Our next session is Bel Fuse, traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol BELFA and BELFB. Presenting for the company today is Farouq Tuweiq, their CFO, and Lynn Hutkin, their VP of Financial Reporting. With that, I'll hand it over to Lynn.
Thank you, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. We feel we have a very interesting story. For those of you who aren't familiar with Bel, I'll just provide a quick background about the company, and then I'll pass it over to Farouq to talk a little bit more about what's coming ahead and future growth drivers. Just starting out, Bel has been around for 75 years. We were started in 1949 by Elliot Bernstein, who is our current CEO's father. Dan took over as CEO from his father back in 2001. Put simply, we power, protect, and connect electronic circuits. We're making power supplies and connectors, as I'll get into in a future slide. When we first started, we were making fuses for black and white televisions.
And then ever since, we've been evolving with the industry and whatever the new end markets are. So we moved into color TVs and then networking, military, aerospace, and most recently, e-mobility and AI. So we just have been very successful at staying relevant and just evolving with the end markets as they come along. Today, at the trailing 12 months, we are around $525 million in sales, with an Adjusted EBITDA of just under $100 million. We always say that diversity is our strength. And this is something that Dan, when he first took over as CEO, really introduced to the company. So I started with the company 17 years ago. And when I joined, these pie charts looked very different. We were largely networking, heavily in Asia. We were all OEM. We didn't have any distribution presence.
And over the years, we've done a series of acquisitions, 15 or so in the last dozen years or so. And that has resulted with a diversity across each of these aspects, which has just made us stronger because every year, there's something that's not running well, right? I mean, it's just the nature of the business. There's always some region or end market or product group that's going through some tough time. So being a diverse organization really helps to introduce stability into our business and our financial results. On the bottom here, we have some of our customers. And this is one thing that we've been doing very successfully with over the years, ever since we started, is partnering with these blue chip customers. So these are the groups who are making the end products that go into the world today.
And our engineers work very closely with their engineers. So whatever they're developing for their end products, they reach out to our engineers asking for the particular electronic components to build those end products. So it's very much an engineer-to-engineer sale. Delving a little bit into our segments, we do run the company in these three product groups. I'll just run through these quickly. Our power group is about 45% of our sales. And this is really power supplies and fuses. The end applications here are industrial, rail, networking, e-mobility. And the customers are the networking guys, Cisco, HP, Dell, and then on the rail side, companies like Alstom. Our connectivity solutions business has been around 40% of our sales recently. And this is where we currently have our aerospace and defense end markets.
We did just close on an acquisition last week, Enercon, which we'll be adding to our A&D exposure, which Farouq will get into. This current view is legacy Bel's, we'll call it, pre-Enercon. The main customers here are the military aerospace customers, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed. We also have Ag exposure and work with John Deere. These are largely connectors, cabling. We have a premise wiring service. As they're building out new construction, we do the cabling that goes behind the walls. Our third business is the magnetic solutions group. This is largely networking. If you think about the little ports on the back of your laptop, we basically make high-end connectors that are in a brick form. They look like a harmonica, and they kind of fit into these servers, routers, switches, hubs for companies like Cisco, Dell, and HP. Again, this is largely networking.
So on the bottom here, you can see our financial overview for the last five years. And the one item I'll point out, while we have had a bit of a challenge on the top line, particularly in power and magnetics over the past year, largely due to inventory destocking that's happening in the channel, our gross margins have improved, even on the lower sales base. And I'll get into that in the coming slides here. So we've been on this transformative journey over the last four years. And this highlights some of the key factors. But I'll just summarize. We've been doing a lot of strengthening of our bench. So it started in 2021. We brought Farouq on board. At the time, Dan, our CEO, realized that there was a disconnect happening with Bel. We were making quality products. We had very talented engineers.
We were working with the right customers. Why were we not looking like our competitors? Why was our financial profile not looking like theirs? Why was our stock price not trading at multiples like theirs? So there was a disconnect, and he acknowledged the need for a change, so brought Farouq in from the outside. Farouq has an investment banking background, worked in the industrial technology space, so very familiar with our competitors. So he came on board asking all of the right questions, and we didn't have all of the answers right away, but we embarked on this journey of really rewiring the company. We've since changed over of the seven people who report to Dan. Six of them are new in the last four years. Some are from the outside. Some are internal promotes. We've had some board refreshment.
And then most recently, we have, just in the past month or two, hired a new global head of contracts at the corporate level. That was a new position. And he is in charge of looking at our procurement contracts globally and also a global head of sales, Uma Pingali, who's been working in the industry for a long time. And he'll be tasked with taking a look at all of our cross-selling opportunities, which is a position that we've never had in the past. So strengthening the bench has been key. And it's really been a cultural change for Bel over the years. We've also undertaken numerous business and operational initiatives. We finished our ERP system implementation following our string of acquisitions. So we're now on a consolidated system.
We have SKU-level profitability so that we can drive our business decisions with data instead of stories, which are nice to hear, but they don't always translate to the financials, so we're a very data-driven organization now. We've done four facility consolidations through last year, largely in China, and then this year, we announced two additional ones that are going on right now, and those should be done by the end of Q1 2025, so we've really been looking at the whole organization, just introducing automation where we can, efficiencies, and just leading the business with data, and from a strategy perspective, we have really been looking at the overall business, making decisions on where we want to be tomorrow, so the acquisition of Enercon, which Farouq will get into, is a great example of that, so they are a 100% pure-play aerospace and defense business.
It was a large size for us, so it will be transformative to us. Now that our house is a little more clean, we're a good host for M&A. All of that wrapped up has led to our improved financial results, which you can see from these charts. If you look back to 2021 versus where we are in the trailing 12-month period here, sales were relatively flat. In fact, they're down even a little bit from where we were in 2021. However, our gross margin profile has gone up by 1,300 basis points in that time frame, and our EBITDA dollars have doubled.
All of the initiatives that we've done, making sure that we're designing the right products, manufacturing the right products, selling the right products, and having just a cohesive team with this new rewired machine has really led to improved sustainable financial results over the years. And then from a liquidity perspective, we've seen our debt balance go down, our cash balance go up, which has allowed us to embark on M&A, which we have done. And we're very pleased to see that people were paying attention during our transformation, and our stock has responded accordingly. This is just a picture of our stock chart over the last three years or so with 400% return on investment during that time frame. That's where we are today. I will now pass it over to Farouq to talk about where we're going.
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for taking some time out of your schedule here today, so one of the things that we talk about is a lot of the macro and what's going outside of Bel and what's helping drive the industry overall, and we thought it'd be helpful to just kind of capture some of the buzzwords that are real, and we're seeing the benefits of that, and we think the industry will benefit from some of these themes for the future ahead here. As we think about electrification, electronification, AI, there's also a bunch of kind of other things going on here as well.
I think what's interesting about the time is if you look back, call it 15 years ago, generally, every now and then, a theme comes into the industry, and you see a big replacement cycle, and then the theme dies, and then waiting for the next theme. So as Lynn had stated, we started out in the selling fuses for black and white TVs, right? So everybody made a lot of money on black and white TVs. And then it became a regular way kind of replacement cycle. And then there was the advent of color TVs, right? So then there was this big replacement cycle and then kind of a little bit of a letdown after that. Then we got into computing, personal computing, and so on and so forth.
What's interesting here, in the last, call it over a decade or two, we are seeing a convergence of themes that are driving the world of components. In addition to the themes, we think a lot about end markets. End markets are very critical in our industry to use the example of a plane. Whether you're supplying a sensor, which obviously we don't, connector, power product, seats, right? Every time a plane comes off the line, everybody gets to make more money. And then there's the MRO cycle. So end markets are pretty key for us, whether it be our narrow lane of passives or others. In terms of what went good for us in 2024, obviously, you saw the revenue chart. It was largely down year over year as the industry had grappled with some destocking, especially in our distribution networking channels.
There was some demand weakness in the industry, but we did have some things that were going good, so what went good for us this year and we expect to close out the year is aerospace, defense, rail, and let's call it niche applications and industrial, and in terms of the expectation, if you followed our story at the beginning of this year, late last year, we said we'd expect to see some improvements, if you will, from an end market perspective as we came into year-end and the second half of the year, and we spoke on this on the third quarter call back in October last month is we did see some of these things coming in terms of indicating recovery in the near term heading into 2025, so those are distribution, which obviously serves a lot of different customers, networking.
So as we think about data centers and so on, we think that's going to recover. And excluding Enercon, these are our two biggest end markets, right? So distribution, networking were down. It makes it tough to grow the top line when you're down on your two biggest end markets. And then we expect recovery in premise wiring. And obviously, additive to all that will be Enercon. In terms of medium term, and we think about these things as kind of multi-year drivers that for us are maybe a smaller dollar amount, but are seeing some real tailwinds. Space and AI, and let's call it EV. We do an industrial EV. So think of not consumer side, but think of airport, ground support vehicles, large buses, earth mine equipment, ag equipment. So that's where we play, where it's called a low-medium volume.
It's a very different sentiment than the consumer EV market. There's a little bit down for us, but we think we'll recover. So we'll talk a little bit about these kind of medium-term drivers. And ultimately, we always have something that's kind of in the good guy column, the bad guy column. In 2022, our magnetics and power business were leading the way and not so much connectivity. 2023, connectivity started picking up the momentum and power and magnetics took a step back. This year, power and magnetics took a step back. It makes it hard when two or three segments are down. But ultimately, we think we are poised for growth here. Maybe just a couple of examples, visuals. I think our products tend to be a little bit, maybe not household items. So just kind of some examples on an airplane where our components go.
And I would say roughly a quarter of our business is OEM, North America OEM, and roughly 75% or three quarters is MRO. Obviously, you get down on the OEM side, it opens up the door on the MRO side. So there's a nice replacement cycle. Obviously, there was a little bit of hiccup with all the strikes into September and October and November here. So there was a little bit of a hiccup there as things slowed down. But ultimately, we think there's a bullish outlook on the all things commercial air industry for the years to come. On the defense side, again, we touch a lot of different applications. We tend to be heavy in munitions and communication-type support applications. This business was pretty down in 2018 and 2019 as spending on hard defense wasn't entirely there.
As we saw what happened in geopolitical events last year and this year, there's been a reposturing of the global defense spending. We think defense for the next few years will be an increase to spend on hard defense, which will be unfortunately a beneficiary for us. As we think about whether it be replenishment cycles, new technology, emerging technology on the battlefield, we think that this would be additive to the Bel Fuse side. Railway, so we're on the passenger cars. If you ever kind of look at a rail from the top, you see a bunch of boxes sitting on top. We do some of those. That's really helping manage the electrical flow and management of what's going on inside the train, anywhere from headlights to the braking systems, battery charging, turning on the coffee machine, right? Railway is an interesting market.
It's not necessarily what you'd think of traditionally as a growthy market, but rail has seen some interesting infrastructure spend and growth in places like China and India, so if you read Alstom and some of the ones what they're doing, there's some interesting applications going on there. Rail is also a very good business for us because it is pretty mission-critical. It's important. It's a very conservative customer-based technology, and performance is critical. These things get beat up very much out in the field, so they have to perform, and that's exactly where we excel, making really good ruggedized products for very tough applications, and as you can see, it's been up nicely for us here. Space, as I said, is an emerging thing for us.
When we say about space, it's really kind of everything you read about space, whether the satellites are being launched out there and ultimately tourism. This is an interesting business. We've been in space for, I think, over 40 years. Space historically was considered a very low volume, low revenue. And as a result of that, it wasn't necessarily a growthy thing. But because we've been in it for 40 years, in the last few years, as we've seen these space companies develop, we had a reference name. So we were very well known in the industry, and we started getting these calls early on, and we've had some really nice design wins. So we're starting to see a breakout of the space revenue where historically, I think on a good year, if you got $1 million or $2 million of sales, that's a home run.
We started seeing that breakout in 2023 to that four level, and we've said it'll be a little over seven this year. We're starting to see step changes. Now, $7 million on, let's say, $500,000-plus might not be the biggest of numbers, but this sits in our connectivity business. Our connectivity business is a little over $200 million. $7 million on $200 million is a new revenue stream we didn't have. We do expect some step changes, especially as you guys are kind of monitoring and reading the news out there in terms of launches that are coming up. It's a very interesting niche application that all of a sudden is starting to get legs on it. It tends to be a lot of good sole source position for us with very high margins. That's the Bel Fuse story.
We announced middle of September at this point the acquisition of Enercon, and we closed on it last week. We made the announcement so our Q4 numbers will have some of the numbers from Enercon in it once we do put our numbers out there. Enercon, from a dollar amount EV perspective, roughly $400 million, and we did an 80/20 type split with a current private equity owner there so the value is around $400 million with a $10 million earn-out. At that level, it's our biggest acquisition from a purchase price that we've done. It's a little bit under $40 million of EBITDA. So if we think of our 100 roughly million of EBITDA and 40 on that, it is a chunky acquisition. This deal is from maybe just talk about the numbers a second. You see the gross margin and the EBITDA margin here.
It is a margin additive across our P&L. So it should help us move up our margins, which we'll take a look at here in a second. We said it will be accretive on a non-GAAP basis out of the gate. Within year one, on a GAAP basis, just because some of the noise when you do such a big acquisition in terms of amortization and deal fees and stuff like that that come on the board here. Purchase multiple a little bit under, a little bit over, sorry, 10 times 2024. We said that we expect to be roughly a little bit under 2x in terms of leverage by end of Q4. We have some T-bills that we're waiting to mature. As they mature, we're going to pay down the debt here. So we like the math and we like the numbers.
In terms of the story itself, this is a 100% A&D business, and as we said, we think there's a positive tailwind to A&D. We announced this in September. We closed it last week, and it's tough to ignore the U.S. election, so people ask us, you guys had insight into the elections, and we take a little bit longer-term thematic investment themes on the business given we're a longer design cycle. So defense was always something that we did good on, and we liked it, so we've been on the hunt for years, so it's something we woke up one day and decided to do it. This makes A&D our biggest end market, so we move into a little bit more, let's say, predictable cycle with good competitive dynamics and a healthy moat and kind of sets us up pretty nicely.
It does also open up a new market for us in Israel. Today, we don't sell any of our connectivity products, which is our aerospace defense products. So now there's a reverse synergy into hopefully Israel. In terms of the synergies, I should say we know there's revenue and potential cost synergies. We did not underwrite that as our base case, and there's reasons for that. One is we think it's a very attractive deal on its own merits with nice growth outlook. We paid a very reasonable price, and when you look at the other comps out there for it, and I would say from an EBITDA margin perspective, which is around 33%, it's very unheard of in our industry. So these guys are doing something right before you start getting in there and we start breaking it all up.
On the revenue synergies piece of it, we think Europe is an underutilized or underleveraged potential for Enercon's products. The reason is the Europeans like to have manufacturing on the continent there, similar to the Americans, and Enercon doesn't have manufacturing in Europe, so they were looking to address that. We have a big power facility in Slovakia, which is part of the EU. We also have Cinch products with two factories out in the U.K., so we know the customers. We have the power side of it, so we think there's something to be done there. On the U.S. side of it, there are some relationships we're a little bit deeper on than Enercon that we can open up the doors there, and from a design cycle perspective, connectivity folks tend to see designs earlier on.
So now all of a sudden, we can pull in the power team, which was not something that we had the luxury of doing. And we're the only connector guy in the industry doing it. I should say this company, the vast, vast, vast majority of their business is sole sourced. So it's very designed. And there's a really unique reason around that R&D team specifically as to why that is. It's a very diverse, diverse business. So their minimum order quantity is one. I think half the revenue comes from order quantities of 10. And I think anything over 25 is considered high volume for us, which is not what we would consider high volume. But it kind of shows the engineering chops and the way these guys kind of go about their business.
And then on the Bel side, obviously, we talked about a great scale, margin profile, accretive. For those of you that know, we do have a customer concentration that we talked about in our 10K. In 2022, that customer was around 17% of sales. Last year was around 11-ish% of sales. So now with Enercon, that further gets muted, if you will. So that way, we can hopefully reduce the whiplash that investors have when some of our key customers kind of stumble a little bit. So introduce a little more predictability and diversity on our business. Maybe this is our last slide here. Maybe just to kind of show you side by side in terms of where we are from an end market perspective and kind of where we're going. Obviously, like I said, defense and aerospace there, the 22% and 9%, 31%.
We know that that number is higher than 31% because some customers want to be handled through the distribution channel. So we will kind of break that out. But ultimately, I think the message is the only 30% market we'll have on a pro forma basis is A&D. Obviously, as we look at the world that we're in today and kind of recent administration changes, this is probably not a bad place to be in. And then you can see there the gross margins. I wouldn't focus too much on that given it's IFRS gross margins. So there might be some changes, some noise in the gross margin, what kind of goes up, what goes down. But we should be good on the EBITDA margin side of things and EBIT. With that, those are our prepared remarks. So we'll open up for any questions if anybody has.
Divestitures, I know you've got a few. Are there more to come or has the portfolio now been trimmed down and you're where you want to be fully enrolled?
Yeah. I think when we were on our February call earlier this year, we announced our fifth facility consolidation, and we kind of got that question, and I would say at the time, we'd say you're never done, but we feel that we've covered a lot of ground, and there's still some kind of fine-tuning we'd like to do, so then zoom forward to this October call that we talked about. We announced our sixth facility consolidation is a little bit smaller, so it's not as kind of a drastic of a thing. We call that kind of cleanup type stuff. We also announced that we hired our new first-time head of sales, so a newly created position and global procurement as Lynn was talking about. Are we done? I don't think you're ever done, but at least you've covered a lot more ground.
So what's in the rearview mirror is a lot bigger and heavier than what's in the road ahead of you. But ultimately, I think what we're doing is really we've always been focused on the growth side of it. And hopefully, 2025 is kind of the year where we talked about that. So you're never done, but I think there are some things we want to do. Like, for example, we launched a sales commission structure for the first time this year ever. Right? Was it a great commission structure? No. Was it a good one? Sure. But now with the new head of sales, there's some things we want to change heading into next year. So I look at that as just house maintenance, kind of housekeeping, if you will. So we're not done, but you're very well deep into the innings, if that makes sense.
The question is, just because this says, repeat the question: is when will we look at future acquisitions? I think the answer is we're always looking. But we also understand we're in a different position today than we were yesterday. Yesterday, we were in a net cash position. Today, we'll be in a net debt position. Our team on the power side are going to have their hands full a little bit with this one. So those guys might be tapped out. But the connectivity folks, magnetics folks are not doing M&A right now. So I'd say we have some food on the plate, but we're not out of the M&A game. So we want to be a little bit balanced in our approach there. Any other questions? Okay. Appreciate your time. Thanks, everyone.