Delighted to introduce Bel Fuse, Farouq Tuweiq, CEO, and Lynn Hutkin, CFO.
All right. Thanks, Jean. Morning, everyone. Thank you for making some time for us here today. We got a presentation we'll run through here, and then we're happy to open it up for Q and A at the end. These things are usually more interactive if we get questions, so get those ready, please. All right. Bel Fuse, we're headquartered not too far from here, West Orange, New Jersey. We celebrated, seemingly a long time ago, but early last year, our 75th anniversary, which is no small feat in our industry of electronic components, where we've seen a lot of change and consolidation in the industry. We've been hanging out in the industry here, really a testament to our engineering and product set. Believe it or not, we started out in the business of making fuses for black and white TVs back in 1949.
There was color TVs and personal compute, and then to where we are today, really more kind of B2B type company. Obviously publicly traded, roughly $629 million of sales and 21% of EBITDA. You guys will see some of this pro forma stuff throughout the presentation. We did our largest acquisition in our history back in November of a company called Enercon. That is kind of the intention of the pro forma there, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. All right. We pride ourselves on diversity geographically and markets, go-to-market. We have seen the benefits of that really come through in the last couple of years as we have seen the industry go through some too much inventory in the channel and some challenges there. We have seen kind of the benefits of that diversity side of things.
Today, power, historically, I should say, on the product level group, we've historically been a little bit more balanced, 1/3 , 1/3 , 1/3 . If you've kind of tracked us here for the last couple of years, and especially now with Enercon, we are 54% power. Our connectivity group, still 35%. Where the historically is in terms of percentage, they've seen some nice growth there. We obviously have seen some challenges in our main magnetic group, which we'll get into that in a little bit here. End markets, today, A&D is our largest end market. In Q1, it was around 38%. When we look at this here, it's closer to 36%, so roughly 1/3 . The company I was talking about earlier that we acquired, Enercon, would sit into that A&D space.
The second largest market for us is, or I should say, historically, has been networking, has been the largest one for us. With the acquisitions, along with some of the challenges that market states, our third one. Industrial is kind of your coverall. As we think about distribution, it's a great market for us. It's been down a little bit given too much inventory in the channel last year. We're seeing nice signs of recovery there. We're excited for that. Think of that as really more of a market seating and customer finding type relationship. It's interesting to me because I think it is a safe assumption, but general investors would tend to think of this as a low margin business. The reality is it's a very good corporate level margin business. That's a key one for us.
Customer type, we're largely direct OEM. Obviously, these numbers are a little bit skewed because distribution was down. We are largely a direct relationship. That engineer to engineer handholding in the trenches, long design cycles is very key for us. The customer has always appreciated, obviously, the brand name, our engineering talent, and the fact that we are really there for the long time. We have been there throughout history, which is a key thing for our customer base, which tends to be more conservative. Geographically, we align ourselves more to North America-based companies. Historically, North America was 70%. It has come down a little bit with our recent acquisition. We have seen expansion in EMEA. That is where our company that we acquired, Enercon, would sit with some more Israel exposure and the EMEA side. We have seen that kind of expand a little bit here.
Some logos for some of our customers. Looking at this a little bit by group here. I'm not going to hit on everything, but you'll see that on the organic basis was kind of going through a cycle down, some of the challenges within the channel. We saw weakness in distribution and networking and largely in industrial, but rail and e-mobility. Rail was the really standout one for us last year. Also, we started seeing AI come through this segment as where we service AI. We talk about some of the customers here. If you look at the financials on the bottom, I should point out one of the big focus areas for us the last three, four years, we've been in kind of restructure, turnaround mode to get our margins to more industry aligned. You'll see that just more of across the theme.
We'll get into that in a second, why our margins have improved despite some difficulty on the headline. Connectivity solutions, this was our legacy A&D exposure business. This is kind of what we were known for on the A&D side. Similar design cycles, largely North American and European exposure type business here, but generally low volume type applications. This has been a nice grower for us, especially as we've seen the MAX get off the line back in 2020, 2021, and defense spending ramp up. Obviously, this has been a grower for us given that just overall increased defense spending. Magnetic solutions, I would say this is our most concentrated business. It's really concentrated in networking and distribution, which both of them have been down. That's why you see that big decline in sales.
I would say in 2022, this segment obviously had an unusual number of revenue given some of the challenges and the dislocation and issues that were going on in the supply chain. It has been a little bit tough for us. We also have a customer concentration in the segment. The good news is on the rebound, and we have seen that come through. I think starting Q3 last year, we have seen that sequentially grow. We are excited to kind of get back to growth on that one. Change is something we have talked about a lot. For those of you that have kind of followed our story today, I think when we look at our margin profile, which Lynn will get into, on the gross margin level, I bet you we are in the kind of top 90th percentile despite our sales coming down last year.
We look at our EBITDA also probably at a minimum of 50-60-70 percentile of our industry. We know our strategy of cleaning up the business has worked. This is just a broad stroke of what has been done the last few years. I would just bucket on really on the people side, operations, and strategy. On the people side, strengthening our bench, we have added our first outside global head of Europe sales, Sabine. We added our first global head of sales back in 2024, our first global focused head of, we call them contracts, really strategic procurement. You will see various changes on the executive team. Today, CEO as of a couple of weeks ago, and Lynn, CFO as well. When you looked at when I joined back in 2021, I was the new person.
Today, only one person on the executive team kind of predates me. Some of it was internal elevations and promotions, some from the outside. I think we're happy with where the people side of it is. Operations, we've done six facility consolidations across the businesses. We have really invested a fair amount of money into our CapEx. Six less facilities, more CapEx as the ROI started making sense. When we were looking back at 2021, I think we were four times levered. We were 5% EBITDA margin roughly. We were just trying to pay our bills and stay above water. Now we've moved into the offense side on CapEx and automation as we think about global input costs going up. Strategy has been a big discussion. I think something that maybe we've underinvested in.
We've really kind of done a good job back in 2022 and 2023 setting a plan and kind of going at it. One thing I think folks here will point out to a lot of this was operational, internal focused, factory level. The reason there really was just the world was a little bit shut down in terms of sales in general. We thought it was more prudent to focus on getting our house in order first to empower our sales team. As we think about 2025, a lot of focus on sales and achieving that growth, which we said earlier this year, we expect growth across the business. We will hit on one slide here before turning over to Lynn. Like we said, we had a transition here in May 2025.
I think those that have also followed our story probably knew that Lynn and I both played maybe unusual roles for our previous titles. And we've been on this journey of change for the last four years. So investors are like, "What's new now?" We're like, "Well, we've been doing a lot of this stuff." Obviously, there's some things we want to get to the last 20% 30%, but we've been on this journey. We're not waiting for this. Our previous CEO, Dan Bernstein, stepped into the chairmanship role. But we now will be able to kind of get to some of the things maybe there was just misalignment on. China tariffs, whatever I tell you right now, I'm sure it'll be wrong tomorrow once we see a new tweet coming out. But we've talked about this a little bit more in depth on our call in April.
I think one of the misunderstood, let's say on the outside from a casual reader investor, is you'll see we have a lot of square footage and a lot of people in China. People assume all of our revenues are in China and everything we're making is in China. The reality of the matter is the heavy China footprint is because our magnetic segment, which today is our smallest, is a very labor-intensive product. Therefore, they need a lot of square footage. A lot of the workers there need dorms. You will see an outsized headcount and square footage, but that misaligns to the revenue. In the second quarter, we talked about that we have roughly 25% exposure to tariffs. This is revenue, let's say, that's making its way back to the U.S. Roughly 10% of that 25%, so 10%, is China specific.
The other 15% is other countries with the big concentrations, the largest one there being Israel, and then also some India and some other kind of random places. We on the 15% have not really seen any disruption or concern there. We do not really think that is something that is overly stressful. As a reminder, our industry has been operating under the tariff side of things back in 2018, 2019 when these things got initially put on. We are passing it all on, and we are moving it on. I should say the 10% that is from China coming in, we saw some folks put a pause order in the second quarter as they got clarity on the 170% tariff. Obviously, since then, that number has come down to something more manageable. We have seen a resumption of, let us call it, the shipping.
The one caveat here is when we gave our guidance, which was around $145 million-$155 million, we said there is this $8 million-$10 million of this, let's call it at risk. China will wait and see what happens. We will recover some of that. Some of those guys are going to have to get back in line as lead times and get back into the production cycle. Better news overall today. We're passing on the tariffs. We think we're on a relative basis to understand we're very well set up to handle this environment. Obviously, we continue to hope for more clarity. In terms of what we're really focused on here and working, like I said, sales and growth is something we've always talked about. We're putting more muscle behind that. Like we said, we have great engineers, great product names, great reputation.
We just want to make sure that we're really leaning into it. This one is really exciting for us. Also, sales initiatives. Like I said, we hired a very seasoned leader back in October. He's been digesting the organization. I mean, we are global for a company that's, let's call it, $650 million of sales. We're very global. We're in a lot of places. A part of that understanding is who does what where. Uma has been well in on that. We're very excited for the things that he's working on. We've put some of these things in place. We'll maybe talk more about that as time goes on. Procurement, like I said, historically, we've done buying more at a BU level or really more at a facility level. I would say raw materials is our biggest cost expense.
It was the one that there was no true ownership of it. Now, this may seem a little bit simplistic, but when we look at something like power, which is our biggest segment today, 70%-80% of the bill of material is material. Think about it more simplistically. If we're very good at acquiring raw material, you will have a really good chance of making your margins, even if you mess up the people overhead side of it. We had nobody kind of really focused on it. That is a, I understand companies love saying procurement, procurement, but for us, this is a real opportunity. We've done some nice things the last couple of years in terms of cost reductions and cost takeouts, even in a tough environment. I think this one is going to be a good one for us.
I think if you also followed our journey the last three, four years, we've been heavily focused on the P&L. Our gross margin was low. EBIT was low. EPS was low, overlevered. So a lot of interest expense. For us, we really focused on making our P&L a little bit more healthy. We obviously did not sleep on the balance sheet side of things. If we're doing a price increase or we're trying to push other terms on the relationship term delivery and you're trying to figure out AR terms, it makes it a little more complicated. We're, I'd say, renewed focus on balance sheet. Obviously, I'll caveat this will be a little bit longer term because our customers are very, very big folks in general. We think there is enough there that we can improve upon. With that, turn it over to Lynn.
Thank you, Farouq. Just to wrap up what Farouq just went through, this is kind of a snapshot of the self-help phase, as we'll call it, that we just went through over the last four years. You can see even with sales going down by 20%, as Farouq mentioned, from 2023- 2024, the gross margins that we were able to achieve based on pricing actions we took, facility consolidations, aligning pay with performance, all of those initiatives that we've done over the last four years has really helped to drive our gross margin and EBITDA margins up. You can see that those were sustained even on a lower sales base. From a liquidity perspective, we did take on a fair amount of debt with the Enercon acquisition that we did in November of 2024. We are aggressively paying that down.
As of the end of April, this was from right after our earnings call, we were at $270 million of debt and $65 million of cash. We do have intentions of continuing that level of paydown. As we look forward, we've been talking about growth. That's the main focus for this year. How are we going to get there? This slide just goes through the industry that we're in, electronic components, which is in an exciting space today. It's not just one thing that needs to hit in order for us to grow. This is across the whole industry. As things get smaller, more efficient, smarter, faster, we're playing in all of these spaces. Electrification, AI, EV, which is slow at the moment, but we do expect that to be a longer-term growth driver for us.
These are all areas that we participate in and we think will be additive to us over the years. For Bel specifically, as we look for the balance of 2025, the areas that we see continued strength in is, and I'll get into these in the next slides here, A&D has been a strong force, and we expect that to continue throughout the year. Space and AI have both been emerging for us. It was a couple of million dollars a year up until 2024. They were both around that $7 million-$8 million range in 2024. We're continuing to see growth there. Small, but growing and exciting end markets for us. If you've been following us over the last few years, you would have seen that networking and distribution have been soft.
There's been a lot of inventory in the channel over the last two years. Our customers have worked through that inventory on hand. We started seeing an uptick in bookings earlier in 2024, which bodes well for the end of the year. These are areas that we anticipate seeing some rebound in the second half. The next few slides, these just go through some of the specific growth drivers that I outlined. Obviously, aerospace, we've been in aerospace for decades. It's OEM and aftermarket, as Farouq mentioned. Nice growth here. We will go as the new production of aircraft goes. If your view on that is that it's growing, we will grow with it. We do have an aftermarket exposure here as well.
On the defense side, as the global security needs evolve and various countries are strengthening their defense systems, we will participate in that. We do work with the U.S. primes here, the Israeli primes, along with the Enercon acquisition that we did in November. They are largely on the defense side, the Enercon business. They are about 93% defense. This is U.S., Israel, and also some Europe on the legacy Bel side. We do expect this to be a large growth driver for us going forward. Space, as I mentioned, small, but we have been in space for decades. This was before it made really any money for us. We were just excited to know that our product survived up in space. Now that it is becoming more commercialized, people are sending a lot more things up into space.
We have over 200 customers in this area. Some of them are the names that you read about in the news. Other ones are very small startup-type customers. We believe that we are very well positioned in this area. As I mentioned, last year, it was about $8 million of sales. Q1 was $2 million. We do expect it to continue to grow, small, but an exciting end market for us. On AI, this is also small, but growing. This is largely in our power group. Our power supplies, it is actually the same power supplies that we have been manufacturing. If you think back to the days of Bitcoin mining a few years back, it was the same power supplies that were being sold into that end application.
It is really more of the same power supplies, just higher volume of those supplies going into these applications. In this area, we are not participating with the hyperscalers here. We have chosen our spots. It is more working with the networking customers, Cisco, HP, Dell, and then also some of the smaller startup-y type customers who compete more with NVIDIA. In summary, we think that we are at a very exciting point in our journey here over the last four years. As we mentioned, it was kind of a self-help story, growing margins, cleaning up our foundation. The next chapter, as we look into the second half of 2025 and into 2026, is really focusing on growth, both organic, inorganic, and then tackling not only sales, but also the procurement piece. We are just getting started.
It seems like a lot of times investors say, "Oh, so you finished, right? The gross margin story is finished." We view it as we finished getting the foundation strong. Now we're going to start the growth story. Thank you. We'll open it up for questions.
[guess] John, talk about kind of gross margin leverage you have there. I mean, how much more do you have there and then maybe the growth outlook from here?
On the gross margin side, we view ourselves as being probably in the 90th percentile of the industry today. We're not going to blindly focus on increasing margins from here. I don't think we have a desire to be a 40% gross margin company.
What we would like to do going forward is viewing it as more of a taking a portfolio approach and adding to the top line, maintaining margins, and adding to the bottom line. That is more of how we look at gross margins. We are good where we are, but we do want to drive top line and bottom line.
I think.
Andy?
let's say, updates on what we have seen from our customers' distribution since the next call? What the month of June looks like.
Yeah. I would say maybe I will just give a high-level here. Maybe just the question was around what are we seeing from distribution customers here. I think it was the third week in May, we had our biggest industry conference that happens once a year in Vegas, EDS.
Really, EDS is for distributor and supplier companies like us. It is not OEM customers, right? I would say—and maybe I am just expanding your question here a little bit, Andy—that I think the body language and the message is much more positive. I think when we look at EDS back in 2024 and 2023, I would say they were much more subdued. I think there is a more bullish outlook on where we are going. That was good to hear other people in the industry kind of echoing what we are seeing. I think they are not too dissimilar maybe to Bel Fuse. I think maybe some weakness in consumer, but consumer is like 5% of our business, so it is not really a big focus. Some end markets will be a little bit more labored.
Where we participate, I think there is a much more bullish, robust language. In terms of specifically our distribution folks, if you recall, maybe to expand on that a little bit as well, in our earnings call, we said $8 million-$10 million from distribution customers that was scheduled to ship in Q2 that was at risk given that they wanted to see more clarity coming out of the China tariff. Obviously, the China tariff was reduced down to, let's call it, mid-50s. That did lead to more of a resumption. No pauses today. People are kind of back, let's say, normal cadence. The question is, the $8 million-$10 million that we had called out at the end of April was a mix of finished goods, so things that were ready to ship that were just sitting on the dock.
It was things that were scheduled to be manufactured in a quarter and shipped out. It depends on where it is in the manufacturing journey. We'll recover. If it's finished goods that we can ship out, yes, we ship it out and we'll be shipping it out. There's a little bit of port backup because all of a sudden everyone woke up with China says, "Let's ship a bunch of things out." We do expect a recovery part of that $8 million-$10 million, not all of it, but some of it. The rest of it that we don't get to in Q2 will get shipped out to Q3.
I just want to add a few questions. Can you talk about Enercon's roadmap, what their roadmap may look like?
You're talking about. Yeah. Remember, they are an A&D business.
The question is around Enercon roadmap here on the product side. They are 100% aerospace defense, 93% defense, and 7% commercial air. These are not, let's say, quick design cycles, right? When we look at Enercon, 2025 is basically booked. It's been booked for the last few months. We're taking orders for 2026, not out of the gate 2026, so a little bit beyond that. We've talked about we think there's a fair amount of revenue synergies when we did acquire Enercon. We also said we don't really expect anything in 2025, right? Just it's not the way the industry works. We expect some of that in 2026. In terms of some of the tea leaves, maybe we are seeing some cross-sell opportunities. We have fed them some opportunities. They fed us some opportunities.
We like the activity, let's say, around it. To your other question, Enercon is always in the business of designing and going after new business, right? It's just it's the question of, okay, we know you're getting shots on goal, but when do you actually convert that? I would say in terms of shots on goal, given what's going on in the end market, we're seeing a lot of shots on goal, right? We're seeing kind of robustness both in Europe and in North America. We like the activity around it, which was kind of our operating thesis, right? There's a lot of money going into this space. Some of the things we have seen, which we don't know if this is a little bit of a new normal, is a little bit of shortening on duration of design times.
We had a project come in in Europe where usually, let's say, it's this long, and they did it much quicker. Now, is that a change of mindset given what's going on there? Unclear yet, but we've seen some shortening of durations on design cycles. That was more of a ground, let's say, vehicle. Maybe because of that, it was a little bit quicker, but things that fly, maybe not so much, unclear. TBD. Any other questions? All right. Thank you, everyone, for your time. Appreciate it. Always happy to connect offline here. Thank you.