We're going to allow the time for them to populate. My name is John Franzreb. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation for the day is Ampco-Pittsburgh, ticker AP. For those who are not familiar with the company, Ampco is a holding company that operates in two segments: Forged and Cast Engineered Products and Air and Liquid Processing. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO Brett McBrayer, CFO Dave Anderson, and Sam Lyon, the president of the Forged and Cast Engineered Products group. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A icon to submit questions, and now we'll present them to management. With that said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Just a little bit about Ampco-Pittsburgh. Again, my name is Brett McBrayer. I'm the CEO. As John mentioned, we have Dave Anderson, who is our CFO, as well as our president of the Air and Liquid Processing segment. He's going to be speaking as well. Also speaking this morning will be Sam Lyon, again, president of our forged and cast engineered product segment. Ampco-Pittsburgh is a focused industrial leader executing a profitable reset. We're positioned for multi-year earnings growth and a balance sheet improvement. The company was founded in 1929 in Ampco-Pittsburgh, a diversified manufacturer serving mission-critical industrial markets across North America and Europe. The company operates through two unique segments. One is, again, the Forged and Cast Engineered Products group, which is a global market leader in forged and cast rolls used in steel and aluminum rolling mills.
And then Air and Liquid Processing, which is a high-growth platform supplying heat exchangers, air handling systems, and pumps for nuclear power, U.S. Navy combatant ships, and regulated industrial segments. 2024 revenue totaled roughly a little over $400 million, with approximately 1,500 employees leading market share positions in multiple niches. Next slide, please. In 2025, we completed our reset of the business, basically eliminating the remaining unprofitable assets in the portfolio. The next couple of years is really focused on improved performance. We're expecting $7-$8 million of annual EBITDA improvement from the reset of our portfolio. Air and Liquid continues to pursue some exciting growth opportunities in the market, and we're focused on strengthening the balance sheet. Going forward, it's going to be purely growth, utilizing our operational efficiencies to improve performance, and then capitalizing on the trends we're seeing in North America and Europe.
All right. Good morning. My name is Sam Lyon. I run the Forged and Cast Engineered Products business. A little bit about our business and what's happening. We're the market leader forged and cast rolls in the western part of the world, excluding China. Our two largest markets are North America and Europe. Roughly 90%-95% of what we do are rolling mill rolls, which are consumable products. So you think about a razor-razor blade kind of a model. They get consumed in the mill and eventually replaced. So we supply once we get into a mill, we typically stay in the mill and continue to supply them. We also supply forged engineered products, which are non-rolls, which I'll have a slide on later. That market has been growing a bit for us the last few years.
You can see the major customers that we supply on the bottom. It's all of the large steel and aluminum flat rolled products companies. It's U.S. Steel, which is part of Nippon now. I want to update that slide. Steel Dynamics, Cleveland-Cliffs, and all the major steel companies around the world. Next slide, please. We operate in the U.S., mainly in the U.S., Europe, and China. In the U.S., we produce our forged rolls, which will go into cold mills, and then in Åkers Styckebruk, Sweden, and the U.K., which was closed, produce hot mill rolls, and Slovenia produces cold mill rolls. And then I'll get into our joint ventures in China on a future slide. The Chinese joint ventures, ATR, which is Åkers TISCO, that is controlled by us. 59.88% interest in that.
We use that business to supply to China, as well as we use it to supplement our Åkers Styckebruk sales into Europe to give a blended price to the customer, which is an advantage for us. And then we have a forged roll facility that we're a joint venture in. We only have 33% interest in their non-operating partner. Just a little bit of background about what a roll is. This is a very simplified pictorial of a rolling mill, but you can see that there's rolls that deform the steel. So the steel starts out thick on the left side of the picture and progressively gets thinner and thinner and thinner to get the whole way down to foil, the aluminum foil that you buy.
The end products, which are going to future slide, everything from your washing machine, the car sheet, the can sheet, the tin for cans, residential construction, tubular goods for oil and gas. So everywhere you look, there's product that was produced, and that product had to be produced using our product, which is rolling mill rolls and steel mill. Just the types of rolls. We can go back one more day. There's the larger diameter rolls, the backup roll. Those are lower volume. They last maybe five to 10 years. The work roll is more half a year to a year. Again, they're consumables. As you deform the steel, the surface of the roll deteriorates, has to get taken out of the mill, refurbished, put back into the mill, and after a period of time, it is unusable, and they have to buy a new one.
So if you look at the global market for rolling mill rolls, it's approximated at about $2 billion annually. And our revenue is roughly; this is the western side of the business. Our revenue is roughly in the $250-$300 million range. Go back. Next slide, Dave. Forged rolls, again, those facilities are in North America, and then we do have a facility in Ravne, Slovenia. Mostly, these go into cold mill rolls. A forged roll has higher strength, lower temperature requirements, which is why it requires a forged roll. Our primary competitors in North America: Lehigh Heavy, Superior. It says Villares on there, but there's some rumblings in the market that they're going to stop producing cold mill rolls. They just recently stopped producing hot mill rolls, which we're seeing increased inquiries from who they were supplying.
In Europe, Sheffield Forgemasters, Steinhoff, a little bit more competition, Ravne Systems, and Reinosa. Cast rolls go to hot mills. The cast mill roll has a very hard and high-temperature surface on it, which is ideal for processing red hot steel. And so it's a little bit of a different process, or it's a lot of a different process. And so it's a completely different facility would make those. Primary competitors in North America are. There's one, which is United. And that's an important point to mention is that in the U.S. or North American market, including Canada and Mexico, there's only one supplier of rolls domestically, and they cannot support the entire market. So therefore, we're on even footing with the rest of our competition, which is all in Europe from a tariff and an import perspective.
However, our Sweden facility has an advantage from an energy perspective, as energy in Sweden, they're self-sufficient. They actually sell energy into the rest of Europe, and it's all green as well, which is a benefit for our Sweden plant. The non-roll business, forged engineered products, think rounds, slabs , fan shafts. So the blocks will go into oil and gas for fluid and pumping for fracking. And then also the blocks, you can make molds out of them, plastic injection molding, molding for stamping, things like that. Two major competitors: Ellwood Specialty Steel and Finkl. I'll get into it later, but this particular part of the business has been improved due to the current tariff situation in the U.S. There's a lot of imports, and now the barriers to imports are much higher than they used to be. Next slide, Dave.
If we look at sales, top 10 customers make up roughly half of our revenue. But inside of that, those top 10 customers have many, many mills. So it's really not as concentrated as that would look. For example, in U.S. Steel, we're supplying to four or five mills. Steel Dynamics, we're supplying to three mills. And they really buy the rolls at the mill level for the most part. Geography, I mentioned, North America and Europe being our two largest markets. You can see that in the stacked graph. That continues to be that way, and we think it will be that way in the future. And then end markets, which I mentioned on the right, very diverse group of end markets, which sometimes some are up and some are down. Right now, the residential construction in the U.S. is down. However, non-residential construction is high.
So you can see that there's some stabilizing with the offsetting markets there. Recent equipment modernization. Two years ago, we finished a major upgrading of our U.S. assets. They were very old, and the technology was very old as well. And we did an analysis and determined it was better to purchase new than refurbish our old equipment. We spent roughly $30 million modernizing that equipment. It's all running very well. We have much better reliability and improved productivity for our roll machines in the U.S. Talked a little bit about the expanding market for forged distribution bar and the fracking market. Again, the tariff situation going to 50% tariffs on imports has really gotten to the point where it is more effective to source in the United States versus outside the United States.
We're seeing that business for us really double from 5%-10% of what we do, which is a nice complementary business to utilize our assets to the roll business. One thing that's recently happening in Europe, they're kind of behind where the U.S. was, but they're now adopting a similar approach to imports. Their domestic steel industry in the U.K. and Europe has really been hurt badly by tariffs or imports from low-cost countries. Their current quota and tariff system is expiring this year, and they are proposing and they're finalizing the plans to have the quota get cut in half and the tariff double from 25%-50%. What that would result in is roughly 8% less steel coming into or 8% more production in Europe.
It would improve their utilization of their mills from 65% to 80% to 85%, which will result in more demand for rolling mill rolls, which is positive for us. I mentioned the end markets. If you look at the major end markets where our customers supply and the sizes of them, those are all projected to grow roughly three to five percent over the next five years compounded. That's a healthy growth rate for us as our assets are very, we're asset-heavy. The drop-through on incremental business is pretty high margin. This is in contrast to the prior five years where those markets were flat to declining, with the exception of non-residential construction in the United States. We're pretty excited about the future of the next three to five years.
Just to kind of reiterate what Brett said in the beginning, if you look at where we're at now, we executed structural changes, small distribution business closed, and we closed our U.K. roll facility, and that by itself will add $7-$8 million of EBITDA to the bottom line. We've navigated at this point the tariffs, although those seem to be ever-changing. The story there is that our plant in Sweden is only competing against one plant in the U.S., which can't supply the entire market. So therefore, the customer sort of has to pay the tariff, which we've been successful at negotiating that for them to pay the tariffs, 100% pass-through, and we look, 2026 and beyond looks positive. The end markets look like they're going to grow, and the tariff and protections on North America, U.S., and Europe support our footprint supplying into those businesses.
We already covered this, Dave. I think we're good to go on to you. Okay.
Good morning. I'm Dave Anderson, as Brett mentioned. I'm the President of the Air and Liquid Processing segment and also the CFO for Ampco-Pittsburgh. Just starting with a little bit about the air and liquid businesses, there's three distinct businesses in the group: Aerofin. Aerofin makes heat exchange and heat transfer products used in nuclear power, industrial process, HVAC, Buffalo Air Handling, large custom air handling units. Think of units that are used in unique environments. You're talking research centers, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, things of that nature where there's a need for very particular air filtrations, positive air pressure, things of that nature. And then Buffalo Pumps makes custom centrifugal pumps. A lot of their business is with the U.S. Navy, which I'll talk about in a few slides.
Also the power generation market, selling a lot of pumps that are used with gas turbines. All three businesses, roughly the same size, so they split fairly evenly across the air and liquid group. Some of the customers, as I mentioned, you'll see for Buffalo Air, Merck, Eli Lilly, some of the pharmaceuticals, some of the research places, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For Buffalo Pumps, you'll see Solar Turbines, who's building a lot of gas turbines that are going into the AI data center market these days. They've been a long-time customer for us, along with the U.S. Navy work that we do. The last few years have been pretty exciting times for air and liquid. Revenue, 55% growth over the last three years. We expect to continue growth. We're in some really good strategic markets that I'll cover a little bit.
We have pretty significant barriers to entry. It's very difficult to get into supplying to combat ships for the U.S. Navy. It's very difficult to be qualified to supply into nuclear plants. So the barriers to entry are always helpful for us. Then one of the markets, as I mentioned, U.S. Navy. We've been a long-term supplier since before World War II to U.S. Navy combat ships. And we're seeing just long-term growth. The Navy plan that they publish every year, they publish a 30-year plan for what it looks like. You can see they need to build a lot more ships. And it's even a lot more than what this graph presents because there's a lot of ships that will be retired in the next few years.
So the Navy realizes they need to do a lot of building, and they don't have the capacity in the shipyards and in the industrial base. So they're actually investing in companies like us. We've received $9 million from the U.S. Navy to modernize our facility in Buffalo so we can better support them. So great opportunity for us in the long run in the Navy market. Similarly, the nuclear market, as you may have seen, nuclear has been really the favored choice in recent times. A lot of growth there, not just in the current power plants, but in the small modular nuclear reactors, in restarting some of the plants that had been shut down. We supply to more than 90% of the North American nuclear plants, so we are firmly entrenched in this market.
As I said before, the barriers to entry are significant to become a supplier to a nuclear plant. Growth strategy will continue to focus on, for Aerofin, the nuclear market. Also, the small modulars, there's a lot of players out there. We're really casting a wide net to be the resource for all of them. Nobody knows today who the winners will be, but our intent is to deal with all of them. Buffalo Air, really seeing a lot in the pharmaceutical market in recent years. That seems to be continuing. You're seeing more onshoring there in the pharmaceutical market. For Buffalo Pumps, both the U.S. Navy and the power generation markets are moving into good long-term growth. Just a couple of slides overall on financials for Ampco.
Just adjusted EBITDA, you can see over the last couple of years going in the right direction. Sam talked about the $7 million-$8 million annualized EBITDA improvement for the U.K. exit. That's a significant change for us going forward. And then just our growth opportunities that we're seeing. And then just to talk for a minute about debt leverage. The last few years, as Brett talked about, we made a lot of steps forward. Some of that included the plant modernization. Some of that included the U.K. shutdown. So that required us to invest some money. But we're seeing that leverage trend starting to move the other direction now. And you can see on the second chart, that's what we expect to see as the shutdown of the U.K. impacts us, the plant modernization, all favorable items for us.
And our pension plan moving towards a fully funded status also is very helpful towards us. So we expect in the next few years to see that leverage trend moving in our favor. And then really the final slide is just the investment thesis. And this is really just a recap of what we covered. Forged and Cast, Sam talked about. We've exited the underperforming assets. That's a great reset for us. And we're seeing some end markets that have some potential to grow. Air and Liquid has shown it can grow, continues to grow. Significant barriers. We're in some exciting markets there as well. And then overall for Ampco, as we start to improve our free cash flow generation, there's opportunities for us to pay down some of the debt that we've had in the last couple of years.
And we get to a fully funded benefit plan that all points in a positive direction for us. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, gentlemen. If you have a question, please type in the Q&A section, and I will present it to management. I'd like to start off with the U.K. insolvency. Can you kind of walk us through that decision-making process and maybe how long it will take to unwind that and realize that's $7-$8 million?
Sam, why don't you take that one, please?
Okay. Yeah. So that plant, it was cash flow positive, made a little bit of profit prior to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. And that conflict really did two things. It changed the demand for steel in Europe, but it also drastically changed the energy picture in Europe. And that plant became unprofitable. We could not fill it.
The energy competition compared to Europe was in a bad way. We intended to solvently close the plant. We really explored all of our options and looked at the insolvency, which ended up being the best option for the business and for our customers. We formally went into insolvency in October of this past year. The plant actually continued to operate until it finished everything that was started and shipped to our customers. As of October 15th, the losses had stopped. Now the finished product has everything's been finished and shipped to our customers. Those receivables will end up going to our bank group, paying down our debt, the sale of the property and equipment. There's already an agreement on that. All existing letters of credit for the energy companies will also go away.
Dave had that financial slide for the leverage. It was roughly 0.8. I think it was 0.8. Yes, 0.8. It will improve terms just from receiving that money from the closure of the business. In summary, it's closed. The losses have stopped. Over the next three to six months, we'll receive the proceeds from the closure of the plant.
Is that suggested that $7-$8 million EBITDA improvement is right now being realized?
Yes.
Annualized. Got it. Got it. Let's move to the audience here. Kind of the first question is, have steelmakers delayed roll purchases at all or extended roll lives in the past? What are you seeing on this front today? And more generally, can you comment on demand trends in the roll business?
Yeah. During the tariff situation, yes.
Customers that are at a good cash position generally have a six-month to 12-month supply of rolls on hand, such as, well, I won't name them, but the ones that are flush with cash have rolls. They waited to see what was going to happen. And so there was a short-term demand, I guess, blip, lack of demand in 2025. Now everybody's pretty tight on as far as what their normal inventories are. So any increase in demand requires an immediate increase in roll buy. As far as the overall market, it's been flat for the last couple of years. We are seeing signs of improvement. Certainly, any lower interest rates will help home building, which would be a tailwind. And then non-residential construction, data centers, and those kind of activities will improve demand.
And then lastly, the tariff quota system in Europe that will increase demand could increase demand 10%-15% in Europe. So things look flat right now; they look positive for the future.
Got it. I'm going to elaborate on this question a little bit. Within the Air and Liquid Processing segment, can you discuss awards within the U.S. Navy and how that has evolved over the past five years? But I'd also like to maybe put into context; all three businesses are a third, a third, a third, as you pointed out. How would that look, say, three or four years ago? Which business had the fastest growth today?
They have all had actually really good growth over the last few years. So they're fairly close to each other. A few years ago, they were roughly a third, a third, and a third.
They were all just smaller. So they're all growing in a good direction. The Navy, in particular, is a long-term thing for us. And there's really two things in the Navy. There's the new ships they're building that I talked about. And then also we have focused on the Navy aftermarket, which there's a lot of opportunities for us to serve that market. So there continues to be good growth that we can achieve there. And the investments that they've made in us have really laid the groundwork for us to continue to increase what we can supply to them. And that's just coming online. We installed the first part of that equipment a year ago. The second batch of equipment is being installed literally as we talk. It arrived in our Buffalo plant about a week ago, and it's being installed right now.
Question also about the Navy on the competitive environment. Who do you compete with in that market?
There's a few companies that will supply into that market. Think of people like CIRCOR, Carver. So it varies a lot from a smaller privately held to a larger corporation. But there's only a few competitors. As I mentioned, in order to be qualified to supply to a combat ship, there's a lot of certifications. There's a lot of testing that has to happen, as you would imagine.
Question about within air and liquid, are the three businesses similar in profit contribution?
The product lines will vary somewhat, and we don't really disclose the individual profitability. I would think in terms of the ones that I've talked about, nuclear and Navy tend to be higher just because of the barriers to entry being so significant.
There's a question here, not surprising, about your exposure to data centers. Can you discuss that?
Yes. We are seeing activity on the pump side. The other side of our pump business is the commercial market. And for us, that's primarily supplied into the power generation market and specifically gas turbines. And gas turbines are really seeing market uptick recently. And that's due to the AI data center. The demand for gas turbines is increasing rapidly. So I mentioned a little bit on our customer list, Solar Turbines, people like that that are seeing great business. So where we're seeing AI data centers is coming through our pump line at the moment.
Question about capacity. You mentioned that you had an equipment upgrade cycle they went through. Is there any considerations to add future capacity, and is there any needs to maybe upgrade any more equipment?
From the air and liquid side, and then Sam can address his part. Not a lot on equipment for us. I mean, we're not real capital intensive. So for us, it's more manpower than anything else. But Sam can address his issues.
Yeah. In the U.S., we have at least probably 15%-20% additional latent capacity. So there's no need in the U.S. And then there's just the normal occasional equipment modernization at the other plants that fits within our depreciation schedule already. So nothing major.
Question, Matt, you mentioned the news about a competitor, Villares, possibly getting out of the forged roll space. What's Villares's revenues in that area? And you can speak at the potential catalyst for Ampco.
I shouldn't. Number one, we don't know that they're going out of business.
We just know they exited the cast roll business and that we're seeing inquiries on the forged roll side. So I don't want to say that that's actually happening. As far as size, they're not published, but a cast roll plant is typically has the capacity to do $30 million, roughly between $30 million and $50 million of revenue. We would not get all of that, but it's still just a positive for us. It's hard to say what we would get. We're going to compete with the other guys, but it is a competitor exit thing.
Sam, just curious. I know we're running against the time barrier here, but your European operations, how have they been impacted by the tariff situation? Were they exported at all, or are they just supplied locally?
No, actually, the UK and Sweden probably sent in the neighborhood of 40% or more to the U.S. or to North America. Ravne less, mostly into Europe. So all it really did was delay shipments. We had to go through the approval process with the customers to, number one, what was the tariff going to be? Because they were announced without any rules or regulations about what they actually were and how to implement them. So getting them all calculated and then getting the customers to approve them, at the end of the day, there hasn't been any material impact from the tariffs other than we had to negotiate to get them paid for.
Yeah. And I think, Sam, you mentioned this before, is that from a cast roll perspective, the U.S. doesn't have enough cast roll manufacturing capacity.
So they have to import, and we take advantage of that from Europe.
Yeah. It's underserved. That's correct. Thanks, Brad.
Certainly. Well, gentlemen, we're out of time. I appreciate you being with us today. Do you have any closing remarks?
No. I just want to, again, thank everybody for joining. We're excited about where we are. The heavy lifting is complete. It's now about focusing on improving our performance and reducing our debt and then growing the business. So excited about where we are. We're seeing some positive trends in the marketplace that are supporting our growth outlook and just look forward to the future.
Okay. Well, thank you, Brett. Thank you, David. Thank you, Sam. I appreciate you being with us today, and everybody, have a great day. Thank you. Thanks.