Hi everyone, thanks for coming. Lynn Hutkin, CFO of Bel Fuse. Every day it's a new high. Good morning. Thank you for joining us today and having interest in our story here. We're excited to share our journey and where we're going next. Just to give you some background about Bel, for those who may not be familiar with our company, we have been in business for over 75 years, and we design and manufacture electronic components for use in a variety of end markets. We're global. We have about $630 million in sales. That's including our recent Enercon acquisition. We have about 5,000 people globally. We work with a blue-chip customer base. The benefit with Bel is, over the years, we've been very successful at evolving with the end markets. Back in 1949, we started making fuses for black and white televisions.
I can tell you, if we stayed there, we'd be out of business today. Over the years, we've grown into supporting networking applications and military applications, aerospace, rail, e-mobility, and now space and AI. We've always strived to maintain being relevant within the end markets of today. One thing, over the past 20 or so years, I've been with the company for 18 years. If I think back to when I first started, diversity is something that we were really lacking. We were predominantly networking. We were predominantly within our Magnetics product group. We were very heavily focused in China. Over the years, since I've been here, we've done 16 acquisitions. Our prior CEO, Dan Bernstein, did a great job at diversifying the organization over the years. From an end market perspective, you can see today we're a little over 40% in aerospace and defense.
That networking piece is only about a quarter of the business. We have industrial and then various end markets that we touch through distribution. From a product group perspective, about half of our business is Power . About 1/3 is our Connectivity segment. About 15% is that Magnetics business that was so dominant when I first started. From a customer type perspective, about 3/4 of our sales go direct to our OEM customers. About 1/4 is through the distribution channel. What's nice with distribution is it touches 50,000 end customers a year. It's really a seeding element for our sales. Geographically, we're almost 70% North America, with the balance spread across Asia and Europe. Lots of diversity in the business. We are never running on full cylinders.
If you look at our product groups or end markets, there are always things that are running well, and there are always things that are falling behind. It just gives us resiliency in our business. At the bottom is our sample of our customer base. We've always successfully partnered with blue-chip customers, just staying on top of tomorrow's technologies. This is diving into our segments a little bit more. From a power perspective, as I mentioned, about half of our business is here today. This is a variety of power supplies and fuses. Just as an example, you can think of a power supply that would go into a shelf of a data center server. That's the type of thing that we make. The end markets here are largely networking, industrial, rail, e-mobility, and now AI.
The main customers here are sample customers, I should say, Cisco on the networking side, Alstom on the rail side. Growth drivers within power are largely, we have networking, which is in a rebound situation right now, and then AI, which is small, but we're seeing growth. On the connectivity segment, this is about a third of our business today. This is a variety of cabling and connectors. If you think of an aircraft, the connectors that would go into the in-flight entertainment system, that's behind the seat in front of you. Those are the connectors. We have them along the lighting and the aisles. We have cabling that sits in the wings of the plane that report the level of fuel back to the cockpit. Those are the types of products that we make in the connectivity segment.
Main end markets here are commercial air, military, networking, agricultural, and premise wiring. From a customer perspective, it's your main players here: Boeing, Lockheed , Raytheon. On the ag side, John Deere. From a growth driver perspective, it's largely commercial air and defense, which have been strong. We continue to see nice tailwinds there. On the magnetic side, this is about 15% of our business today. It's really a concentrated product here. It's called our ICMs, our Integrated Connector Modules. If you think about the ports on the side or the back of your laptop, those are ICMs. It's the inside port that cabling will connect into. If you think about a Cisco server, they have a brick of six or eight of them together. It looks like a harmonica. That's the type of product that we make in this segment. The end markets here, it's predominantly networking.
The main customers here are the main networking guys, so Cisco, HP, and Dell. From a growth driver perspective, this area is fairly mature. It's in a rebound situation. As you can see in the charts at the bottom, in 2022, when we had supply chain constraints, we saw an elevated level of ordering from our customers. Sales were around $180 million. As they worked through inventory on hand, we went through this destocking situation over the following two years. We're just now coming out of that. We bottomed out in Q1, Q2 last year. We're seeing a very slow rebound. We do get the question a lot of, you know, where can magnetics get back to? I can tell you it's not going to get back to 2022. That was not a normal year. 2024 at under $70 million is not normal either.
We're in a rebound situation there with nice growth potential. I think the important thing to note on this slide is, at the bottom, the level of gross margin improvement that we've had across each of our segments over the last several years. Summing it all together, you can see here on relatively flat sales, right? If you look over the last few years, sales, there's nothing overly exciting about our top line sales number. It's been largely flat. We have had significant margin expansion over the last four years. That was due to several initiatives. Back in 2021, Farouq came on board as our CFO at the time. He's now our CEO. Farouq came from an investment banking background. He knew what all of our peers looked like. The bones of Bel were good. We had longevity, great reputation, talented engineers, blue-chip customer base. What were we doing wrong?
Why didn't we look like the others from a margin perspective or a multiple perspective? We went through, and thankfully, we had finished a multi-year ERP system implementation in mid-2021. By 2022, early 2022, we had our first view of SKU-level profitability. That was one of Farouq's first questions when he came in, which we did not immediately have the answer to, but we did within a few months. About a quarter of our backlog, we realized, was negative gross margin. We then took the next year or so going through and addressing that. Some of it was we were heavily underpriced in some areas. In some cases, our manufacturing facilities weren't being run efficiently. We went through and did six facility consolidations to clean up our operations. We realized that we didn't have a pay-for-performance mindset across the organization. Our sales folks did not have a commission plan.
They were just paid a salary, which isn't very motivating to sell. That was put in place. Our executive team, everyone was kind of paid the same regardless of how their segments did. That changed a couple of years back with really tying pay to performance and really changing the mindset within the organization. Those are just some examples, but you can see the results here in that our margins, which used to be in the mid-20s, are now in the high 30s. Our EBITDA margins, which were in the mid single-digits, are now close to 20%. We've done a tremendous amount of work in just cleaning up the business, looking a regular way. We did do an acquisition in November, our Enercon acquisition. You'll see on the debt side here that we added debt related to that, which we are actively paying down. That's kind of the history, right?
That paints our journey to date here. As we look to the future, which is what you would all care about, we do feel that we have many different tailwinds. Everything today is being electrified, right? Think about toothbrushes, right? Years ago, it was just a regular toothbrush. Now, it's electric. Increased data generation. Everything is getting smaller, faster. There's AI. There's EV, which admittedly is a little soft right now because of interest rates. EV is something that we think is a longer-term growth driver for us. We feel that we're well-positioned in many different areas. As far as overall growth drivers, I covered a lot of these previously. The main trends that we're seeing today are in the aerospace, with an increase in build rates. Defense, no matter where you look, there's just an increase in defense spending, whether it's the U.S., Europe, with NATO.
That's not something that is quick. We get questions a lot saying, oh, there's all of this defense activity and these things were approved. What is that going to do for you next quarter? That's not how it works. An increase in defense spending for us is definitely additive, but it's more to the future. Think like later 2026 into 2027. The NATO item will be a several-year-out benefit for us. Space and AI, I'll get into in a little more detail on the next slides here. Those are areas that are just robust and growing. We also have on the other side here, what is rebounding. These were things that were strong in the past. They've gone through this destocking situation, and we're starting to see recovery, particularly in distribution and networking at this point. We just started in the second quarter to see those turning back on.
Bookings in the first and second quarter had increased in those areas, and we started seeing those sales start to come through in the late second quarter. I mentioned aerospace and defense. It's definitely a large growth driver for us. We support both aerospace and defense within our Power segment and our Connectivity segment. This is where the Enercon acquisition, you can see the large bump here in sales in the TTM 6/30 period. That is largely due to the acquisition of Enercon, which we did in November of 2024. That was about $120 million of sales. They're a pure A&D company. This is an area that is sticky business. It's an area that we want to continue to see growth in, and we think that we will benefit just from the tailwinds in these end markets as we move forward.
On the emerging side, we talk about space and AI and realizing that they are small today. Sometimes we get the question of, they're so small, why talk about them right now? My response there is going back to our first slide, we are all about, we have to keep evolving. We have to stay relevant with whatever tomorrow's end markets are. Understanding that these are small today, these two combined are about $20 million of sales. Nothing to write home about, but if we weren't in them, you should be concerned because this is where tomorrow is going, right? We're shooting things up into space. AI is the new big thing. It's important to know that we are in these new end markets. Yes, it's small today, but the entire industry in both of these is small today.
We are very well positioned to grow with them as these end markets gain traction. Looking at the third quarter, second half, we've been getting questions about tariffs that revolve every single day, it seems. In general, they've had a very minimal impact on us. There's about 25% of our sales that go from some country outside of the U.S. into the U.S. If you look at our global sales, it's only 25% that could potentially have an impact. The other important thing to note is we've been dealing with tariffs since 2017, 2018. They are not new to us. They are not new to the industry. We have a very well-defined playbook that the entire industry has. These are largely just passed along to our customers. We are a B2B organization.
We definitely keep tabs on what's going on, but we have not seen any significant impact at this point to our business based on tariffs. Looking to the second half, and these are consistent with what we talked about last time, growth mindset across the organization. I had talked about how we spent the last four years cleaning up our foundation. That is largely done. There's still some small initiatives, and we'll always have continuous improvement in that area. Now the focus is on growth. If you recall back to the slide that showed the sales that were nothing exciting, right, on the top line sales perspective, we need to prove that we can grow organically. It's not something that we've been successful in the past, and we know that. We hired our first Global Head of Sales in the fall of last year.
We have lots of sales initiatives on the organic side in place to grow sales organically. In addition to that, M&A has always been in our DNA. Like I said, we've done 16 since I've been here. With Farouq as our new CEO, he comes from the investment banking background. M&A is definitely in his DNA as well. It is safe to say that M&A will be a part of our future. We are very heavily focused on top line growth at this point. From a procurement perspective, we also hired our first Global Head of Procurement last year. It's a function that was handled locally in the past. It now has global attention on it to drive initiatives for material cost savings. That's something that we've been focusing on.
With all of the focus on the P&L and margins over the last four years, there has not been a lot of attention on the balance sheet and improving cash conversion and cleaning up our DSO and DPO. That is an initiative that is starting to take priority as well. In summary, for those who are new to the story, we think that we do offer a compelling combination of strong financials. Like I said, we've worked hard to diversify our end markets over the last couple of decades. We are exposed to exciting end markets that are in a nice growth zone, like aerospace, defense, AI, and space. We've had disciplined capital management. I think over the last four years, we've really shown our commitment to transforming the company, implementing continuous improvement initiatives and innovation.
We think that the road ahead is exciting with M&A being part of the story. I'll open it for questions. Yes.
How about how your acquisition is going now?
Yeah, so the acquisition of Enercon closed in, and I'm sorry, the question was how the acquisition of Enercon is going. We closed on it in November 2024. I mean, the acquisition was really as advertised, which is nice. You hope that's how it works, right? With all the due diligence that you do, you hope that there are no surprises. It's really been as advertised. The business is growing. I would say every aspect of the Enercon team is very strong. They have a very strong sales team with a follow-the-money approach where they look and see who's being funded, you know, whether it's through a defense budget or VC money. That's who they're going after for their next customers. They're very strong technically with their engineers. It's just a different acquisition for us, but it diversified us into Israel, which was nice.
We never signed up for any cost synergies there. There may be some minimal ones down the road, but it's not something that we had in the cards from day one or anything. The one nice thing with Enercon is the revenue synergies that it could bring. Again, because it's in aerospace and defense, it's definitely longer-term in nature. It's not going to be anything quick. Enercon doesn't have any sales into Europe because they don't have any manufacturing in Europe. Now, Bel has a power manufacturing plant in Slovakia that currently manufactures rail and e-mobility. They're already manufacturing the harsh environment type power products. The thought is having Enercon start doing some manufacturing out of Slovakia so that they can service that European defense market. On the flip side, our connectivity products were never sold into the Israeli defense market.
Enercon has very strong relationships with the three Israeli primes. Previously, Connectivity had no relationships there. There are cross-synergy opportunities, you know, on the revenue side that we're really excited about. Like I said, it'll take time. It's more of a, you know, later 2026 into 2027, but those are exciting. In general, the acquisition is going really well. Yes.
Does that make your business less cyclical going forward? Because the revenue projections have been, you know, aerospace that we've had to begin only up. Is it really great that we'll schedule how the planes?
It is, yeah, to your point. The question was, with the increase in our A&D exposure, does that help make our business less cyclical? It would. Aerospace and defense, to your point, is very long-term in nature, right? I mean, we could get an order in January of a given year, and it's, you know, ship this volume each month for the next 18 months. It definitely gives you more visibility. It's more predictable. It does help mitigate the other side of the business, which is less predictable and tends to have more seasonality. If you were to look at Bel 's business prior to the Enercon acquisition, our first quarter was always our weakest, just because there's Chinese New Year. Our factories there are closed for two weeks. There's disruption in the workforce as they're coming and going and having to hire and train people.
The fourth quarter, again, with Golden Week in China and everything in the U.S., that tends to be our second weakest quarter of the year. Q2 and Q3 tend to be the strongest. Now, introduce Enercon, and there is no seasonality. They're pretty consistent from quarter to quarter. It just helps smooth that out for us, but without having any affiliation with China, it just eliminates that seasonality.
Your facts in space, which is probably now about 1/3 of your business, roughly on a fair and ongoing basis. You talked about other 2/3 of your business, what kind of growth initiatives out of that are?
Yep. The question was around, you know, that we were talking about aerospace defense. That's about 40% of our business today. The question was around the other 60% and where we see growth opportunities there. I think on the networking side, that's definitely an area. We're seeing a couple of things in networking. One is a rebound. That was also one of the areas where in 2022, customers had ordered a tremendous amount of product. It took them a couple of years to work through inventory on hand. We're finally seeing bookings come back. We're seeing a rebound in networking right now. On top of that, you have AI, which is new and has nothing to do with the rebound. Those are two areas for the other 60% of the business where we see growth. Yes. The question is if our M&A strategy includes turnarounds, given our history here.
From an M&A perspective, we look at everything that is out there to be looked at. It has to check both the story box and the math box. On the story side, it's things like, you know, what end markets is it in? We prefer the stickier end markets, A& D, maybe medical. We don't do a lot in medical today, but that would be something of interest to us. Is it in one of our product groups, right? We're currently looking in power and connectivity. I don't think we're looking to add a fourth product group necessarily. Geographically, where is it? Is it entirely in China? That may not be of interest to us. We're looking to diversify geographically. There's lots of the story where it needs to make sense. From a math perspective, what does it do to our margins?
To your point, would a turnaround be of interest? It could be, but we would need to have a very clear path to turning it around because we've worked really hard over the last four years to get our margins to where they are today, not looking to go back to where we were. If we acquired a Bel 2.0, you know, something a Bel from four years ago, we would need to make sure that we had the playbook to get those margins up in a pretty quick timeframe. We're not looking to have it be margin destructive. Would we do something that sets us back a little bit temporarily while we clean it up, if everything else made sense? Sure. Thank you so much.