Good morning. Welcome to the Ideas Conference. Next up, we've got Core Molding Technologies, traded on the NYSE ticker symbol CMT. And I'd like to introduce Dave Duvall, CEO, and Eric Palomaki, COO, and Alex Panda, CFO. I'll hand it off to Dave.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us here to listen to the Core Molding story. I figured a place to put my paper. I think, as you probably read in the AK, I will be retiring in May of 2026. I think with that, I'll be sticking around with the board for the next 12 to 16 months, probably more to say what not to do than what to do. That's usually how it works. Eric Palomaki, COO, will be taking over for me as CEO in May of 2026. Now, Eric has been through an extensive two-year succession development program. It's a lot of work, a lot of self-introspect, and a lot of feedback that probably sometimes it's hard to go through. It's all part of the development.
I would say that we structure our business into must-win battles when we talk about our strategy. The must-win battle is something that's the highest priority. This is what we have to get done. I don't care what your priorities are. This is the must-win battle. Our very first must-win battle, if you look back at Core Molding , it was a turnaround. If you look back at where we were in 2017, 2018, it was a very bad place to work. Nobody wanted to be there. I think any business is built on the people. I mean, no person does a bad job on purpose. We brought in people that we worked with from other turnarounds and really implemented what I would say is a world-class talent and leadership development program to where everybody in a company has a succession plan.
Everybody in a company knows where they want to go. Everybody in a company knows what it takes to get there, or at least that's the plan. Right? I think that was the very first part when we talked about the must-win battle back in 2019. You can fix all the equipment you want, but if you don't have people that are going to maintain it and run it, it won't last. That was the key. I think it takes a lot of work and a lot of self-improvement to go through the program. I'm proud and very comfortable with Eric taking over as CEO. Now, for sure, I still have a lot of stock, so it better do well. We spent a lot of hours together at the beginning. Eric and I worked together from the very beginning.
We spent hours on top of presses at midnight, fixing oil leaks and getting things running all the way to doing sales plans. I think Eric's been involved in the entire process all the way. I'd say he's one of the most driven, engaged, and creative leaders I've worked with, and I'm proud to see him move on to the next level. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Eric or go through that, and please make sure you ask some hard questions. I know, Bill, you got some hard questions.
All right. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Dave, for all your time. You've spent a lot of years mentoring me and helping me grow in this business. I've been fortunate enough to be part of Core since 2018 when Dave started. I have a mechanical engineering background, and I've worked in a lot of operations across different industries in automotive and transportation. Let me start with why you should invest in Core. We have 45 years of experience producing composite large and ultra-large parts. Of course, our longest track record is with the truck industry. We've supported the truck industry that entire time, and a lot of people know us for our work in truck and transportation. However, we also have a competitive moat. We're sole sourced on a lot of the tooling for those projects. Those tools can't be moved to somebody else.
Additionally, some of the press sizes are absolutely massive. These are large and ultra-large parts, and the presses that make them are even bigger than the taller than this room. You'll see a multi-year improving trend of gross margins, as well as a lot of long-term relationships with very large blue-chip customers. We've had a disciplined capital approach, and we're really working on our organic growth and have a lot of new recent wins that we've established, and we're happy to tell you about those today. As Dave talked about, our must-win battle transformation, the last seven years have been an exciting and eventful journey. I've been fortunate enough to be part of the engineering, the program management office, the operations, as well as the R&D group across Core Molding. In 2019, we really started focusing on the turnaround. 2019 and 2020 was the turnaround.
It was getting the right people on the bus. It was establishing the culture in the business, and it was really working to maintain our customers. I would tell you on the operations side, it was a brute force process. We were just trying to make sure we got the next truck covered and shipped out the door. As we got into the end of 2019 and 2020, of course, COVID hit. We went through the COVID adventure of 2020, as well as the Texas freeze that established a lot of supply chain challenges in our industry in early February of 2021. Through that period, we made Core a great place to work. We continued to work on growing end markets, and we really standardized the basics in operations. In operations, at Core, we say safety, people, quality, delivery, and then cost.
That is what we do to create the culture inside of Core that we always ship good quality parts on time to our customer. Really, through that first three years, it was all internally focused. We were working inside the business on presses, on maintenance, on establishing culture, on succession planning. As we got into 2022 and 2023, we really were able to externally focus and start looking at customer contracts, start working with our customers on renegotiating pricing. Especially with the supply chain changes, some of the raw materials had significantly increased. We were able to get contracts that had raw material adjustment clauses with a lot of our customers. Operationally, we continue to work on continuous improvement and growing that system, as well as working with our frontline leaders.
We now have training programs with our HR organizational development team all the way down to the frontline of operations. All the way to a supervisor and a team leader in the operation, we teach them how to deal with difficult people. We teach them how to engage the workforce, really making sure that Core is a great place to work for every employee all the way down to the shop floor. As we got into 2024 and 2025, we've started focusing on growing our wallet share. We call it our best for growth must-win battle in 2024 and 2025. That's working on organic growth, and we'll talk a lot about our Volvo products this year. We will continue to work on leadership development as well as succession planning.
Of course, Dave, Alex, and I are all examples of that, but we have that example all the way down through the plant management teams and leadership teams across Core. We take succession planning and development of people very seriously. A little more about Core. Of course, you know that we're publicly traded, but did you know we have 45 years of legacy and are headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with about 1,500 employees? Our sales range from the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and we aim to be the most reliable, innovative, and responsive partner in materials and manufacturing solutions. Our number one market is the transportation business. That's semi-truck hoods, roofs, and other air deflectors for the truck market. Our second big market is the power sports market.
That makes up about 25% of our business, and it includes two primary focuses: the personal watercraft market, as well as the UTV or utility terrain vehicle market, so side-by-side vehicles. The remaining quarter is built up in our building products and industrial and utilities. Our North American footprint has over 82 presses spanning 1.3 million sq ft and growing, and presses as large as 5,500 tons. All of our products are USMCA compliant, and we build products in six manufacturing locations: Coburg, Ontario, that's east of Toronto. You see that one on the top, Winona, Minnesota, on the banks of the Mississippi between Minnesota and Wisconsin, Central Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. Our southeast location is in Gaffney, South Carolina, just across the border from North Carolina. We have two locations in Monterrey, Mexico, in Mexico, Monterrey and Matamoros, Mexico.
We make very large assemblies, and so we have very large assets to build those assemblies. You'll notice in the upper right, a six-axis robot moving an entire bonded roof hood. That's a class six roof hood that's being picked up by a six-axis robot to improve cycle time. It's our quickest assembly line that was launched in 2023. They can make over 15 hoods like that per hour. On the lower right, you'll notice a 5,000-ton press. That press is three stories above ground and two stories below ground. The amount of work and effort it takes to install a machine that big is massive, and it's what creates some of that barrier to entry for others that want to mold semi-truck roofs. We talk about some of the customers we serve. We have a lengthy history with those truck customers, many of them blue chip.
They're not the kind of customers we worry about account receivable with. They all pay their bills. Our power sports history started in what I would call real R&D work with Yamaha. All the Yamaha personal watercraft have Core Molding composite material that is lighter and stronger than any other material on the market. It's a true R&D and material research that has been evolving over years to where it is today. Our power sports history with BRP came through acquisition. It started in 2015 at about $10 million of our revenue portfolio. Today, it's over $40 million with BRP. It's the perfect example of what we call grow wallet share. When you work with a customer and you do a good job, they want you to solve more problems with them and do more business with them.
We have new wins in building products and industrial, and we hope to grow those materials over the next 10 years. Now I'd like to introduce Alex Panda, our CFO, to walk us through how the business shows up in the financials.
Thank you, Eric. Good morning, everyone. Over the past five years, we've seen fluctuations in our sales. In 2022 and 2023, like many companies, we saw a COVID boom that primarily affected our building products and power sports industries. These markets, again, make up 25%-35% of our overall sales. In 2024 and 2025, we saw a decline in these industries. Also, during this time, we transitioned a major program with Volvo to a competitor as we did not bid on the replacement business due to the old products not hitting certain financial metrics. In 2025, we entered into a truck trough. A truck cycle starts off with the trough, followed by five to seven years of demand increases, and then another trough. Right now, we are in the middle to end of a truck trough.
In the second half of 2026, we believe demand will start to increase, followed by five to seven years of demand increases in truck. We've been laser-focused on improving our margins over the last three years. We've been able to do this through operational efficiencies, customer price increases, and better contracts with our customers and our vendors. For customers, we don't accept fixed pricing anymore. Like Eric said, we build in raw material adjuster clauses in all of our contracts. For vendors, we've started to negotiate rebates and better pricing for raw materials. Over my 12 years at Core, achieving a 17%-19% gross margin was only seen during a truck peak. Right now, we've been able to achieve that over the last two years. Like I said, in 2025, we hit a trough.
We're positioned to take advantage of truck and power sports to rebound and the launch of our $47 million of incremental sales wins to achieve a greater than 19% gross margin in the future. Improving margins, what did that do for us? Right now, we've created a strong balance sheet. We have $43 million of cash on the books, and our net cash position, once you back out debt, is $23 million. We really like to have liquidity on hand to take advantage of large organic growth opportunities as they come. Organic growth opportunities are our number one priority when it comes to investing. Right now, our 2025 CapEx estimated spend is between $10 million -$12 million. We target anywhere between 3%-3.5% of sales on an annual basis to spend on sustaining CapEx.
Growth CapEx, we just announced like a quarter or two ago that we're going to spend $25 million to expand our Mexico business. That's really to support our new program win with Volvo that will be produced out of our Matamoros facility and shipped to Volvo's brand new manufacturing facility in Monterrey, Mexico. For M&A, we've really worked on building the pipeline up over the last nine months. Eric, Dave, and I have visited three companies over the last nine months, but the one thing that we're seeing is the selling price that the sellers are asking for really would be dilutive because the multiple is a lot higher than where we're currently trading. We believe we have to focus on organic growth for now and do M&A at a later date.
Lastly, returning capital to shareholders, we have a stock buyback program that is authorized up to $7.5 million to spend, and we've spent so far about $5.5 million, so we have about $2 million left. Prioritizing our organic growth opportunities, over the last three years, we've had operating cash flows of $90 million, and we've invested $27 million in CapEx. Of this $27 million, we've spent $14 million on growth CapEx. Like I said, we're going to spend another $25 million on growth CapEx to expand our two Mexico facilities. Eric will get into a little bit more detail of that on the next couple of slides. Lastly, I'd like to talk about the long-term financial targets.
Over the next three to five years, we believe we can achieve greater than $500 million in sales with an operating income of greater than 8% and a return on capital employed of greater than 14%. Now I'd like to hand it back to Eric. He's going to walk you through how we're going to achieve these long-term goals.
Thanks, Alex. When we think about $500 million, some might think that's an aggressive number. We see the opportunities across nearly every market. Others look at the title of this slide at $7 billion and think, "There's no way you have a $7 billion addressable market." The thing is, composites can be used everywhere. They can be used in transportation, power sports, and industrials, like you see across the top row. They can be used to support radar antennas for the aerospace industry to communicate with satellites, construction, and agriculture. Last year, we even developed fake rocks for one of our customers. He's going to be taking those to home garden centers to be able to sell fake rocks. They think a $10 million business of fake rocks.
We look for expansion into any other sales channels that we can find, as well as any of our customers who are already multi-billion dollar companies that buy a lot of products from us because those are the perfect areas to grow wallet share. Some of the best opportunities we find for expansion are when we replace metal, concrete, wood, or traditional plastic products. Those are areas where composites typically shine. Why do customers choose Core? Customers choose us because we create large molded parts that have unique value. Whether it's the top row and you see all of the truck hoods, they have their emblem, and it's the first thing down the road, the first thing that hits your eye when you look at a large truck or bus or transportation vehicle, they trust us for that hood.
When it comes to power sports, if it's a UTV that you're buying for doing work, hunting, working in a garage, those are vehicles that have a dump box on them. We make a majority of the dump boxes shown in this photograph here. We also do skid plates for the power sports industry to solve unique problems. I'll show you more about that later, as well as most of the personal watercrafts have some sort of Core composite material on them. Our process is great at the lakefront, where you see the docks in the center here, where you can have no corrosion. Wood will rot, and a lot of metals, irons, steels will rust. If you can switch those to composites, you have a great solution for a custom dock.
Our troughs along the rail line allow you to put data cables when you're installing a new rail line. The stormwater chamber is shown in the lower center as a way to reduce environmental impact. When you install a parking lot today, instead of having the water run off into streams and creeks nearby, you store the water underneath the surface and let that water naturally absorb back into the ground. Finally, in the lower right, one of my favorite processes, a one-piece industrial blade fan up to 12 ft in length and a hollow molded cross-section, a truly awesome process for those engineers in the room. Alex talked about our investment for organic growth. This is our new 200,000 sq ft facility shown in the photograph there. That's what we won a $150 million contract with Volvo that launches in the first quarter of 2027.
That underpins it, but there's a couple of other ways we earn our conservatively calculated 16% return on capital employed with this project. We'll install two brand new 4,500-ton hydraulic presses in Matamoros, making Matamoros the largest sleeper roof provider in all of North America. We will convert the 200,000 sq ft and move our two Monterrey facilities that are spread in two locations. One is 55,000 sq ft, 130. We'll combine those two facilities under one roof. Then we'll also transfer our DCPD production facility from Matamoros into that remaining space in Monterrey. 85% of that product today ships to a customer in Monterrey. When we move the manufacturing, the molding, and the presses there, there's instant cost synergies and savings associated with transportation. Across this, there are multiple hard savings examples that we know will get the return on capital for this project.
We'll also upgrade our capability with top coat finishing, especially for the construction and agriculture customers. They keep asking us to do a one-stop shop that can mold, assemble, and top coat paint a finished product for them. We need that capability, and we're going to add it with this new facility. When we talk about diversification, it's a key aspect of our strategy, and we conserve in almost every industry. There's a few examples here that I'll show you. In the upper left-hand corner is a new startup that's building electric pickup truck boxes. They've awarded us the inner sides, the bulkhead, the tailgate, and the two D-pillars near the tail lights. That entire bed surround will be produced with Core Molding DLFT composite technology. We've developed additional SMCs to sell into the door markets, shown in the upper right.
On the right-hand edge, the base plate that I mentioned earlier is a base plate that holds the radar antenna to communicate up to satellites that are being launched and orbiting the United States Earth. In the lower right, the bus battery pack that you see is an interchangeable battery pack where they can charge offline and just hot swap batteries at a bus, allowing a bus to do a continuous duty cycle without a downtime for charging. We are going to build an entire case out of our composite. In the lower left is a medical bed that we were working on with this customer for a couple of years to convert a metal product over to a thermoplastic product.
Those supporting members that are underneath the mattress will be produced from our structural foam process and allow them a nice surface to clean, but you also get all the integrated features of hinges, handles, everything in one molded part without the additional cost. On the left-hand edge shows a carbon fiber beauty panel that we're working with our resin transfer for another grow wallet share opportunity that we won with a personal watercraft business. If the diversification does not get too exciting, the magnitude of some of these new wins ought to get you excited. $45 million of new wins in 2024, $47 million so far year to date through the third quarter of this year brings us to $92 million. $72 million of that is incremental. The first project you see on the left, that is a new truck roof.
We're finishing the tooling for that during the fourth quarter of 2025. That will launch at the end of 2026, early 2027, but it replaces a current roof that we have today. So no incremental volume. The second one over is the Volvo roof project that we're making all the investments for. That tooling will be during 2026 and all of that installation for a launch in the first quarter of 2027. The third one in is a door skid material that you've just started to see in the income statement that launched during the second quarter and started having volume in the third. The fourth one is a UTV skid plate that launched in the third quarter of this year and will reach its full run rate next year, between $8 million and $10 million a year of annual sales of those skid plates.
The fifth one in is the electric pickup truck that I showed. That OEM believed they were going to make 150,000 vehicles a year. To start, we conservatively cut that down by a third to 50,000. So that $9 million is equivalent of a third of their projections of what they think. Those six parts will be worth $9 million a year. The batteries and miscellaneous projects make up the remainder of those new wins. We believe these are conservative and reasonable estimates for all of the products that we do. Why do customers stay with Core? Let's say we won the customer. Why do they stay with us? It could be, or is generally, the delivery on time, good quality parts, and then we create value in some way for the customer.
The example on the left is a concrete trough to go on the rail line. Our product is more expensive. That piece of concrete is definitely cheaper than a composite trough. However, once you have to use an excavator or a backhoe, something with hydraulic power to set those, instead of having just a person be able to pick up the composite trough, the speed of installation goes up by 10 times, making the overall cost of the project go down by 15%. When you look at the second example, when you want to win on Sunday and sell on Monday, you work out to take 75 lbs out of the personal watercraft hull. That improves the handling speed and velocity that that watercraft can handle with the same horsepower and allows Yamaha to be uniquely competitive in their market.
The second picture you see on the bottom is the 10-pound sledgehammer test to prove the durability of that boat. You can literally take a full-size sledgehammer and hammer that boat hull and it will not crack or pull the corner off. We have been nominated in the third example for unique solutions like that 150-pound boat hull you see molded in one piece, measuring over 10 feet tall, including integrated engine mounts, fuel tank restraints, as well as all of the jet drive geometries at the bottom. A solution so detailed and unique that it creates value for our customer, but it also creates value for the end customer that buys that vehicle for their lake house. The breadth of the portfolio on the last example shows how we solve customer problems with different technologies.
We built a main hull with our DLFT reinforced composite that's more expensive, but solves problems with the engine, jet drive, and all of the torque, where the extension on the nose of that boat doesn't need the same strength. We're able to put a better cost solution together for them and use our structural foam process for that part. I've got two final case studies I want to show you. A flush cover vault. You've seen these in a neighborhood or a sidewalk, anywhere that you've walked where there are interconnecting fiber underneath the sidewalk. You've got a burial vault with a flush lid on it. Historically, a 90 lb lid, we've engineered a solution that we sell today that's 25 lb. And it can still take 22,000 lb of load. You can drive a semi-truck over that cover and it won't fail.
We worked with a lot of our customers to integrate features. When you look at some of those boat hull or power sports products, whether it's a stud, a knot, an assembly feature, if we can integrate that into the part, then they save money because they don't have to do the assembly process in their facility. We've also added, for durability concerns, unidirectional tape along the sides because they had impact concerns of boats getting damaged. We were able to double the impact resistance by molding unidirectional glass into the sides of that boat hull. A great solution for that customer. A final example, this is the one that skid plate that launched during this quarter. This is a problem that was identified by the safety for debris penetration into a recreational vehicle.
This is near and dear to me because I own some of these and race side by side, and I've seen it happen. The solution was to be able to stop a 355 J of energy impact over a one-inch wooden stake hitting that material. When the customer identified this for us, we built this test fixture over the weekend and proved that we could come up with a composite solution instead of a steel or aluminum sheet metal solution for them. Through that engineering partnership and their trust in us, we were able to launch this skid plate this quarter, and it has no issues with noise. One of the things they worry about is rocks coming off the tires and making loud noises or chipping the paint, leading to corrosion issues on a metal part.
With a composite solution, we get lower friction, no rust, it's a molded-in color black, just a great solution for them. We really earned their loyalty in terms of this. It's a great grow wallet share example. The other unique thing is this leverages our multi-nozzle injection process that very few in North America have, and that means this tool can't be run by somebody else. This is a unique Core Molding solution that very few people can make a skid plate five feet across, four feet across, and produce it in one part, one single molding cycle. I want to thank you for your interest in Core Molding and remind you we have visibility to $300 million of sales in 2027. We know the truck market cycles can be challenging, like Alex talked about, the troughs and peaks.
Those are challenging, but we also give us confidence that we know there's another recovery coming around cycle in the next couple of years. Those large OEM projects for truck and power sports, they do create consistent demand, which is good, even when it's down or up, so we know we have confidence in that future growth. We've maintained strong gross margins through this low truck cycle, through this trough, which historically we have only hit on the peak areas. We really feel that we'll have economies of scale as that business comes back. The last two I want to remind you will be the number one producer of sleeper roofs, producing over 1,000 sleeper roofs out of our Matamoros facility in 2027. We will have over 20,000 tons of press and force at four large presses, 4,500-ton, 5,500-ton, and 5,000-ton presses in that facility.
We're the number one producer of personal watercraft, hulls, middecks, and liners. We estimate about 85% of the global personal watercraft has Core Composite material in it. Thank you for your time. As Dave said, see if you can ask me some hard questions. Yeah.
I'm not really familiar with the business. Trucks alone, you're talking largely of new manufacturing component parts that are added on or used in the construction, the truck body, the truck bed. Is there an opportunity to add on? Why aren't you going to be the interior so Johnson Controls it where the margins are much better?
Yeah. The question is about exterior of a vehicle versus interior of a truck vehicle. I would say that a lot of the interior is generally high-pressure injection molding. What I would tell you is that is a substantially larger market than us.
We would be in very much a niche molding of doing sheet molding compound outer panels and of the size and scale. There are very few people that have any high-pressure machines that could build a part literally six feet by six feet because the tonnage you would need is three to four times the tonnage that we need to mold at. Very difficult to build this big a part that way.
There is really no opportunity for you in that business.
We tend to steer away from a lot of the A-class products. Something that is a final touch part, we want structural big skid plates, outer panels, big roof fairings. That tends to be our sweet spot. It is not out of the question. It is something that we could certainly look at and consider.
How much better one versus the other?
I would tell you the margins in high pressure, there's a lot of competition. High-pressure molding, we could go find 1,000 companies that have high-pressure machines in North America right now. You could only find a handful that have machines that we have.
You make a good point. When we look at, we were looking at some of the acquisitions, a lot of our parts really are structural, right? They're not aesthetic. When you look at high-pressure injection molding, you're looking at a lot of aesthetics. It's a class A surface. I can either paint it or I put a peak out on it. When you looked at that one hard and viable part that we had done, that's actually covering a large structural part.
When we looked at acquisitions, we looked at large injection molding capabilities that we could interlock into our structural on top with injection molding. Yeah.
You mentioned all the traction of the pre-programmed wins across the first sort of 10 markets. That's leading to a substantial revenue growth. How does that look just ongoing in terms of your development funnel? Is that repeatable year after year, or is this just something that's happening exceptionally because things have kind of come together? How do you think about the business in that kind of two to four-year horizon relative to this?
Yeah. The question is, over the last couple of years, we had some pretty good success in wins. How do we see that forecasting our sales growth in the coming years?
I would start by making sure I remind you all that transformation period, we really were internally focused for a number of years. We did not purposefully go work on sales. As far as the turnaround, the sales was the last portion of the business for us to work on turning around because when you cannot deliver current products, you do not want to add more things to that because you are going to disappoint customers. About a year ago, we hired a Chief Commercial Officer, Alex Bantz, to help us at the executive level run our sales organization. We have really been working on that a lot the last two years. You can see $45 million the last two years. I will tell you, Alex would stand here and tell you he thinks he can sell $100 million a year of our capability and process.
We have demonstrated $45 million and $47 million year to date. We think we will knock a few more in there this fourth quarter. I do not see a reason why it is not sustainable to do $50 million a year of new wins over the next few years. I think it is really, yeah.
I was just going to add in our current sales pipeline is right around $250 million. If you take our 25% historical win rate, that puts it right about there. As long as we keep building that pipeline, I think the sales and the wins will come.
A ny questions?
On Dave's comment, if you were looking to get an acquisition or acquisitions where you could be molding your technology along with new technology together, is that essentially where you concluded that the price tag to buy those was too high?
Or are there other dynamics, or is it simply timing?
Yeah. I mean, where we were looking was really large injection molding, not small parts. Something that had at least 2,000 lbs or greater to be able to fit with our strategy on our box. You see a lot of where we make a product, DLFT, great for a truck bed, great for a UGB bed, but you do not want it on the side of your vehicle, right? Or you do not want it on top of your personal watercraft. We saw the demand in that. Now, we can mold those parts, but still they are somewhat bespoke, right? You are only going to put carbon fiber on the high end. When you start looking at the skirting on the truck, and if you said the interior of the truck, that is where we start seeing the potential for injection molding.
If you look at it, if we can mold in, if you're molding, you can mold in, and then mold an injection molding part that snaps onto it, you need to go faster. That is really the direction we were looking at. Again, it is a sales challenge, right? We do well in the area. We do great growing model share because once we are in, we are trusted, we show value. We were early in the design phase, but it is a long process to get the first sale. There is no doubt. Our float-to-cash cycle time is anywhere between 9-24 months. What you will see, all those wins, we are not even recognizing sales yet. Those sales come in, but once you have them, you have them for 8-10 years.
Yeah. Go ahead.
A couple more.
You had some weakness in the truck business this quarter, but you also had strength in the power sports and building products already. Would you walk through what the drivers were that led to a seen an uptick versus a year ago for both of those segments?
Yeah. This slide's a perfect one to answer it with. This is the skid plate slide that launched during the third quarter. We started producing those at volume during the third quarter. That alone is a big enough project to, I'll say, overcome the demand that's depressed in personal watercraft and whatever. That's what you saw during the third quarter for that one. The other one is the door skin material that's shown as the third one. That launched in the started in the second quarter. I would say very minimal in the second quarter.
Third quarter was the first time you saw what would be a full run rate of that material. We call that our building products because it goes into residential and commercial doors. It could be interior doors. It could be front door, like exterior doors, that sort of thing.
You've talked in the past how SMC, the quote-to-cash cycle, can be much shorter. It can be. That's an SMC product. What was the timeline there?
That was about six months from initial engagement, some sampling, to starting production. Yeah. That's what we're seeing for most of them. We could do it in that three- to six-month range. Some as early as less than that. We've already been able to ship some samples to suppliers in a month. We will see how that goes.
We have four customers right now in the compounding market that are taking samples, having engineering visits. We were hoping to announce one of those wins by this point. We do not have that signed yet. We will not announce those until they are official. During the fourth quarter, I really do expect to be able to tell you we have won at least one, if not more than one of those SMC compounds. All of those, I think, can launch in under six months. They can launch during the first half of next year. Yeah.
Question about your capacity. They have mentioned that this new business might be recurring for eight years or so once you are given the contract as well. How do you handle the capacity? You would not be surprised when the truck market picks back up.
Is that really compensating the stair or are you prepared to benefit of the next cycle?
Yeah. That has been a part of Core business for a while is you have to keep that capacity reserved for the truck cycles. You have to know that as that peak comes back, you've already basically sold that material, that capacity, and be ready. What I would say is different for sure today than maybe it was many years ago is that we're taking this lull and reinvesting and really working on getting ready for that.
We talk every day about, "Do we think it's in June, July of next year that we're going to have to start hiring?" We have plants that are actually doing practice mock hiring right now because if you do not practice hiring for six months, then you kind of forget how to hire, right? You have to go through that process. We are actually taking employees and pretend hiring them, pretend onboarding them so that we can practice and make sure we're ready when that peak comes. That will be the challenge for us in operations when that peak comes. I mean, it's a 33% increase in truck in one year over max, right? Think about businesses that grow 33% in one year. That's a steep ramp. Yeah. We believe we have capacity in place to do $425 million-$475 million of revenue.
Where we need to invest is if we do not have the right asset at the right location for the customer. The Volvo Mexico expansion was that case. We were out of large tonnage presses of capacity down in Matamoros, and we needed to install two brand new presses.
We do not build it and hope they come. We make sure we get it and then we build it. The big Volvo program is really funding and allowing us to put another facility in to consolidate two facilities and put what we call DCPD, which is more of a structural that you would see on a vocational truck, like a pump truck or a forestry truck. We are putting topcoat paint in, so we take advantage of that win to be able to consolidate and make those big moves.
I think when we talked about our months and values, three years ago with Zero, saying we were really focused on the operational side, we got at least 20% of our target to the public, 20% additional capacity with two plants. We had done that. If I rewind the same equipment six years ago, you probably had capacity in 300.
All right. Great. Any other questions? Thank you.