Morning. So good morning, everyone. My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu, for those of you who don't know me. We have Cadre Holdings up on stage. We have Brad Williams, who's President and CEO, and Blaine Browers, CFO. A lot of alliteration there for me to get right. But Cadre is a neat little company that we cover. We initiated on it last year, so I feel like a lot of people don't know about you guys cause you don't typically fall in our typical coverage universe. So with that, I know you guys don't have a boring slide presentation cause that's not the type of guys you are. So I'm gonna try to cover both new information, but also inform investors about you guys. So just high level, what do you guys actually do?
What are the products you make, key end markets you supply to? How do you think about the business breakdown and opportunities?
Yeah, absolutely. So, Cadre Holdings, we're a global company that provides protective equipment for law enforcement militaries around the world. We take pride in our, our mission around, saving lives for those folks in those professions. We have three main product categories. We have body armor, which is hard armor and soft armor, things like plates, helmets, shields, soft body armor. Our second category is duty gear, which is where the company started over 55 years ago. So we make, duty holsters for law enforcement, and we're the leader in the U.S. market, in that category. And then the third category is, EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal. So think of that as bomb technicians around the world that wear our bomb suits to, keep them protected on their missions.
Talk about just the business breakdown. Who do you supply? Who's your customer? Is it mostly government? Is it commercial customers? And how do you think about maybe just the growth rates?
Yeah, absolutely. How our revenue breaks down overall, 59% of the business, roughly, is local, state, local agencies, state and local agencies. Then we have about 19% of the business that's international for us. 13% is fed, and then the remaining, which is about 9%, is our consumer business, which is mainly selling holsters and hearing protection to consumers, mainly in the US marketplace. When you look at growth rates within this industry, one of the things we really love about this business is based on the type of products that we have, being protective products, when you look at budgets for police protection over a long period of time, if you go back 10, 12, 14 years, those budgets remain strong.
They typically grow about 2%-3% on an annual basis, and their expenditures are usually in that same range. So during an industrial recession, financial recession, defund the police, COVID, you name it, all those blips that you would see in a lot of budgets and many end markets, you don't, you don't see that within our business, so we're definitely a very durable business.
Maybe just add a little bit. Kind of moving from kind of the demand side, you know, one of the great things, so we're not, as Brad's mentioned, gonna have, you know, 15, 20% growth years. We don't have the downside, but really, the value is kind of twofold. One is very low CapEx company, so we generate a lot of free cash flow. Generally, CapEx, maintenance CapEx is less than about 1% of revenue in a given year. So we kick off a tremendous amount of cash there, which allows us to make acquisitions, lever up, and then de-lever in short order. The second piece is, really with that stable top line, we focus really on the operating model.
You know, I worked at, prior to coming to Cadre, at IDEX Corporation and GE, and, you know, Brad has a great resume at Danaher, Ingersoll Rand, and IDEX, but really focused on operating the business. So we feel with that macro 3% top line, we can deliver double-digit EBITDA expansion, and really based on three things. First is price, right? So, you know, we haven't talked too much about the products, but we're positioned as a premium product, and we're saving lives, right? In some cases, very high market share. That allows us to consistently get 1% of price net of material inflation. So that alone in our business gives you 4%-5% EBITDA expansion.
Second piece is, with our model and being a more mature business, we don't have a significant SG&A investment to make, 'cause again, we're not-- we don't have that 15, 20% growth in a given year, so that incremental volume flows through at, you know, near margin-like levels. And then the third piece is really around productivity, right? And this is where the operating model and our, our backgrounds, as well as the broader management team come in, is continue to focus on productivity, removing costs from the business, serving our customers better, and getting 1%-2% in a year. So you take those, those three things, and you can kind of quickly get to 10% EBITDA expansion in a given year. And there... You know, we sometimes get the question of: Where are you at in the journey?
You know, are we in late innings or early innings? And what Brad and I talk about is we've been—Brad joined the company in 2017, I joined in 2018 is those first couple of years were really focused on kind of broader restructuring. When we think about Lean and the Lean journey and the operating model, it's still early, early innings, and we feel like there's plenty of runway for the future.
Talk to us a little bit about the competitive landscape. You said pricing is easy to get, given your relatively high market share. Who are your competitors? How does Cadre's portfolio fit into that?
It depends on the product category out of the three larger groups that I mentioned earlier. So, you know, within body armor, there's mainly one competitor in the U.S. marketplace. So we estimate our share of body armor in the U.S. marketplace of law enforcement is around the high 30, low 40% type range, and then we split that share equally with a competitor by the name of Point Blank in the U.S. Outside the U.S., our share of body armor is much lower. We estimate less than 15%, and, you know, especially in Europe, for body armor, it's very fragmented.
So, you know, we'll probably talk about M&A in a little bit, but that opens up the opportunity for us to do what we really did in the U.S. marketplace, which is do some consolidation work in Europe from a body armor product category. And then the second category, again, where we started over 55 years ago, is with holsters. So our share of law enforcement and federal agencies and U.S. military is around, you know, 90%, when we look at that space, in the U.S. market. In that space, there's a couple competitors there, but with that type of share, you can imagine, we typically are the leader in that area. And then the third category is EOD. So EOD, again, is explosive ordnance disposal, global category for us.
There's about 10,700 bomb suits out there globally. If you think about it, very niche, but the average selling price of a bomb suit is about $36,000. You're talking a very sophisticated piece of equipment, highly protective, lots of technology built into the equipment, you know, overall. There are some competitors in that space, but they're very, very small, and we see on a very limited basis.
Maybe just add on the EOD. I think one of the great things about that business is the U.S. DOD is the largest buyer, right? Has the largest EOD tech group in the world. That business works jointly with R&D, U.S., U.S. government-funded R&D projects for the next generation bomb suits, and they've done it consistently over the last couple of years. So when you talk about positioning, being close to the end user and developing new technologies with the leading, you know, military in the world, that is the EOD business, which enables them to continue to stay ahead of competition and continue to innovate.
Is there, you know, within your three major product lines, is there much differentiation versus your competitors?
Oh, absolutely. When you look at us, we're typically that upper end, if you think of just kind of the basic good, better, best strategy, right? We're typically in that best plus category. And, you know, depending on the category, so for like body armor, it's all about a highly protective product, but it's also about comfort. So when you think about our core customer in body armor is law enforcement, they're wearing body armor for 10, 12, 14 hours a day. So comfort is extremely, extremely important within that space, and, you know, we're positioned in that category where when they do a wear test, a lot of times with agencies, where they'll wear our products and wear other competitive products, we like when that happens because we typically win out whenever there's a wear test.
There's also something called a shoot test that happens within some agencies, where they'll basically take our product, we'll go out to their range, we'll line up various calibers of weapons, and, you know, we'll aggressively shoot our product over and over. And we do that aggressively because we have that much confidence in the engineering that goes into our product overall. So we love when that happens also because we typically win out in that category. And then, as Blaine already mentioned with EOD, very differentiated based on all the paid R&D work that we do with the U.S. military around staying ahead of competitors. Everything, for example, like heads-up display, that, that's integrated into our helmets, a cooling system inside the suit overall, how you integrate with robots.
There's a lot of technology involved in it, and we're definitely positioned well within that category.
Cool. Let's move to your customer base. You know, you mentioned largely high market share in the U.S. with the U.S. DOD customer. What should investors look to track your growth? Is it U.S. DOD budgets, certain line items in there? Is there police hiring? What do you think about?
You know, a big function of what we do is headcount, okay? And I'm going to start there, but it's it's there's not a good, there's not good information out there in terms of law enforcement headcount in, in the U.S., in terms of how that, you know, continues to either go up or down, okay? And that's one of the biggest gaps right now in the industry, is just, it's tough to hire law enforcement officers in the U.S. Now, you might think, "Ooh, that, that could be a bad story for our company." Well, it's, it's actually not, because a big part of their budget is headcount. So the budget is still there. The budgets are still robust, but overall, they're, what we've seen is spend per officer actually increase.
So they're continuing to buy, they're continuing to upgrade equipment, they're continuing to make sure that they're equipping officers with what they need for various missions and situations that go on. So leading indicator kind of things within our market is a little difficult to put your finger on. But when you look historically at those budgets, year over year, they've done well.
So elaborate on that a little bit. What does it mean? The guy gets a black suit and a pink suit, or, you know, spend per officer, you know, how, how could spend
Yeah
per officer possibly grow?
Spend per officer grows because of the type of equipment that they buy, right? So for example, unfortunate example, right? The shooting that happened in Uvalde, in Texas, the school shooting that most all of us have seen and know about. We've seen a large grant, for example, by the state of Texas that went out last year, and that grant was there to supply their agencies and schools with the type of equipment needed to be able to go into that type of a situation, you know, to give officers that confidence that they're highly protected when they have a situation like that.
So that's how you see spend per officer increase, because when you're looking at that type of equipment, which is typically what we call hard armor, that equipment is significantly more expensive than what you would see, like a patrol person wearing on the street.
Yeah, maybe while we're talking a little bit about the demand side, all our products really have refresh cycles, right? So recurring revenue is a key component of the business. So if you start with body armor, that's really driven by the warranty period, which is five years in the U.S. So most agencies will not have officers out in the street with, quote, unquote, "expired body armor," out, meaning out of warranty. So you have that five-year refresh cycle. In addition, the body armor is semi-custom. So if Brad and I were officers, if Brad retires or I retire, they don't hand our body armor over to the other person because it doesn't fit, right? So it has to y ou measure, right, from the top to the bottom, across the chest, across the waist.
So, there's that refresh cycle on the warranty side, but also that semi-customized portion for each officer. That kind of continues to generate that recurring demand. You know, on the holster side, there's a lot of dynamics in the firearms market that really impact this, and what you've seen over time is a couple of changes. If you went back about 10, 15 years ago, it's caliber change, right? They went from, in a lot of cases, 30 or 45 into nine millimeter for a patrol officer. Our holsters are customized for the gun. As you make that move to a different style gun or different caliber, it requires a new holster. Now we talk about kind of what's happening lately. For a while, it was lights, so putting flashlights essentially on the bottom of the holsters.
Again, requires or sorry, on the bottom of guns, again, requires a new holster. Now, it's turned to red dot optics, red dot sights, right? To significantly increase the accuracy of the officer or the military requires a different holster. You have these kind of refresh, recurring cycles that keep the demand going. EOD, generally about a 7-10-year cycle, a lot of that's driven by wear and tear. You know, there's you'd be surprised if you talk to a police department, how often the EOD officers go out. In fact, we were talking to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, who covers kind of the Northeast Florida, Southeast Georgia, and they were saying they're out on about four calls a week, right? Which is surprising.
So that wear and tear on those suits is what generates that refresh cycle, and again, that 7-10 years. So there's, but we don't have a lot of backlog visibility at a given point, you have these refresh cycles and this entrenched position with our customers that creates that recurring revenue stream.
Can you talk about your sales cycle? You mentioned pretty low SG&A, just given your product penetration. You know, of your customers, whether it's federal, state, or local, how early do you start talking to them? You know, when do you know that you have to go in? What's the sort of sales process look like?
Yeah, if we're in the account, for example, with body armor, as Blaine mentioned, the warranty period's five years on body armor. Most of the contracts for state and local agencies are that three-to-five-year type period. If we're in the account already, we know when that three-to-five years is gonna be up, and we're obviously working that account with our third-party distributors around the country and also around the world. We also have our own sales team that are working with either those distributors or also within customers. Because most of our sales team are, you know, they're ex-, you know, officers. They've been in the military. They understand the contracting process. They understand the mission. They're ex-SWAT guys.
Like, you don't sit with a SWAT team and try to sell them on body armor if you don't have that experience. It's just that kind of a technical sale that you need to understand and speak the language. So, it varies significantly. It can go from, you know, us just going in and presenting a new product, you know, six months in advance, and then as they work through that next buy cycle, then we're there, and we're in that account.
Can you talk to us a little bit about why you're so short cycle, 45-60 days is your sort of backlog visibility? That seems ridiculous, like, given a very steady, you know, steady Eddie sort of revenue stream.
I think if you, if you break it off in two parts, really, armor and the duty gear side of the business is the shorter visibility. Duty gear is probably the easiest. You know, the gun, the holster itself is customized for the gun for a department, but not necessarily to the officer. At lower price tag item, you know, maybe in the $100-$200 range. So there's not a need for them to order months and months in advance, right? In fact, it's getting the gun and then ordering the holster is, is typically how it happens. Now, body armor, a, a bit different, but what meaning that it's customized for the officer, so you can't pre-order, right? In the U.S., generally, you're not gonna pre-order. It's not large, medium, small, right? It is a semi-custom piece of armor.
So that armor is ordered once they size the officer, and typically, a lot of that comes from academy classes, so new officers going through academy recruit classes, then getting sized and then ordering. So generally, that kind of falls in that 30-45-day cycle. The exception in our business is really EOD. And EOD, it's more a function really of their production cycle. It's a more complicated product, right? If we think about it, it has all the... some of the attributes of, of body armor, right? You have protection, fragmentation, a lot of cases, protection. You have hard armor plates. You have an integrated helmet. You have electronics. So generally, that's more of a 10-12-week lead time item for us.
So that is the business where they will have, you know, and sometimes up to nine months' worth of backlog, at a given, given point. But the body armor, because it's so repeatable, and the duty gear, because it's so repeatable, because if you think about all the different agencies across the country and the different officers, that, that demand tends to level out just because of the population size.
One thing I want to add real quick is our average size in the U.S. for body armor orders is about 3 units of body armor. Okay, so that may surprise you, right? Because you're thinking 3-to-5-year contracts, you know, you've got a 1,000-person, you know, officer organization, they're gonna order a 1,000, right? That's not the way it works in the U.S. It works like that, typically outside the U.S., but in the U.S., it's all about when you started and your 5-year warranty for your body armor. So, you know, everybody in this room, if we all started at a different time in an agency, your 5-year will expire at a different time, and that's when you get resized because you may have, gained weight or lost weight, right?
Then once that resizing happens, your order comes into our distributor, the distributor gives us the order, right? And then we fulfill that demand and ship it direct to the agency. So just something that a little nuance that surprises a lot of people about the business, but we like that, right? 'Cause it makes it predictable for us, from that perspective.
The commercial side, I think, represents 9% of sales, you mentioned.
It does.
Talk to us a little bit about that. You recently launched a new product in that market.
Yeah, absolutely. We, we've actually had a bunch of new products in that market. So it does represent about 9% overall of our revenue, okay? Keep in mind, we're not selling body armor to consumers. We've got a policy where some companies go and do sell body armor to consumers. We don't. It's a long-standing policy that we want our men and women that are out there protecting us to wear the best of the best product and not going up against someone that, that's not, okay? So most of the consumer side are really holsters and hearing protection. So where we put most of our focus the last few years is growing double digits in this space, because it's really been an afterthought for us. Most of our holster development is for law enforcement.
Very different when you think of the type of safety technology that you have to build into holsters for a law enforcement officer. You're probably sitting there wondering, "Well, how does a holster save a life?" Okay, well, if we had a holster here with a fake weapon, and I handed it to most of you guys, you would not be able to get the weapon out of the holster, okay? And that's designed that way so that if there's a perpetrator trying to get that weapon, it keeps it in the holster until the officer is ready to draw it out. Now, on the consumer side, it's very different because in the U.S., there's over 27 million folks that are potential buyers of consumer holsters. Now, where do we get that?
That's everything from off-duty police officers to, you can look at CCW, which is concealed carry permits, and the number of those out there. And then there's also states that don't require permits, and there's estimates there. So when you look at 27 million folks that could be buying holsters, for us, it's about that premium segment of the holster. There's a lot of low-end, cheap holsters that are on the market from a consumer perspective, but we're positioned more in the high-end position as that company and that brand that officers and military folks know really well. So we are proud to have partnered up. The one that I think you're referencing is Haley Strategic Partners. Just to give you an example of how we go about this market.
So Haley, Travis Haley is a gentleman that was 15 years in the U.S. Marines, Recon team, and he went on, I think, about 14 total deployments. So we partnered with him. He's been using Safariland his entire life, and partnered with him to design a consumer holster that really fits that upper-end, high-feature, high-benefit type product overall, and there's a lot of buzz around it and a lot of things going well there. Then we launched two other consumer products, not with Travis, but just on our own, working with our team in engineering those, a product called Schema, which is a unique product for the consumer space, and you know, we've positioned it well with a couple of others in it too, so things are going well in the consumer world for us.
And then talk about your international exposure. You mentioned that's a potential consolidation opportunity for Cadre. How do you think about that?
Yeah, when we think about for us, it's primarily Europe, when we think about global growth. You think about the body armor segment in Europe. What's interesting is a lot of the Western European countries have at least one, sometimes two, body armor manufacturers. But what we found is they're not exclusively body armor companies. So we'd look at, let's say, a $50 million revenue company that quote-unquote is "a body armor company," but when you start to break it down, it may be $20 million of body armor, and then they fill out the rest of that $50 million with lower-value goods. It could be boots, it could be uniforms, it could be backpacks and tents. So you really have a lot of these suboptimal companies, right, both from a profitability and then also just a production capability standpoint across Europe.
We think there's a really unique opportunity for a roll up strategy in Europe to create a stronger presence. Today, you know, we have body armor manufacturing both in the U.K. and Lithuania, so we have a footprint already in Europe for body armor. It's one we continue to actively look at. The second piece is in January 2021, we acquired Radar 1957, which is an Italian duty gear company, which gave us the ability of immediate manufacturing. So they're doing the same three types of holster manufacturing that we do in the U.S. One of the challenges we had, which is typical, right, as a U.S. company building product in the U.S. and then trying to sell in Europe, you know, there's a couple issues. One is, you know, financially, there's just freight and duties, right?
Right out of the gate, you have that headwind going against you. And then secondarily, there's actually some really unique challenges in holsters. We talk about that custom fit. And what you might not know, and what, you know, frankly, I didn't know before I started and we've learned is, the same gun that's sold in Europe, in Europe and the U.S., it can be slightly different, and it causes fitting problems because the tolerances are so tight on that holster to hold that weapon in, small design differences in the U.S. and Europe create a mismatch in there. And then also, you have the difficulty is a lot of times those guns made in Europe can't be exported to the U.S., so you have another barrier for us to finding.
So having Radar in Europe eliminates that customs and duties. They use the same three manufacturing processes we do in the U.S., so they're able to manufacture both the traditional Radar holsters, but also the Safariland branded holsters as well.
Talk to us a little bit about profitability. Investors might not know what your profit levels are. I think you hit a record of 18.8 EBITDA margins in Q2, and noted it was mostly because of your product mix. So if you could just talk about your operating model and your margin targets.
Sure. So mix has a big component for us, and that's both product and channel mix. But kind of going back to what I talked a little bit earlier, that focus on price, productivity, and leverage is really core to who we are, and that's what we wake up every day trying to just get a little bit better every day. If you go back historically, right, I think Q2 margins were up around 5 points year-over-year. We're certainly not saying committing to 5 points of margin expansion every year, but that continual push forward on margin improvements. We did hit 18.8%, which was a record for the company, which was fantastic.
We still think that when you think about the product suite we have, the attributes of our markets, that we can continue to push margins, you know, up in every year and push up EBITDA margins, and, you know, getting in the twenties does not seem a stretch, and we're comfortable kind of driving towards that in the future.
That makes sense. And then you talked a lot about M&A. I think you mentioned on your last earnings call, you made 10 offers in the past 12 months. Maybe just give us color about, like, your addressable market. How many companies are out there? Where do you look to potentially tag on?
So we think about M&A really in three buckets. The first bucket of M&A is really core markets, new geographies, is the way to think about it. So Radar is example of it's a product we currently make, and it gives us a presence in Europe. You know, it's bucket one. Bucket two would really be share of wallet, so current customers, new products. So in May of 2022, we acquired Cyalume, which is a chemical luminescence company based in the U.S., selling it primarily to the U.S. military. So there's an example of we sell them to the U.S. military, we're getting share of wallet. Has a lot of the same attributes. It's refreshable, has expiration on it. Great, great business. The third bucket that we really talk about is really new verticals.
So the common thread across all our companies will be protection and saving lives. So we think about that third bucket as highly engineered products that protect professionals. That could be arborists, right? You know, hanging linesmen. Could be fire, could be EMS. And we're actively, when we think about our M&A funnel, you talked about the 10 companies, we stay very, very active. Certainly, the markets have been tough, and there's been a little bit of a disconnect between buyers and sellers, but, you know, we think in the near future, we'll start to see that loosen up and buyers and sellers come together.
I realized I ran out of time.
I know
a question ago, but that was, that was really great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you.