Good morning, and thank you all for joining us for our next East Coast Ideas Conference presentation. Presenting next is DMC Global, which trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol BOOM. Representing the company today is Chief Financial Officer Eric Walter. Eric?
Thank you. And I'm here with Geoff High, our VP of IR here, so I look forward to an interactive discussion today. I'm going to run through a few slides here, but we're going to leave some time at the end for questions from everybody. But I appreciate everybody coming here. So DMC is a business that owns three underlying businesses that we're pretty proud of. The business, we would categorize it as being asset-light, so it doesn't require a lot of CapEx to necessarily fund growth. We think that each one of these businesses has a unique leadership position within their markets and that they have an offering that's differentiated from the competition. And we'll talk about that in more detail as we go forward. Just some quick stats here on DMC: roughly $635 million in terms of revenue, $50 million EBITDA.
Right now, the stock is trading towards the lower end of the range of the 52-week performance for it. A lot of that is driven by what's happening in the macroeconomic environment, a lot of uncertainty, which we'll talk through. Anyway, we think is really, really probably a good performing company here. This slide provides the quarterly performance of the business over the past several quarters. We had a down quarter in the third quarter of last year. We've been working hard to make improvement off of that. You'll see that in the fourth quarter of 2024 and obviously in the first quarter of this year. What we're focused on, we'll talk about it in a bit, is more of a back-to-basics. Really trying to focus on ways that we can continue this momentum as we head into the second half of the year.
Obviously, there's some headwinds that we've got from a macroeconomic standpoint that we're dealing with, just as a lot of companies are as well. On this slide, the main thing that we want to make sure you're aware of is that we maintain a pretty clean balance sheet. We had net debt of roughly $60 million when we finished the most recent quarter. We've got debt capacity of approximately $225 million. We're keeping the leverage ratio manageable, roughly 1.35 times EBITDA, and really keep an eye on this going forward. The business, as I mentioned, has three underlying segments to it. We have our NobelClad business, which is a composite metals business that makes up roughly 20% of our revenues. The remainder of the revenue is split between a building products business called Arcadia and an upstream oil and gas energy products business called DynaEnergetics.
Now, going forward, we think that the majority of the growth from the business is going to come from our Arcadia segment. This shows the relative addressable markets for each one of the businesses. Obviously, you can see that the Arcadia business has a much higher addressable market. We think that the nature of that business lends itself to growth geographically, but also just the market size is significantly bigger. We think that this slide will look very different in two- three years as that Arcadia business starts to grow. The other two businesses we expect will grow, but it is going to be more modest than Arcadia. Speaking of which, we will go into Arcadia as our first business. This is an architectural framing systems company.
What that means is that they basically fabricate aluminum extrusions into doors, into windows that would be any type of an opening that you would have going into a building. They call that the fenestration industry. Arcadia pretty much focuses in this area. The primary applications for this are going to be commercial exteriors. What that means is the first couple of floors when you walk into the atrium of a building, you'll see stores there. You'll see some sort of storefronts and things like that. That's part of what they really focus on. They can also do the exterior of the building, which is called the curtain wall. Most of their revenues are going to come from commercial exterior applications. They do also provide products for what I'd call the ultra-high-end residential market. That's roughly 15% of their revenue.
The interiors market, which is roughly 10%. One of the things that makes this business a little unique is how they go to market. They have a hub and satellite model. The hub model is where they do their finishing operations on the products, where they do anodizing, where they do painting. The satellites is really where customers will purchase those products. We can sell those to them as if they're raw materials. They buy those products, just the extruded product that's been painted and anodized, or we can fabricate it for them in the shape of a door or a window, whatever they want. We talked a little bit about this in terms of the breakdown of their revenues. The majority of the revenue, 75%, would be commercial exteriors. You can see some of the applications there.
What I was mentioning earlier, when you look at the first or second floor of a building when you walk in, we call that the podium. That's where you see a lot of the change out. Whenever you have any type of retail stores, whether it's a Starbucks, shoe shine, whatever, whenever they change out, they usually change the look and feel of the store on the front side of it. There are aluminum extrusions that are used to hold the glass in that application. That would be what Arcadia sells. The middle column there, roughly 10% of our business comes from commercial interiors. We call this Wilson Partitions. Just think of this as being the interior doors, the demising walls that would go into any type of commercial office space. The last segment, which is about 15%, is what we call Arcadia Custom.
This is the high-end residential business. Here, anything that you see on this house here from a windows or a door standpoint would be what Arcadia would sell. Roughly split across all those three areas there. This is a double-click into the commercial exteriors business. We talked about the 75% being attributable to commercial exteriors. If you look at this left-hand side, this is what we call our service centers. These are the satellites that are out there. This is roughly half of Arcadia's revenue. What we are doing is we are selling a painted or an anodized aluminum extrusion to a small glazier, to a small contractor, who then will take that and do the fabrication on behalf of their end customer. This can be new build. This can be renovation work. It is a little hard to see how they actually use it.
The main thing is these are smaller contractors and glazers. The average order size here is roughly $5,000. We typically get a higher margin on this because the customer's paying for the product availability and the customization capabilities that Arcadia has. That is contrasted with this other side of the slide, which is our projects. This is our long-cycle business. This is roughly 25% of Arcadia's revenues. These tend to be more 9-month, 12-month types of projects. We would sell through architects to reach the developer or the general contractor in these types of applications. You can see this example here of a large facility we did a few years ago. This type of business is one that tends to be a little bit more competitive. You have more people that are bidding on this work, but nonetheless, creative to Arcadia.
This breaks down that commercial exteriors business into a little bit more detail. In terms of where Arcadia is located, this is a footprint. As I mentioned earlier, it's a hub and satellite type of a model. Their hub right now is located in the Los Angeles area. That's where they would do their painting and anodizing. The satellites that they have is where they would distribute the product. The satellites look a lot like this left-hand picture that we have on this slide here, where you've got inventory that's out there in the right sizes, in the right colors, anodizing for the smaller contractors to come and pick up. Those satellite locations also do fabricating as well, so they can turn those straight linear links into windows, into doors on behalf of customers as well. That's a quick overview of Arcadia.
We're going to go to the second business, which is our energy products business, DynaEnergetics. This business is a leader in the perforating gun space within the well completion process. We'll talk about this overall process here in a second. It's really a technology-driven company. It's been around for several years. Their technology allows them to get a higher price relative to the competition. The other aspect of it is it means that they've got a more reliable product. They've got a safer product that's used for actually the well completion process. By well completion, this is, you may know this, this may be new to some, but there's kind of three steps in the process of getting hydrocarbons, whether it's natural gas or oil, out of the ground. The first process people always think about is doing the actual drilling.
That is where the driller will create a well bore in the ground. It will be normally in the U.S., it will be more of a horizontal or unconventional well that goes down and kind of goes out for possibly two, three miles. That does not allow you to actually pull the hydrocarbons up to the surface because once they drill that, they encase that well bore in cement. That is step one. Where DynaEnergetics comes in is in the second phase of this whole process, which is the well completion. They make a product that actually sets off charges with shape charges that will create fractures in the formation, and it blows holes through that concrete pipe. You can imagine that they put this product on a string that goes down one, two, three miles underground to set off these explosions.
It allows then step three to happen, which is for the natural gas, the oil, the hydrocarbons to seep through those fractures into the well bore that can be pumped to the surface. This is squarely in the upstream oil and gas space. The way that DynaEnergetics typically wins is really kind of a couple of ways. One is that their product allows us to go direct to well site instead of having a whole bunch of intermediary steps on behalf of the customer. We sell a product that is an integrated product, we'll see on the next slide, that the customer can then take and they can use it in their application for this well completion process.
Some of the competing products that we have, basically, the customers have to buy these components, and they put all of these parts together to create the perforating gun that is then used for the well completion part of it. This is a snapshot of what the product looks like. The DynaEnergetics product is on the left-hand side of the slide. All of the componentry is within this steel cylinder that you see there. We point out that the detonator that is laying out there on the left-hand side, it is a wireless detonator. You do not have to do any soldering to try to connect. The customers do not have to connect wires into the actual working parts of the perforating gun.
When you look at the competing product on the left-hand side, you'll see there's lots of different pieces and lots of different parts to this that the customer sometimes has to integrate on behalf of themselves. We think that this is a safer, more reliable product, and it makes the customer's lives easier from an efficiency standpoint as well. In terms of facilities, we've got two main operations. We have a German operation, which supports our international business. They also have an R&D facility there that handles a lot of the new product design, product changes, and manufacturing of that wireless detonator that we had on the previous slide. The other major assembly we have is in the U.S. in our Blum, Texas facility. That's where we do a lot of shape charge work as well as assembly of the end product.
One of the things, one of the initiatives that we had this past year in 2024 was to put in additional robotics into our assembly line. We have been able to do that at the Blum, Texas facility. What that does is it allows us to have more flexibility around how we scale up capacity versus having to go hire direct labor to manufacture the same amount of guns. That is a quick overview of the DynaEnergetics business. The last business that we will walk through will be our composite metals business, which is NobelClad. NobelClad has a process called explosion clad welding. What that means is that they take two dissimilar types of metals that have different melting points, and they are able to go through this process of combining them together into one solid piece of material.
The reason for that is because some metals are anti-corrosive, anti-heat, anti-pressure resistant. That is what you want to have in contact with whatever the chemical or whatever the process is that you are doing. You can also have a cheaper backer, we call it, like carbon steel, that provides the rigidity to the end product itself and allows you to have a more cost-effective product that still performs well versus having to make a vessel or a pipe completely 100% out of this more expensive metal. They have got a variety of end markets we are going to talk about. Some of that is in the oil and gas and petrochem space, but obviously work in different sectors as well. This kind of gets you a little bit of an idea about what their products actually look like.
We've got our products listed on the top and then some of the applications on the bottom. On the left-hand side, you'll see we've got the cladded plate. That's where we take those two dissimilar metals and through this explosion clad process, combine them together. What it's used for, it's used for, an example here, separation towers, where we will then sell this to a fabricator who will take those sheets and then form it into separation towers that are viewed right there. We also have clad heads there, which is the top of this pressure vessel you'll see there on the bottom. We'll take the flat plates and then we'll form it into these heads that are used for those types of applications. For heat exchangers, we've got tube sheet there as well. That's very applicable for that market.
In the marine area and also in transportation, specifically with trains, we make what are called transition joints, which are smaller joints that are connecting to dissimilar areas of whatever the ship or whatever the vehicle happens to be. When you look at the main markets for the business, the top two bullet points there, it's roughly half of the business for NobelClad, but they're also diversified in other areas that we've got listed there. With marine, that's going to be any type of shipbuilding application. We do also do work for the U.S. Navy for their submarine program. That is part of some of the end applications that they have there. Power generation can be anything from electrical and nuclear. It is a varied end market that NobelClad targets. From a capacity standpoint, the business has two primary locations.
One is in Germany that services the international market for their customers there. We also have a facility in Pennsylvania that's primarily focused on North America, but also does work on behalf of international clients as well. From a performance standpoint, and this will be the last slide that I end on here before Q&A, what I would say is if you've listened to our earnings calls, we've talked about getting back to basics. That can mean a lot of things, but for us, it's pretty simple. It's getting the right leadership in place. We got a new leader out of our Arcadia business who was the former president for 20 years before DMC Global bought it. Really, their period of rapid growth. He's come back on board and is helping really to pivot that business to growth going forward.
We're making any type of investment that we make right now really has to have an immediate, clear ROI associated with it. We're not necessarily going to be investing in initiatives that provide a five-year payback. We're looking for something that's going to be here and now over the next, call it 18-24 months. In terms of what we focus on, whether it's financial reviews, whether it's incentive metrics, it really boils down to two things for us. It's EBITDA growth and it's free cash flow generation. All of the management team, whether it's at the DMC level or the three businesses, are incented on those same two metrics. It's really trying to get everybody in the organization focused on those key things. We've got some other words up here on the board about what are things we're doing.
For me, that's kind of the biggest thing that we're focused on right now is getting back to the things that we need to be doing well and executing on those. That we think will have the single biggest impact on our ability to perform for the balance of the year. With that, I know I've thrown a lot of information at you. I'm going to pause here for questions. Happy to take any questions you might have.
Yes.
Just with regard to Arcadia and your sales in the U.S., is it mostly regional? I mean, most of your sales offices were in the south and southwest.
Yeah. For that commercial exteriors business, that's primarily west and southwest. That's 75% of our revenues.
For the remainder of the business, they do sell nationally for our interiors business and for the residential business, but the bulk of it would be west. The one thing I did not mention, it is not going to necessarily manifest itself in our P&L in 2025, but there is going to be a fairly significant rebuild effort for the LA wildfires. We are taking quotes right now on some of the residential rebuild. Again, it is not something you are going to see in our business this year. It is going to be something that is going to be a 2026 type of impact. Yes.
Eric, looking at your past results, we follow you at times and then kind of back off. Just looking over time, you have had periods of glory, then offset by those disappointments. Were those self-inflicted or were those macro drivers that were leading to the earnings volatility?
Just understand that, please. Yeah. For last year, I would say, and I'll talk about it business by business. For Arcadia, I would say most of that was self-inflicted. We, unfortunately, the management team there made some decisions that were regrettable from a capacity standpoint, and we had elongated lead times and unfortunately lost the trust of some of our customers. A big reason for us hiring back the former president was to reestablish that trust. Someone who's been in the industry for 25 years and knows these customers as well as vendors, knows them really well. That's why for the Arcadia business, I feel like despite what's going on from a macro standpoint, there's still the ability to outperform last year just by making some of these self-help back-to-basics improvements.
With DynaEnergetics last year, it was a combination of industry and then I think performance as well. What happened with DynaEnergetics in particular is that one of their largest customers acquired other customers of DynaEnergetics . We did not pick up any volume in the process, but what happened was all of that volume now went through at a lower average selling price. That really had a negative impact on the margin for the business last year. We will always push on ASP. We will always try to get that as high as possible. The things we can control are around our cost structure. The two initiatives that we had last year, one was around automation, that we put additional robotics in our assembly line in Texas. That came online in the first quarter of this year.
The second was we value engineered, I guess I'd call it, our flagship product. We were able to make the perforating gun smaller. What that means is it's less raw materials, particularly steel. It's been a hedge against the tariff impact, but also allows us to gain margin by having a lower cost base. I think with DynaEnergetics , we had some secular things that were going on. Both of those initiatives rolled out this year that we think will help support better margins going forward. Yes.
Longer term, like next 5 + years. What's the vision for the company?
Yeah. I'll break that down into kind of two sections. For the next, I'd call it 18 months, what we're focused on is bringing in the remaining part of Arcadia that we don't own.
In 2021, we acquired 60% of Arcadia, and then there is an option to purchase the remaining 40% of Arcadia. A lot of our capital allocation right now is going towards debt reduction and also making sure that we have the right capacity in place to handle tucking in that remaining 40%. Beyond that, what you will see is that Arcadia is going to become a bigger picture, bigger piece of the DMC portfolio going forward. We think that is going to happen in a couple of different ways. One is going to be geographic expansion. When I mentioned the hub and satellite model, one way we can do that is by adding additional satellites that surround the hub that provides deeper penetration in some states where we do not currently operate. The other way is to do some thematic acquisition, smaller players, mom and pops.
It might be located in another part of the country where they already have a supply base, a customer base, and they have the infrastructure in place for us to use that as a beachhead. We think that there's a lot of opportunity left in North America. When you think about our commercial exteriors business that really only services the West and Southwest, there's a lot of room for us to grow. We just have to be thoughtful about it because there are competitors in those markets. We want to make sure that the model that we have will actually resonate with the customers we're trying to get.
Just first 18 months then.
No, first 18 months is just the, yeah, is the, yeah, capital allocation, the option. And then beyond that would be using additional capacity we have for geographic expansion. Yeah.
We are also, I should mention that we're not standing still from a new product development standpoint. We are putting new products in place for the residential business to allow it to be more competitive in different parts of the country, whether it's hurricane-resistant products for the Gulf Shore area or whether it's more thermally treated products for the Northeast. For our interiors business, commercial interiors business, we also have a new product that we're going to be rolling out later this year, which will be or provides different types of incentives for landlords from a tax depreciation standpoint that we think will resonate with them. We are making those types of investments as well. They're just not, they're not significant CapEx investments, but we think they're important to maintain the brand and maintain the loyalty with the customer base. Yes.
Eric, when you do bring the remaining 40% of Arcadia, does that revenue pie that you showed us in the beginning change or is it fully consolidated in terms of the way you're demonstrating or?
Yeah. That's on a fully consolidated basis. The way that it works right now in our financials is that from revenue down through, let's say, operating income, it's on a 100% basis. If you look down below, you'll see this non-controlling interest that backs out the 40%.
Eric, if I can add one thing, you asked about growth and just initiatives over the next few years. I want to emphasize that the other two businesses are not standing still. There's a lot of R&D taking place at DynaEnergetics. They're doing things in new product offerings, dealing with downfall orientation, as well as opportunities in the geothermal space.
All of the businesses are focused on maintaining share and growing where possible.
Yeah, that's a great point. It's a great point. With the DynaEnergetics business, we think of that as being a technology business. There is additional investment that we're making around listening to our customers, what do they want? One of the things that I kind of glossed over was when we did this value engineering and we shortened the length of the perforating gun, we also were able to shorten the length of the detonator. The so what of that is that the detonator now has capacity in it to put sensors so that we can down hole in the well bore a mile down. We can monitor pressure. We can monitor humidity, heat. That will be important for the operators up on the surface.
Now, we haven't begun to tap into that yet. That could be potentially a different revenue model for the business. But we're trying to be forward-thinking from the standpoint of what we think customers will want, having this active dialogue with them to validate it, and then putting some R&D to work to make sure we bring that to market. That's something that we're in process working on right now as well.
Okay. I'm going to ask two more if I may. Sure. Kind of playing on Jeff's comment. The first question is, what's the single largest operational swing factor that you would anticipate to earnings over the course of the next couple of years? And then secondarily, when you buy the remaining 40% of Arcadia, I've not run the numbers. What happens to the bottom line P&L? Do you have extra consumed current interest rates?
Yeah.
Maybe the second one I'll start with. What it means for the bottom line is we bring in the 40% of Arcadia profit that's being backed out right now. From a balance sheet standpoint, we're going to manage it so that it's between two and two and a half times leverage ratio. We don't want to go too much higher than that. It'll look the same from revenue all the way down to EBITDA, but when you go down to EPS, it'll be accretive at that level.
How much accretion? Like I said, I haven't run the numbers yet, but essentially it's the non-controlling interest that we added back minus interest expense.
That's right. That's the calculation, yeah.
That ends up being roughly how much benefit EPS?
At the EPS level, I don't know. I could follow up on that.
From an EBITDA standpoint, if you look at whatever consensus is for this year, it would be 40% of that number, basically, is what it would be, the impact. I think from an operation standpoint, at Arcadia, it is more around just getting back to what they do really well, which is managing their operations. We had a hiccup last year, which impacted the performance of the business. Getting back to being a lean, efficiently run organization, reestablishing that customer trust. There is a fair amount of fixed cost in the delivery of that product. To the extent that revenues tick up, not all of it, but a lot of it drops to the bottom line. Their costs are not as variable as what you might expect.
To the extent that we can get out there and we can take some share from the competition, that certainly will be one of the biggest drivers we can have from an operational standpoint. I think for the DynaEnergetics business, it's leveraging these investments that they made that were rolled out partly through the first quarter of this year around automation. There are other automation initiatives that they're planning for right now. That'll obviously take cost out of the business, but I think equally as important, provide flexibility that they can scale capacity up and down as you have the peaks and troughs of the oil and gas business. I think for NobelClad, what I would say is looking at different ways that they can compete effectively with Chinese competition.
That's a part of the market that they typically don't target today because they're not going to be as cost-effective. There are other parts of the globe, India, to name an example, where they have a comparable cost base to China. Thinking about how we can leverage capabilities there for some partners so that we can be more competitive in the Asian market. That's what I would say, probably just broad brush across all three.
Thank you.
You bet.