Okay, why don't we get started? I'm Steve Ferrazzani, an analyst at Sidoti. Thanks for joining us for day two of the Sidoti December Virtual Investor Conference. I'm so pleased this morning to be joined by Columbus McKinnon. We have President and CEO David Wilson, CFO Greg Rustowicz, and Investor Relations and Treasurer Kristy Moser joining us for a 30-minute discussion of the business. I think it'll be extremely informative. I'd like to remind everyone we will try to mix in some audience questions along the way. So if you do have a question, you press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and we'll get to as many as we can as we move along here. Why don't I turn it over to David first, though, with some introductory comments on Columbus McKinnon?
Great. Thank you, Steve, and welcome, everyone. Columbus McKinnon has been a leader in the material handling space for over 150 years, and we're building on this foundation as we are transforming into an integrated provider of intelligent motion solutions for material handling. We have a carefully curated portfolio of assets that enable the precise movement and orientation of materials to solve customers' material handling needs. When I joined the business about four years ago, we set out on our transformation journey to scale the business and create platforms for growth with a focus on secular markets while further differentiating our business and delivering improved financial results. Our strategic framework includes being market-led, customer-centric, and operationally excellent, and our strategic plans' core framework, a growth framework, frankly, drives our balanced and disciplined approach to prioritizing and delivering organic growth, which is complemented by inorganic growth in secular growth markets.
In addition to our existing product categories, we've opened a few additional avenues for growth. And with the addition of our Precision Conveyance platform in the last few years, we've expanded the TAM of our business by $5 billion, excuse me, to a total of $20 billion. Precision Conveyance is highly fragmented with attractive financial returns. The diversification breadth of our offering and markets we serve provide a natural balance and added resilience to the business. And that balance also provides multiple levers to enable sustained growth and deliver on our operational and financial objectives. We've demonstrated our ability to deliver stable results in line with our guidance in choppy markets internationally. Scaling our business provides even margin expansion as we get leverage on our growth and see significant opportunities for further margin expansion as we grow the business.
Our products are engineered to be professional-grade and help our customers work smarter while improving safety, uptime, and productivity in their operations. Our strategy that we're executing on has enabled our team to deliver a 16% growth CAGR from 2021- 2024, and we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin over that timeframe by 450 basis points. We're on track to achieve our long-term financial objectives of 40% adjusted gross margins and 21% adjusted EBITDA margins over time. Most recently, in the second quarter, our orders increased 16% year over year with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.08 times as we continue to gain traction with our commercial vertical market and customer experience initiatives, and overall, our project funnel remains healthy. Our carefully curated portfolio generates significant cash and provides returns and financial flexibility to reinvest.
We have a track record of investing in growth and deleveraging quickly to a net leverage ratio of two times, and powered by a track record of attractive and improving financial performance and our position as a market leader with the potential for further scale advantage and compounding growth, we remain confident in the long-term trajectory of our business and our ability to deliver value for our shareholders.
Fantastic.
Without turning it back over to you, Steve.
Thanks so much, David. We do have a series of topics I want to be able to touch on, and I'm sure the audience does as well. I've covered you now for four years, and I've seen a significant transformation both from an M&A effort, and I know what you used to call 80/20. Now you're calling it the business systems. Can you talk to me where you are on those two tracks and where you think you're going, how far along you are?
Yeah, great question. And I would say we're still in the early innings as a company in terms of transforming the business. We've made good progress. We are building a culture around that transformation set of initiatives and the self-help programs that we've been implementing through 80/20. But while we've made significant progress and we're really pleased with that, I think we've got significant opportunities ahead. So we're still in the early innings. And we've expanded our offering into high-growth secular markets. We are investing in consolidation opportunities to simplify our footprint. We are driving pricing strategy and margin expansion strategy in the portfolio. We're simplifying the portfolio. We're focusing heavily on the customer experience. And as you know, we've shifted the business into some really attractive growth verticals. And I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk more about them in the following questions.
Yeah, I do want to touch on first, though. Historically, we've always tracked you comparing, looking at the Federal Reserve capacity utilization or PMI, none of which has been real great this year. Maybe there was a little sliver of positive signs in this week with some order growth, modest. Yet when you reported the most recent quarter, you were showing 16% order growth, which is clearly outpacing what you're seeing against the broader industrial markets, particularly in developed Europe and the US. What's different here? Why are you showing momentum when so many of the other companies within the broader industrial space have not seen it and our general data has not shown it?
Right, right. We were really pleased with that performance, and congratulations to our entire team for the good work that they're doing, but we saw strength across all geographies and product platforms. We saw particular strength in Precision Conveyance, and that was up 42%. And while Montratec, our most recent acquisition, led the growth, given some of the wins that they had, all of our recent acquisitions in the conveyance space were up more than 20%. And so that was quite encouraging. Automation, which was softer entering the year, saw significant increases as well with 24% overall growth. And so the project business really was largely the driver for growth. Short-cycle orders did remain stable, however, which was encouraging knowing there are a number of factors that might be driving some challenges there, or at least leading up to the election.
And with interest rates being high, there were some challenges that were perhaps in front of that portion of the business. We're remaining focused on execution of some vertical market strategies, channel diversification strategies. And given the strong funnel of projects, we expect to see order momentum and greater confidence in the economy helping to release projects as we go forward. So we're encouraged by the funnel of opportunities. Quotation activity remains strong. We've got a robust backlog heading into next year, and we're encouraged by what we're seeing ahead of us.
I want to ask a little bit more about Precision Conveyance because we're coming off of Cyber Monday. And so I saw every news reporter was standing inside some e-commerce facility. But there seems to be optimism about a lot of that needing to try to improve distribution, speed up delivery times. I think I probably saw some of your conveyance systems in the background. We won't say from who. Talk to me about the momentum specifically on Precision Conveyance, touching on e-commerce because I think it's on everyone's mind specifically this week.
Absolutely. So we see this as a highly attractive and high-growth segment in the market. We have differentiated product offerings, and we participate in what we call Precision Conveyance, which we think is different than the simple movement of product on a conveyor. And when we've applied that technology with our customers, they see a differentiation both in terms of performance and sustainability of that performance over time. So we participate in a really great set of markets with those products. The TAM for the business was increased by about $5 billion as we added conveyance to the portfolio. With the addition of Montratec, we now have everything from belted precision conveyors to flexible movement conveyors, accumulation technologies, and now asynchronous conveyance. And as I said, we had that great growth last quarter, 42%.
From the conversations we have with select e-commerce customers, they're likely to begin reinvesting in capacity expansion in the calendar year 2025 after some overbuilding that occurred in the wake of the pandemic, and in addition to that e-commerce market, which we think is exciting and work we've done through channel diversification and broader business development initiatives to expand our reach to multiple parties in that space, we're really excited about the battery production markets that are starting to develop and grow rapidly. There's a lot of capacity for battery production in Asia, but there needs to be investments in the Americas and in Europe to balance out that demand globally, and we're partnered with PowerCo, which is a Volkswagen company and ultimately expected to be spun out of Volkswagen, and we're providing them with solutions for the Gigafactory investments they're making in Valencia, Spain, St.
Thomas, Canada, and Salzgitter, Germany. With that, we've received approximately $20 million of orders in the second and first quarter. We anticipate that we're going to get another 10 or more in this quarter and see the long runway for growth over time with them being over $100 million of opportunity just for that one customer and their plans around these three sites. But when we think about the opportunity more broadly, we believe there are about 200 gigafactories either in construction or in the planning stages. The market's expected to grow from about a $20 billion market in 2020 to about a $500 billion market by 2030. We're really well positioned with a number of key leaders in that space.
Any concerns there? Obviously, the questions are about, certainly, particularly to the U.S., about EV market growth. But you're global. How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, it's interesting. I think a lot of demand still exists for capacity that will be needed over time. And there are a number of players that are investing in the long game. And what we do is we help customers become more productive. And at a time when there's less demand, oftentimes those customers are looking at opportunities to reposition their factories so that they're more productive when demand returns. And so we're working with customers not only while they're in growth mode, but also when they're in productivity mode, particularly given scarcity of labor concerns in some of the reshoring investments that are happening today.
I think the one thing I'd just add there, Steve, is that a lot of the battery production that exists today is produced out of Asia. So from a lot of perspectives, a core dependence on our day-to-day operation, in general, many governments believe should be in region for region. So there's actually a lot of incentives, for example, in Europe. Now we've got the tariff environment as it exists today, and we'll see how that evolves. But that has created a lot of incentives to look at North American and European production. And that's really what you're seeing show up in the opportunities that give us confidence that our differentiated technology has a lot of opportunity and leverage as that expands.
Actually, let me jump ahead because you led into the question. Actually, the one question we've already gotten from the audience, and every company has gotten this through the conference. So let me just jump into it right now because everybody wants to know. We have a new administration coming in. There's a lot of talk around tariffs. That can be a positive. People are viewing that as maybe a positive view, also maybe a negative. Can you, on balance, talk about how you're preparing and thinking about what we don't know will be final decisions, right? Because it changes weekly.
Right, right.
How you're thinking about it right now?
Yeah, we see it as relatively neutral for our business. We see there being the potential for tariffs, certainly. We think we're well positioned with an in-region, for-region manufacturing strategy. We think relative to the competition in our core markets, we may have a better position than they might in terms of imports and where products are coming from. However, we're also in a position where we're making key investments, and we're monitoring the landscape of tariffs and trying to make sure that we're positioned to realize all the benefits that we were planning to realize from those investments. And on the whole, we think that we're intact. But as it is an evolving landscape, it's something we need to pay close attention to.
I would just say that from an overall assessment perspective, we think that we're—we'd like to think we're positively biased, but we're planning for a relatively neutral position with tariffs.
I have to ask, any issue with, because you moved a lot of production to Monterrey?
Right, right. No, we have, and we have more to come there. And we have a substantial return from that investment that we're anticipating. And we think in any case, we get value out of that. And so we don't see that being something that would be going the other way if tariffs were implemented in a meaningful way. And so we see that as being still a very positive investment for us. We also have growth potential in Latin America and in Mexico specifically. And so the capacity opportunity that that provides us with to serve that country specifically and then not have tariff implications on that volume is real as well.
You touched on, oh, go ahead. Sorry.
I was going to say, Steve, I'd just also add that, so I think that's from a company operations perspective. I also want to make sure that we highlight the potential tailwind from a demand perspective of onshoring. And I think that's an incredibly important factor as people have to move or choose to move production from low-cost, high-availability of labor locations to low-availability, higher-cost environments. They're going to have to navigate, "How do I manage my margins and try to preserve as much as I can?" And in order to do that, a lot of them are going to have to consider automation of their facilities. And the combination, as we alluded to earlier around AI technology combined with the physical world, we're that interconnected tissue, which enables very precise movement and orientation of product that can be done in that automated fashion.
Without that interconnected tissue, you can't be nearly as efficient in the automation of your production.
Because when we think about that, if there is more manufacturing capacity to come back to the U.S. over the next three to five years, you're not going to build an old-school factory.
Correct.
That doesn't make any sense, so that would indicate if that does take place the way some people expect it to, you're particularly well positioned.
Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think, Christy, those are terrific additions to the conversation, and glad you brought them up. I do think we're uniquely positioned with our automation and material handling capabilities in multiple environments from the ceiling, on the floor, connecting process steps, buffering, asynchronous movement, machine-to-machine communication to help automate factories for customers as they're doing that reshoring. And as Christy indicated, all of the intelligence from an AI perspective that you can bring to bear via modeling around the best solution and best approach you should take to be successful, whether that's in a warehousing and distribution function or in a manufacturing environment. In the physical world, you still have to implement that.
You want to have the closed-loop communication and real-time feedback from an automation perspective that enables the precise movement you need to have to make the gains that you hope to realize through those models real. As Christy indicated, we think we can do the connective tissue that enables that nervous system AI model to actually deliver where the muscles and bones and tissue actually hits the product and make sure that things actually happen the way you expect them to.
When you talked about how you're set up, so a little bit different, your fiscal 2025 is ending March, or I guess it's your fiscal 20, yeah, 2025. You had indicated second half better than first half. Any changes to that, and why is that?
Yeah, no, no changes to that. And it really reflects the timing of our current backlog. And so we've taken a lot of orders that have a bit of a longer lead on them. We've had solid order growth in the second half, and I think that supports what we're looking at. We've got great funnel projects. We're ramping production in a number of key sites. And as we entered the year, we even talked about an elevated backlog that we wanted to try to reduce. So yes, the second half is elevated versus the first. And candidly, the fourth quarter versus the third quarter. And so we remain confident in our demand and backlog position to enable that execution. Yeah, I would also add that a lot of uncertainty has now been removed with the election.
We would expect that certainly our fiscal fourth quarter, which is historically our strongest quarter, will benefit from the uncertainty going away.
Have you heard any changes this fast post-election? Because we know there was significant uncertainty, and you talked about, in a lot of the companies we talked to, even when they reported their for them with Q3. Any shift yet? There's also the interest rate environment, which.
We have. We've seen customers moving to place orders that had been held up, but we also see a lot of development in conversations. Even if the orders haven't advanced to the point of being placed, the projects and the discussion and the engagement and the optimism around where we're going with those has increased. And so I think there's a bit of a balance of the rate environment's getting better. We've got clarity around the election results in the U.S. We're planning for our fiscal or our calendar 2025. And I think there's probably maybe one more hurdle for timing, which is let's get past the end of the year in some cases so that people aren't necessarily getting out ahead of putting inventory on shelves before quarter end or something like that.
Because it's fair to assume a lot of your customers on a calendar year are just starting to set their budget expectations for.
Correct.
Okay. We touched on e-commerce. We touched on your expectations with battery and EVs. Can you talk a little bit more about your bigger end markets, what you're seeing and the differences you might be seeing?
Yeah. I think from an end market perspective and lifting, defense continues to be strong. Given our shift to a vertical market selling approach, ag and construction remained quite strong. And that's interesting because I know the demand for the end user, the products provided by those customers has been off, but they're taking the opportunity to improve and automate more within their factories. Aerospace remains strong, and we have further potential with some large customers there. The utility markets have been slower but are picking up following recent hurricane activity. Automotive has cooled, and I think that's well known. There's some manufacturing capacity expansion that's underway, however, in EV that we spoke of earlier relative to battery production. From a U.S. Precision Conveyance standpoint, e-commerce quotation activity is beginning to convert with some strong pipeline opportunities across multiple end users, multiple large customers. Logistics is pretty stable.
Food and beverage packaging is a continued focus. We've got a number of interesting opportunities in the pipeline. I'd say the facility automation market's a little bit softer, but there's a pipeline of opportunities. Pharmaceuticals quotations remain healthy. And we continue to see opportunities for the Montratec product that we recently acquired on a global basis. So that's exciting. And then if I just shift to the geographic regions, the oil and gas market remains robust. Rail investment in both APAC and India continues to be strong. The machine building activity in Europe has been soft. So that's an area that's a watch-out for us. But the Middle East continues to outperform, and that's lifting our engineer-to-order business for the European team.
Okay. You talked about your fiscal 2027 targets in the past, including a 40% gross margin. You still got it. While your margins have been improving over two, three years, you still got a pretty good lift to get there. Can you talk about your ability to hit those targets and whether you think you're on track?
Yeah. First, the short answer is we do. And we do have ground to cover, but we've got a nice runway of opportunities that we think are largely facilitated from within the company. And so we've got a self-help plan that can drive that expansion. We think there's roughly 200 basis points of opportunity from the work we're doing in Monterrey and additional opportunities there. We think through disciplined but thoughtful pricing actions, there's an opportunity for additional uplift in terms of margin performance. And then through productivity and just overall a better utilization of our resources, we think there's additional opportunities for us through our 80/20 initiatives within the company.
Okay. You know when you go ahead. Sorry.
No, I was just going to say, so we think that the runway that we have ahead of us is an attractive runway. And the CMBS program, 80/20, the margin expansion initiatives we're driving should assist us to reach those 40% gross margin targets and 20% EBITDA targets even without M&A.
That's what I was—that was the question I was going to. Because I know when you laid this out at your analyst day way back, hitting that target, as I recall, the expectation was there would be some M&A mixed in. And obviously, a margin accretive acquisition makes that a lot easier. How will you think incorporating that in your thought process?
Yeah. In order to achieve the fiscal 2027 targets that we set out on the top line, I would say there's roughly a 50/50 mix of organic to acquisitive. And so it's between $200 million and $300 million of organic, $200-$300 million worth of M&A opportunities. But even if we only reached a $1.2 billion top line, we think we can still get to plus or minus the targets that we've established. And so we've got a lot of self-help built in there. And then the fragmented landscape of M&A opportunities is encouraging. We think the deal flow's increasing. We know there are really attractive potential opportunities that could be available at the right prices. And so we'll be disciplined as we think about that. Certainly, we have been very focused on debt repayment, and we've seen that in our actions.
Yeah. I do want to ask about the balance sheet, which is significant. Obviously, your leverage went up post-Dorner, then Garvey and Montratec. More recently, you have been making inroads on paying down the debt. Probably as we get through some of the more higher CapEx this year, your free cash flow improves a lot, theoretically improves a lot. What's your target net leverage now, and how does that impact how you're thinking about M&A?
Yeah. So I'll jump in on that one. Our target remains between 2-2.5. We expect by the end of the fiscal year that we'll be at 2.3 times on a net leverage basis. We're making good progress. We committed to paying down $60 million of debt this fiscal year. We've paid $30 million already, and that's despite actually buying back $10 million of stock, which we thought that just given where our stock had been priced, it was an opportunity to add value to the corporation. We run models that look at the impact of paying down debt versus buying back shares and what impact that would have on the company from an EPS perspective, and we were at a point where it made sense to pull the trigger.
The good news is, we're still going to be able to deliver on the $60 million of debt repayment.
I do want to ask, because you mentioned the share repurchase and then, David, specific to you, the open market purchase. What should that tell us about how you're thinking about both the stock price, both from a company perspective and, David, from your transaction?
As Greg indicated, we saw an attractive entry point to utilize that program and buy back some shares. As a company, we thought that that made sense. The answer for me is simple. I'm a believer in our strategy and believe that we've created intrinsic value in the business that I don't think is currently reflected in the stock price. Additionally, I believe there's a lot of pent-up demand for investment that's been on the sidelines and growth opportunities that lie ahead as we head into next year.
I think pulling all of the factors we've sort of touched on already relative to the shift in manufacturing and rebalancing in region for region, the need for, in a scarce labor environment, automation capabilities. I think all of that, plus what we're working on within the company from a self-help perspective, made it look like a good investment to me.
Very good. We covered a lot of ground in the last half hour. I know we didn't maybe get to everything. Anything specifically you wanted to touch on that we maybe, or closing comments you want investors to be thinking about as we get into the holiday season?
Yeah. We're a company that's evolving, executing on plans and commitments that we've made. We're making great progress against an exciting strategy. And we think that this is an exciting time for folks to be paying attention to Columbus McKinnon.
Fantastic. David Wilson, Greg Rustowicz, Kristy Moser from Columbus McKinnon. Hope everybody found it as informative as I did. And thanks again for joining us at our December conference, everyone. Thanks and have a happy holiday season.
Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thanks everyone.