to America now, so that's a benefit for us. On the cast roll side, most of our competitors are in Europe, as we are. There's one supplier in the U.S., and that's an important fact because the U.S. is underserved. The U.S., even though there's a tariff, the U.S. supplier can't support the entire U.S. market, so we're on a very even playing field with the rest of our competition. Our plant in Sweden is energy independent, where our competitors are not.
Sweden's actually an exporter of energy, so that's a benefit we have as well. Forged engineered products, I'm not going to talk about that a whole lot, but it's everything that's not a roll, so shafting, blocks, things for injection molding, just really either rounds or blocks of steel, or also frac blocks that go into the oil and gas industry for fracking. That's a pretty small portion of our product, but it is growing, and as I stated earlier, the tariffs are providing a tailwind for that product for us. Looking at our sales, top 10 customers are roughly half of our revenue, which isn't really surprising. If you look at our major customers, like ArcelorMittal is a very large business. If you look at the top 10 steel companies, they produce much more than 50% of the global steel demand in aluminum as well. It's the same way. If you look at where we sell, I already stated it, North America and Europe is the majority of our sales, followed by Asia. A couple of key points: we invested roughly $30 million to modernize much of our equipment. Our equipment was old. It's very capital-intensive, and it needed upgraded, so most of it was for reliability and getting us to the future, but it also is more efficient as you put new equipment in. On top of that, we put a little bit of extra capacity in for FEP products to enable that to grow.
I already talked about that. A recent key development in Europe: Europe has been spending a lot of money modernizing their mills, trying to make them more carbon neutral, while at the same time increasing imports from Asia and low-cost countries. Finally, there was enough noise from the producers that just recently Europe announced that they're going to increase their quota system and make it difficult—actually decrease their quota system, but make it more difficult for imports to come into Europe. They're going to lower their quota to like 2013, 2014 levels, and then at the same time, anything above the quota will have a 50% tariff instead of a 25% tariff. The goal, if you look at the bottom right graph, is to get their market from a 65% utilization rate to an 80-85% utilization rate, which will allow their mills to run at or above the cost of capital. That's a big development, and that will be a very big tailwind for us, as it's about a 20% improvement in their utilization of their mills, which will result in them needing much more rolls, and Europe is one of our largest markets. If you look at our end market, our customers' end markets, they're all projected to grow at mid-single-digit growth rates in the next five years, which also is a tailwind for our business. If you look at North American construction, there's a lot of data centers. Our bridges are old. There's a lot of approved projects in North America. Europe is actually projected to grow a little bit coming off of a period of recession, and light vehicle production has been pretty stagnant, and that's also projected to grow along with aluminum. We are excited about this. It provides a very strong look for our future. Our business is very capital-intensive and has a fair amount of overhead, so any additional business that we get drops the bottom line at a pretty substantial drop-through rate.
If we look at just summarizing, we've executed structural changes. Brett had mentioned getting all of the nonprofitable businesses out of our footprint. The U.K. was just closed. We exited a small non-core distribution facility. We made it through the tariff situation. We think we understand that now. It was interesting. Those were announced, the most recent ones, without any definition of what the tariff really was, so that took us about a quarter to work through that to get the calculations proper to make sure as we were importing, we were importing at the correct tariff rates so that we did not get ourselves in trouble. Convincing our customers that they had to pay for it, which we've successfully done, and then really looking at the end markets that are from 2025 to 2030 look like they're in a good position to grow, so we're pretty excited about the future of the business. Dave?
Good morning. Dave Anderson. I run the air and liquid part of Ampco-Pittsburgh, and I'll walk through and share a few things about what we do and what's happening. There's a lot of positive things in the air and liquid group at the moment. Really, there are three businesses that are part of our group. There's Aerofin, who makes custom heat exchangers sold into multiple markets, industrial HVAC, and the most exciting one is nuclear power plants, which has really become a growth market at the moment. Buffalo Air Handling, custom air handling units. Number one market in recent years is the pharmaceutical market. We do a lot of work with companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, Johnson & Johnson. Then Buffalo Pumps, who makes custom pumps. Number one market for them is the U.S. Navy market. We've been a supplier on combat ships since before World War II, so there's a large market there that we deal with. There you can see some of the customers, as I mentioned. Pharmaceuticals, Aerofin doing a lot of work in industrial nuclear plants, and Buffalo Air in Merck, Pfizer, and Pumps doing primarily the U.S. Navy and power generation markets. The next few are my favorite slides. This one probably is my favorite. In 2022, Air and Liquid launched new growth plans, the intent of taking what had been a consistent but not growing business and turning it into a growing business. 55% revenue growth over the last three years. My conclusion is we've been quite successful in turning into a growth story at this point. We expect that to continue. There are markets that are growing that we're in, and there are significant barriers to entry.
It's very difficult to be a supplier to combat ships for the Navy. There's a lot of requirements, so there's not very many competitors. Same thing with the nuclear market. There's really only a couple of people that have the code welding certifications that are acceptable to supply into nuclear power plants. Two of the markets that I'm going to talk about for a minute is the U.S. Navy and the nuclear market. The U.S. Navy has long-term growth plans. They need to expand. They're chasing China, and at the moment, they realize they're not doing a great job of chasing China. They're continuing to fall behind. They have put in place funding programs, which we've been taking advantage of. We've secured funding that the Navy is writing checks to us for nine million dollars to modernize our plant. That's in process at the moment. They're paying for the equipment. The first equipment came in about a year ago. We have more equipment that's arriving at the port in the next few weeks, that will go in place, and we have more equipment coming in 2026. We're really modernizing our plant, and the great part is we're not paying for it. It's a great opportunity for us to do that, and the Navy market just continues to show really good long-term growth. I touched on briefly the nuclear market. This has really turned into a growth market, and it's a combination of reasons. You're seeing nuclear plants that are restarting that had been shut down. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa all have plants that are restarting. We supplied to all three of those in the past. We'll supply to them again. Plants that have been running are extending, which means we'll do more replacement works to those plants. As you may have heard, small modular reactors is a thing that's up and coming. We've already been dealing with some of them on working through their processes. We had our first order about six months ago from a small modular company, and our goal really in the modular market is to cast a wide net. There's a lot of players out there. We don't know who the winners will ultimately be, but our intent is to deal with all of them, so we're dealing with whoever the strong players are when it comes out. Really, growth strategies, as I talked about. We've been very successful in the last few years in growing all three of our businesses. We expect to keep doing that. We see a lot of opportunities. Our capacity has increased. We can go out into the market and do more business. That is what I have to Mike.
Thank you, Dave.
Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Mike McAuley. I'm the Chief Financial Officer, and I just have a couple of slides on financials. As Sam mentioned, we've had a couple of underperforming businesses in the portfolio for the past couple of years as we've been navigating a downturn in the steel industry that has stabilized, but we couldn't hold on for recovery. We did exit the U.K. facility in October, and we are exiting the Always Unlimited plant in Ohio in the fourth quarter as well. We will recognize some impairment charges in the fourth quarter that are non-cash. Underlying, if we look here, this is just even with those underperformers in the portfolio, we've been seeing an increase in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin over the last couple of years. I didn't show 2025 on here, but we're almost at the same level September year to date in adjusted EBITDA as 2024, so you can expect what a full year effect might look like. We do know that adjusted EBITDA margins through the September quarter are 8%, so we're going to see another growth year in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. With the exit of those facilities, we expect an additional $7-8 million rise on a step change kind of basis in adjusted EBITDA going forward on a full year run rate basis. That starts in October. It starts, let's say, mid-quarter Q4 going forward, so we're already feeling that right now, and you'll see that as part of our Q4 numbers.
Of course, as you heard from Sam and Dave, we've got additional growth opportunities to cause this to rise further in the future. Just a couple of points about the balance sheet. Ampco-Pittsburgh, we've made some strategic decisions in the last couple of years. Sam touched on one area. We took the strategic decision to invest in modernization of capital equipment in the forged and cast engineered product segment, and really that was a key factor in the uptick in net debt over the last couple of years. That's basically shown here as the CapEx bar on the bar chart. I also show a couple of other items on here, but if you look at the overall story, I think it was a step up in the CapEx to support that strategic investment in the forged and cast segment that was really the driver. Our focus in the near term is to reduce our leverage. Just a couple of points on this. With regard to a couple of the items that we face, we do have an asbestos liability that we've been servicing. The long-term actuarial trends on that item are improving. It should come down. The last time we delivered a pump with an asbestos-containing material on it was around 1985. Just so actuarially, if you look back how long ago that was, the ability to bring claims should drop in the future. Our U.S. pension plan, this is really good news, is that our U.S. pension plan, which is the bulk of our employee benefit obligations, is almost fully funded. As we sit here today, we're approaching 100%.
Of course, everything depends on the valuation at year-end, but we're approaching 100%, so that's really good news in terms of required minimum contributions. If you look at our leverage ratio, we're expected we're in the range of 4.0 now. We have a clear roadmap to get to 3.0 and then drop it further down with adjusted EBITDA growth. This is the ratio of net debt to adjusted EBITDA. We expect it to finish below 4.0 in 2025, and we look at a couple of things that are already built in or we're already expecting with the exit of the U.K. That step change in EBITDA improvement with the U.K. exit, $7-$8 million in adjusted EBITDA, that's going to improve the ratio on its own by about 0.8 times. We also expect one of the things that will be coming with that is that we expect liquidation proceeds to be able to reduce our net debt about 0.3 times further. There will be more disclosures on that going forward, but those are projections that I think are built in that are two pieces of the roadmap. There is just base EBITDA growth on top of that, as Sam and Dave described. Really good story, I think, in terms of our ability to manage down the debt and improve the balance sheet going forward. I think Brett would like to wrap up.
Thanks, Mike. Just a few comments here in summary. It is really our investment thesis. On the forged and cast side, you heard about us obviously exiting underperforming assets. The new tariffs in place, structured quota system in Europe is going to help us going forward. Our end markets in that segment are growing, which is positive for us. Air and liquid processing, David mentioned the 55% revenue growth over the last three years. Significant barriers to entry. Our long-term growth of Navy and nuclear. You think about it, the Navy's investing in us, so I think that's a pretty positive message. Ampco-Pittsburgh overall expected earnings is going to improve our debt reduction or help us with our debt reduction. We also have some realization of tax assets that are going to help us going forward. Our defined benefit plan, as Mike mentioned, is almost 100% fully funded. Free cash flow generation, we see that improving moving forward. I think a pretty exciting story overall. Last year when I did this, I spoke by myself. I thought it'd be nice to kind of spread the joy of the opportunity. I think these guys did a much better job than I did last year. Guys, thank you. At this point, we'll take any questions you may have. Yes.
Forgive me for not fully understanding, but I would not ever have to think about it again in tariffs. How much do you produce in Europe that is coming in that you have had to navigate the tariffs? Are they reciprocal? Are you sending anything out from here? Or is everything you are able to produce in Europe and sell in Europe produced here and sold here?
Sam, why don't you repeat the question first?
Yes, so make sure I got the question right. It's a tariff question on how much are we shipping from Europe to here, and is the reciprocal tariffs going back? Up until recently, with the cast facilities in Europe, roughly 40-50% of what they shipped, so $40 million or $50 million would come to the U.S. With the U.K. exiting, that'll be reduced down to, say, $20 million-$25 million roughly coming here. That tariff rate is at 15%-27%. That's kind of strange, but it depends on the makeup of the roll because it's only steel. The steel's part, the roll's part steel and part cast iron. If you look at that, in the Q4, I could tell you that we project the amount of tariffs to be roughly $1.5 million-$2 million worth of tariff cost. There is no reciprocal tariff going back. We do ship forged rolls, about 55-60% stay in North America. The rest ship outside of North America, but there's no tariffs on that product into Europe or into Brazil or into Canada or Mexico.
What's the difference between what's coming in from Europe that's tariff-first, what you're able to produce here? I mean, it's not the same product.
No, no, no. Okay. Again, what we produce in the U.S. is for cold mills, and what we produce in Europe, particularly in the U.K. and Sweden, is for hot strip mills. The products do not overlap. They are completely different products, if that makes sense. Going forward too, as the quota system and the tariff system in Europe progresses, we would anticipate shipping less from Europe into the U.S. and more from Europe into Europe, which is also a benefit on our borrowing because while the material is on the water, you do not get any credit for it at all, and it uses up borrowing capacity and time and all that kind of stuff. We see that could reduce going forward.
I wanted to ask you about the area of the processing business segment. You have seen, as you went through, some pretty robust growth over the last three years. What do you project in the next kind of two to three years? I am just wondering if that business could rival the cast products segment here in short order, or do you feel like it will be a lower growth rate from here post-cuts?
Okay. The question is related to air and liquid and the growth we've seen and will see in the future. We're going to continue to grow. We do have some growth targets out there that on most of our products, it's in the 10% range. My goal is to go right by that percentage. One day I'm going to catch Sam. That's my goal too, so. Yeah, there's a long runway for us. We grew rapidly in the first three years. We've also been doing things to increase our capacity, our ability to keep doing this. We still have more capacity. We can still put a lot more product through our facility. We've changed a lot of processes in the way we hire people so that we can get the people we need. There's still a long path forward.
Maybe just one more follow-up. What's the difference on the margin of that business of the two segments?
The question on the margins between the two segments, our margins are generally a bit higher. We do not have nearly the amount of overhead. Some of the best margins are the ones that are growing rapidly as well, the nuclear market and the Navy aftermarket. As you would imagine, when you only have a couple of other people that can produce those products, the margins are generally pretty nice because there are only a few people to deal with. We know who they are. They know us. There is more than enough market and margin for the few players that are in there.
Are you looking at any international expansion in air and liquid that is set to benefit from the growth in nuclear or also some of the rearmament and increasing defense spending that you're seeing?
Yes. The question there is on air and liquid really moving outside of North America. We do have work that we've been doing on that. We've had meetings with some people in Australia who are doing some work for the U.S. Navy in the future as part of what's called the AUKUS Group, which is really a collaboration to build submarines between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. We're working with a company in Australia to be part of that market. We also have a deal with Curtiss-Wright, who is a fairly large player in the nuclear market. Curtiss-Wright now represents us outside of North America. It gives us a salesforce that we didn't really have in places outside of North America. Yes, there are definitely active steps we're taking to expand beyond just North America in our future.
One more comment on the margin question, just because I don't want to sound like I'm less than Dave here. Recently, we've been able to push pricing in the U.S. market for forged rolls, and we've been able to increase it on the work rolls probably 700 basis points in the last three, four years. Also on the FEP products, that was an absorption fill the mill kind of a play before. It was negative margin. We've just crossed into positive margin with the tariff tailwinds. It is no longer just absorption contribution margin. It actually has a little bit of margin. We've been working hard to do that as well.