The next session is ATI, and we've got Don Newman, the CFO, with us. So Don, thanks very much for coming.
Thanks for having me.
Maybe just to kick it off, do you wanna give us kind of a, a very brief, kinda overview of, of ATI?
Sure, sure. Happy to do that. So ATI is an advanced materials, forgings, and components manufacturer. Our focus is on aerospace and defense, and that represents almost 65% of our revenues. We also have some other end markets that we serve that have similar growth and margin profiles, that also represent, you know, really markets that value materials that have pretty extraordinary performance characteristics. And those end markets are tied to medical, electronics, and some specialty energy. Really, when you think about, when you think about ATI, you wanna think about a business that is really leveraging material science. Our products are used, as I said, in aerospace and defense. Those product use cases are things like the hot section of the jet engine.
We produce materials that are critical to commercial space travel in the rocket engine, dealing with thermal management, which is pretty doggone critical when it comes to rocket engines. And then beyond that, from a forging standpoint, we are, I believe, the number one isothermal forging business in the world, which is that's a critical process and capability to the jet engine space. So that's generally how to think about ATI.
Great. No, it's helpful. Thinking of commercial aerospace, obviously-
Mm-hmm
... been some disruption with some of the OEMs, Boeing, you know, good delivery numbers today, still working to get back up to where-
Right
... we need to be.
Right.
What are you seeing there in terms of any disruption from, from your demand?
You know, what's interesting, we did talk about this a bit in our last earnings call. As a team, we've been very, very focused on diversifying our business. Even though we are certainly an aerospace and defense supplier, we saw opportunity to diversify our product base as well as our customer base, the end markets that we were serving, et cetera, and it's, and it's put us in a good position. When we talked about the impacts of Boeing on our business in our last earnings call, what we shared was, you know, really the impacts of a slower build rate, you know, for Boeing, things that have been announced, it's really marginal to our business. It's not a headline kind of impact.
Mm.
That's really encouraging. If you think about it, Boeing is one of two pretty significant airframers, and we have been focused on not just increasing our business with Boeing, but also very focused in increasing our book of business with Airbus. And you know, we've been very, very successful in that regard. So we're the way to think about ATI and aerospace, we're kind of on all of the airframes, and we are in each of the engine platforms. So when you think of it in that context, for LEAP, for example, it's not... it doesn't really matter to us whether it's a LEAP A, B, or C. So if there's a slowdown in LEAP-1B, for example, well, gee, we're seeing strong demand in things like 1A.
Then we also have some pretty extraordinary capabilities in the defense space. So, we're if you think of it this way, I think the national defense budget last year increased by 4%. Growth in our defense space, our defense business rather, was 18%. We ended the year in the fourth quarter with what I believe was a 21% growth rate within the defense, our defense mix. You know, our applications in that area include things like titanium plate. We support, you know, rotative demand as well as surface and sub requirements that are pretty advanced. So we've got a nice, diversified book of business which is serving us well.
Yeah. Any sort of big difference between the narrow body and the wide body side in terms of seeing demand come through, or is one better off than the other?
Yeah, it's interesting. So first of all, both the narrow body and wide body are good parts of our business. As you guys know, the widebody builds really haven't hit yet. And so now, once they do hit, the way to think about that is the titanium content, and for our business, nickel and titanium are two critical materials, and we've got a suite of products and alloys that, you know, are tied to those two key materials. And so the widebody content of titanium is anywhere from, say, 3-5 x per plane versus what you would see in a narrowbody.
So once that, those builds start, even though it looks like a pretty modest number of builds per month, when you start thinking 10 over here and, you know, five over there, what are the, whatever the numbers you have in your model, even at those levels, it's a pretty impactful demand for our business. And for context, you know, if you go back to, say, 2018, this is a general comment, but what you'd wanna think about for ATI is, we made about as much EBITDA on the widebody as we did the narrowbody back then because the, the, the content was so much higher, even though the number of builds was much, much lower for widebody.
But as far as trends go, of course, the narrowbody build rates had started, and we're certainly seeing builds, strong build numbers with Airbus, and we saw a ramping with Boeing. Boeing is, you know, has some challenges at the moment that they're working through, which we believe completely that they'll work through that. So we've been seeing over the last couple of years, a ramping and early stages of ramping for the narrowbody, and an inkling that the widebody was, is going to be really kind of taking off. And so that, that's one of the reasons, if you look at our long-range forecast, the targets that we put out, you see a significant ramp-
Mm-hmm
in our earnings, in good part because we're participating in the ramp in that component of our commercial business. And now, one area where we did see meaningful growth from a widebody standpoint, and this started really 1.5 years, 2 years ago, was in MRO. Which kind of stands to reason, if you're not building new planes, then your existing planes are growing older, and we all know that's happening. I think the fleet is about as old as it's been on average. Well, that means you're doing more repairs, more maintenance. And when it comes to the jet engine part of our business, you know, we do serve the MRO end market.
You know, normally, you would expect MRO in our business to be 20%-25% of our jet engine sales. What we've seen is more like 40%, especially for widebody, but we've also seen a ramping begin in the narrowbody, which we think is a trend. And if you think about, you know, when the first LEAP engines went on wing, you know, some of those engines are gonna start to come in for their overhauls and-
Right.
And so we see, you know, that as a significant potential source. We also, like I said at the beginning, we're on all of the, kind of, all of the engine platforms and airframe platforms. So when you think about, say, the Geared Turbofan, that's also a source of, you know, of opportunity for us that I would point to as... It's not really a trend on build rates, but it's certainly it's having an effect on demand.
Got it. No, that's helpful. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the CEO transition? So Kim's taking over from Bob.
Yes.
Just a little bit of, you know, last several years, the path he's taken us through-
Yeah
... and what Kim's goal is here going forward.
Yeah, happy to do that. So Bob Wetherbee is our CEO. He's done an amazing job in leading the organization through an establishment of an aerospace and defense strategy that is the focus of our business. And, beyond that strategy, it was a very interesting transformation that came from setting of that strategy and really putting the business in a position where we could create significant value for our shareholders. And so Bob did an incredible job really pointing the organization in the right direction. Bob would be the first person to say that the ATI strategy is not a Bob Wetherbee strategy, and that goes to Bob's style. Bob's very inclusive and collaborative, and so when you look at the strategy that we're deploying to, it is ATI's management strategy.
And so you think about Kim, and Kim brings an incredible operational and business acumen to ATI, and she has, you know, she's been our Chief Operating Officer, done an amazing job in that role. And, you know, as a CEO, she's, I believe, gonna continue our focus on aerospace and defense and really look for ways to accelerate that, which we believe there's significant opportunities in our business to improve performance, accelerate growth, et cetera. And I, and you should expect to see Kim driving that in our business.
Got it. What—I guess one of the operational things you've talked a little bit about is debottlenecking—
Yes
... the process, and you talked, you have the new press you put online. Could you just talk a little bit about that and what the opportunity is there?
Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So we've got some very, very interesting opportunities in growing our business, and one of the opportunities that we've talked about is debottlenecking. And if you think about it, picture the production process like a river or a stream. You know, upstream for us is melting. We melt titanium sponge and revert or scrap. We melt nickel, you know, at scale. That creates some pretty extraordinary materials. Well, that's not the end of what we do. We're not our first prize isn't necessarily creating ingots. We like to transform them into forgings and other components. And so the stream is from melt through the finishing process, that material is flowing.
Well, if you think about it, if you're unlocking melt capacity that exists, or you're adding melt capacity, which we are, then in order for that capacity to really make its way out the door as a finished product, it's gotta flow down that river. It's got to flow through your processes. Well, when you think of it as a river, there are bottlenecks that exist within that flow that didn't exist before you maybe found efficiencies and added capacity and melt, or actually put in new melt assets. So the opportunities around debottlenecking to us are material, and in many cases, the debottlenecking investments that we make are really modest in dollar amount, but they release the flow of the products and have very good returns, right?
Because the revenue that's generated by the additional flow is very strong relative to the capital cost. And so one of the assets that we put in place that we recently announced was a new billet press. And the billet press is a really special asset. It is located in our North Carolina facilities. It is special in a couple of ways. One way is that it can actually press or process both nickel and titanium products. So that is a dual use facility or equipment for us that is that's pretty powerful. And when you add the additional capacity that we've added to our production footprint, whether it's new or whether it's finding efficiencies in existing equipment, that that's an important part of increasing the revenue.
But what it also does is it de-risks the production process because it allows us to have some redundant capacity in those downstream functions that allow us, if there's outages, that we're able to, you know, continue to process and generate revenues. Whereas without that, that press, for example, we wouldn't be able to do. But that's just one example of the debottlenecking efforts that we have.
Got it. That's helpful. Can you talk a little bit about the guidance for this year?
Mm-hmm.
It was a pretty decent ramp through the year. Can you talk about what gives you confidence of that? And specifically, I think some of the industrial parts of the business are smaller, but just what you're seeing there when those-
Sure
kind of bounce back.
Sure. For context, I know not everybody follows our financial results every day. So if you think about last year, last year, we generated about $635 million of EBITDA. Our guide this year is EBITDA at the midpoint of our guidance range is about $725 million. So a nice step up. But as you look on a quarter-to-quarter basis in 2024, you can see that from Q1- Q2, there's a meaningful increase. From Q2 to the second half, there's a meaningful increase. And as you think about the Q1- Q2, one of the impacts that we had in Q1 is we had some outage impacts, and those are behind us. So that'll be a contributor in the step up from Q1- Q2.
In addition to that, we have unlocked some additional capacity. We talked about debottlenecking. The asset, the very asset that you were talking about, that billet press, is allowing us you know, even as early as Q2, to increase production, and we're unlocking that, beginning to unlock that in Q2. And so that's additive to the performance of the business. We have picked up price, and the price performance that we've had will be one of the contributors. We also... And as you think about going into the second half of the year, we're gonna see more of those things in our run rate, but there's also some good guys around titanium melt capacity. So there is a there's an 80%, 80% increase in our titanium melt capacity, and that's off of our 2022 baseline.
The way to think about that is there's two baskets. One is turning on some idled assets, and we've made some modest improvements in those assets to increase efficiency and productivity. The capital cost to restart those assets was about $10 million. They represented roughly a 45% increase in our titanium melt capacity. So on a run rate basis, let me give you context, on a run rate basis, that represents $150 million-$170 million in annual revenue, okay? $150 million-$170 million. Think in terms of around 35% contribution margin. So you do the math on that, on a very conservative end of the math scale, it's about $10 million a quarter in EBITDA, right? At run rate.
Well, that asset, that facility that we restarted, is really ramping in its contribution to the income statement. So we're gonna hit the income statement run rate for that facility in the second half of this year. And for context, if you think about Q1, what it contributed, and you think about the run rate in the second half of the year per quarter, it's about a 50% increase in EBITDA contribution between Q1's level and Q3 and Q4's level. So that's a good guide for the second half. And so you know, this is all underpinned with continued strong demand across our end markets... and you know, certainly having the outages behind us is helpful. Debottlenecking is a contribution.
It's all adding to a business that we would expect to, you know, to be on a run rate basis, as you think about the second half of the year, you know, it should be running at a, you know, something in the $800 million a year range from an EBITDA standpoint. And then from a margin standpoint, you know, the, the margins that we would expect exiting twenty, twenty twenty-four, going to twenty twenty-five, I would expect consolidated EBITDA margins to be in the 16.5%-17% range. So a lot of building strength in this business, and we don't expect, by the way, that it's gonna stop in 2024.
If you look at our 2025 targets, and you look at our 2027 targets, what those reflect are some of the very same drivers that I talked about, plus, you know, it's all about meeting the underlying demand on aerospace and defense and our other key end markets.
Yeah. That's really helpful. You talked a little bit on the engines, but I guess, you think of some of the challenges we're seeing on the new narrowbody engines, right?
Yes.
The recall, the GTF, just durability, time on wing issues. How much of an opportunity is for that, for ATI, either directly for more content or just, you know, the older stuff is flying more, like you said, and that's-
Sure, sure
More spare material?
So, Geared Turbofan specifically, or just-
Just-
narrowbody in general?
Yeah, engines, new engines on narrow bodies.
Okay. So first, if you think about the LEAP engine, which obviously is a critical critical engine for the narrow bodies, they're a great engine. We are a very important supplier to that value chain. We support not just the new builds, but certainly the MRO demand-
Mm-hmm
... that exists. And to your point, the, you know, some of those early LEAP engines, you know, time on wing, I'm talking about, the early engines that were hung on the wings are going to be coming in for overhauls. And so that's gonna be a critical, critical part of our business going forward, and we think it's going to be an area of sustained demand. In terms of the Geared Turbofan, you know, on that, it's interesting, we have a very, very good relationship with that OEM. And the things that ATI does extraordinarily well, there's a lot of things that we do well, but one of the things we do well is we manufacture these high-performance powder materials.
And so as you think about the MRO demand that they're going to have, it you know, part of that's gonna be driven by need for material. Another thing that is going to be important in meeting that MRO demand is forging capacity. And then finally, testing is going to be critical. Well, we have a great relationship with Pratt, and we are a proven supplier of each of those areas. Now, we haven't been a producer of the materials for them, but we could be part of their solution. We have been a producer of forgings, and we would expect that we could be helpful to them in the surge of demand that they're going to be seeing.
And then finally, from a testing standpoint, and, you know, it's easy for us to forget about testing. Testing in this industry is incredibly comprehensive, and it's done consistently. And you're not talking about simple, elementary testing. These are very advanced testing techniques. This is one of our core competencies, and so we've actually added capacity because this was a bottleneck to the industry. We've added capacity around things like sonic testing. So those testing capabilities we have, I think, would also be a great help to meeting the demand that they're likely to see. So all that, you add it all up, and I think the way to think about the Geared Turbofan situation that exists is I really think, and I believe, that we'll have an opportunity to be a part of the solution.
And so that'll be a benefit to the business going forward.
Got it. You mentioned earlier the unplanned outage, you know, late last year-
Yeah
... early this year. Could you talk a little bit about how you manage those? Is it an opportunity to, you know, whether it's through maintenance or whatever, to sort of prevent those from happening in the future?
So, you know, for context, what we're talking about is in Q4, we had some planned and unplanned outages. And those outages actually impacted our Q1 2024 sales because of products, the products available for sale were impacted. You know, there's a couple of things to just keep in mind as you think about those outages. First of all, they're behind us, which is great. The outages, I don't see these outages as a reflection of us underspending on maintenance. You know, that is not something that we choose to do, for example. If demand is high, let's just defer maintenance, kick it down the road. That's really not our model because in the long run, that doesn't put you in the best position.
And so this was not a choice, in terms of run versus maintain. This, this is, I think, a reflection of, you know, you can have planned outages. Like, for example, we had a, had a press that, that was down. We expected it to be down for, you know, a week, week and a half. It was down a week beyond that. And so that was impactful. And, and, and there was, there was an asset that, that went down and wasn't expected, so, you know, we, we took care of that. Now, we talked about debottlenecking. Remember that press we were just talking about?
Well, if we had had that press turned on a couple months earlier, then the outage profile that we're talking about would have been different because we would've had the capacity to offset that outage that was down for a little bit longer than expected. So, you know, it's our goal to be very thoughtful and very wise in how we maintain our assets. And, in doing that, we certainly do not intend to underinvest in maintenance. And, that's... If you look at our spending plan, you know, we're gonna spend roughly $200 million in CapEx each year over the next five years, $80 million of which, ± $80 million of which is major maintenance. So it's not light-duty spending for the business.
Got it. Maybe touch a little bit on the defense business.
Okay.
You talked about some of the, the growth you've seen, but just the biggest drivers of that going forward, what kind of growth rate you see there?
I would, I would be happy to do that. So, you know, we're fortunate in the opportunities that we have around defense, and I'd mentioned earlier, but I'll go ahead and repeat it. As you think about defense in our business, it's about 10% of our revenue, and the growth rate for that space for us has been very good. And, and for all of 2023, the overall growth rate in our defense business was about 18%, and we, we were building momentum at the end of the year, so that's a good indicator. Our exposures around defense are, they're really interesting. So first of all, titanium is one of our key materials, and armor for things like tanks and other rolling vehicles. You know, that titanium plate is pretty important.
As you can imagine, the demand that's hitting our business around titanium plate is really, really strong. Also imagine, you know, the demand isn't expected to just end. And so it's things like that that drive the growth rate in our business at a rate well above what you see in the defense spending growth in Washington. And it's not just titanium, the titanium plate. I mentioned that we're, you know, we provide materials that support our naval activities, both surface as well as below the surface. And, you know, some of those things are confidential, very confidential, and so we don't give a lot of details, but they are, they're good positions to be in.
We also support rotatives, and that's a space that we've been in for quite some time, and we would expect, because we're on some important platforms, that that will continue. Then there's other growth that we can foresee coming that fits really well with our material science capabilities, things like hypersonics. So one of the things that is really important when you think about hypersonics is thermal management. There's heat buildup the faster you go, and so the materials that you need in order to manage that heat buildup have to be, in this case, pretty extraordinary. And, you know, we happen to have some of those materials. And so we see hypersonics as a real growth opportunity for us, not in the short term, but certainly in the longer term.
That hits what we've called aero-like. It's, you know, utilizing hafnium-based materials. Niobium is also a key material that goes into these very high-performance, hyper-high performance kinds of alloys. And so a lot of positive things happening in defense, and I think it'll be there for a long time.
Got it. Could you touch on capital deployment?
Sure.
You guys did a pretty good amount of repurchases first quarter.
Yep.
What's kind of the priority?
Yeah, happy to do that. So the way to think about it is, in Q1, we repurchased about $150 million of shares. And, you know, since the beginning of 2022, I think we're almost at $400 million of share repurchases. But it's important to understand how we view capital deployment, and it's a pretty consistent strategy that we're deploying to. You know, think of it as a three-legged stool. So first leg is invest for growth, and in investing for growth, really, we have a strong bias toward toward organic growth. We have a long list of organic opportunities, but a long list of organic opportunities does not mean an open checkbook for limitless spending. What we've indicated is that our investors should should anticipate about $200 million a year in CapEx....
I have already said that of that, about 120 is growth related, and about 80 is maintenance related, generally. And then, you know, from year to year, it can be plus or minus, but that gives you some idea. The second leg to the stool is delevering, and the delevering that we're doing is multipronged. You know, we had a significant amount of pension obligation that existed, you know, certainly when I started with the business in 2020. We were working that down, and then in 2023, we executed an annuitization that reduced our gross pension obligation by $1.4 billion. And we have excess funded the remaining roughly $250 million of remaining pension liability, which that remainder is all about active employees.
Yeah.
Okay? So we took care of that, but that's not our only goal around delevering. This business is gonna grow. EBITDA is gonna get bigger. Our debt metrics are gonna go in the right direction. I suspect that we'll have a net debt to adjusted EBITDA below 2x by the end of this year, and it'll, I would expect, to rapidly delever from there in 2025. So going in the right direction. I don't wanna just reduce our net debt ratio, I wanna take the, you know, some of that gross debt off the capital structure, save ourselves some cash flow because of lower interest, and de-risk the balance sheet some more. And we're gonna generate enough cash we can do that.
We're funding the CapEx, there will be ample cash to reduce our gross debt, you know, as things mature and become available.
Yeah.
Then that leaves the third leg to the stool. Third leg to the stool, it's returning capital to our shareholders. Our preferred vehicle for doing that is, at this point, buying back shares. And we've been very, very active. And, you know, as you think about the $150 million that we spent in Q1, typically, what we do is we when we get a mandate from our board, that is done on an annual basis, and, you know, we, we would execute it at the end of the fiscal year, which is when we generate the bulk of our annual cash flow. We were comfortable with the liquidity of the business, we were comfortable with the cash generation that we expect in, in this year, and, between Bob, Kim, and I, and the board, we decided, "Hey, why wait?
Let's go ahead and bring those shares in," which worked out really, really well. We finished that mandate in Q1, didn't wait until Q4.
Yeah.
Okay? You know, the way I describe it to investors is, you know, we've been active on share repurchases. The mandate that we just wrapped up, I don't expect will be the last mandate by any stretch, but at the same time, I'm not gonna get ahead of my board.
Right.
That's not fair. But, you know, it's important for us to return capital to shareholders, and that's why it's one of the legs on the stool.
Got it. Maybe just to wrap it up, because I think we're almost out of time, but, any way we should think about pricing opportunities, you know, if you have LTAs rolling off, is there an opportunity to boost price?
Yes, and yes, the short answer is that we've been pretty successful in capturing price. You know, we talk to the market a great deal about our LTA position, and if you think about our high-performance segment, you know, a high percentage, and think in terms of around 80%, are under LTA. So the conclusion when people hear that is, "Oh, my gosh, you're missing all that transactional upside." That is not really the way to think about it. And here's what I mean. Our commercial team did an extraordinary job. As you think about the demand for titanium, for example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the demand increased significantly, and customers were concerned with ensuring that they had capacity to meet their needs. It's a fair request.
And so what we, what we did is we honored our contracts with our customers, but when there was the opportunity to talk about a new contract, even if there was an LTA in place, one of the things that our team did a really good job on was saying, "Okay, if we're gonna open—if we're gonna talk about future capacity, we're gonna talk about current capacity. And so if you wanna ensure your-yourself that you have what you need, then, you know, the things that we really wanna talk about." And one of those things was, you know, a lot of the contracts in this industry are share-based. So an OEM says, "I'll sign an LTA with you, but I'm not gonna do a take or pay. I'm going to sign you up for a percentage. You get 25% of my...
If I'm buying this group of materials, you get 25%, you get 50%," or whatever it is, right? That's how it's worked. So you think about this high-demand environment, where demand, we expect, is going to ramp higher. One of the things our team did was they said, "Okay, we're gonna cap the amount, the pounds that you can buy under this LTA, still share-based, but it hits that limit. Above that limit, we're, it's transactional pricing." We talk about the pricing, and that allows us to take advantage of the upside, for these LTA contracts. Another thing that our commercial guys did that was extraordinary was they added material pass-through, which material pass-through mechanisms under... In our industry, for nickel, it's very common. For titanium, not as common.
So we now have about 60% of our titanium contracts that have some sort of pass-through mechanism.
Great. Well, maybe that's a good place to end it. I think we're over time, but Don, thank you very much.
Thank you.