Okay. Good morning. Thanks for joining and coming today to the first day of the in-person portion of the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Jim Ricchiuti, Senior Analyst with the Equity Research Department covering industrial technologies companies. We're going to kick off today's events with a presentation from CTS Corp, CTS. As many of you know, CTS manufactures sensors, actuators, other electronic components, you know, a wide variety of end markets, A&D, industrial, medical, transportation. We're pleased to have with us today Kieran O'Sullivan, President and CEO. Kieran, why don't you go ahead?
All right. Thanks, Jim. Good morning. For those of you that know the company well, I just want to reemphasize we're focused on products that sense, connect, and move. Our biggest strategy is focused on diversification, growing our medical, aerospace, and defense and industrial markets at a faster pace than our transportation market, but in transportation, we're focused heavily on electrification. Most of our products are agnostic to the drivetrain, but there are certain areas that we're navigating for the future, which will be important for us as a company as well. We also have a strong balance sheet, and we're looking to leverage that balance sheet for organic growth, but also for acquisitions. You would have seen that we did an acquisition back in August of last year of SyQwest, which takes us into the defense area at a greater scale, and I'll come back to that.
It's an integration into sensors and transducers. You're all familiar with the Safe Harbor statement here, so you can see that. So again, I want to emphasize, our company is focused on products that sense, connect, and move. That's where we deploy our capital. That's where we deploy our talent. You can see our revenue here across the different end markets and regions of the world. Sorry, I should say regions of the world, not end markets. Our revenue, EBITDA margin, and profile. Our EBITDA margin over the last 10 years has gone from about 10% closer to 22%, been as high as 23%. And the one thing I want to emphasize here is in the last quarter where we reported earnings in the third quarter, our diversified businesses had grown to 52% of overall company revenue.
That's from a few years ago when transportation was more like 65% and diversified markets were 35%. The reason we're also focused on this diversification is to grow the quality of earnings in our company. And you'll see on later slides that we've also expanded that range and increased that range of the gross margin expectation for our company as well. If you look here in terms of we're focused on driving, driving growth at 10%, 5% through acquisitions and 5% through organic growth. Obviously, that's been a mixed bucket in the last year. We'll give you a further update on that in the earnings call here in early February. But a few things to highlight from a single-digit growth perspective in organic areas.
We're heavily focused on engineered products, highly engineered products in terms of the markets we play and in some cases vertically integrated in those markets as well. We've focused on automation, healthcare in particular for minimally invasive applications that can be medical ultrasound. It can be therapeutics where we're seeing steady growth as well, and also intravascular applications, which are really positive in terms of the impact they can have with the types of technology we have in this area as well, and electrification. As I said, our product portfolio is largely agnostic to the powertrain, but we do have some things where we're focused on electrification as we go forward in a very controlled manner. We've got a very clear focus on how to leverage our balance sheet in terms of M&A, a clear strategy for diversification. We love our transportation business.
We're going to keep it strong, but we're going to grow our medical, aerospace, and defense and industrial markets at a faster pace, and you've seen that from the actions we've taken as well. We have a good balance sheet. We're a little bit conservative on the balance sheet, but we have the capability to do larger acquisitions as well. From a footprint and execution perspective, very solid in terms of where our footprint is at. We've been doing a lot of work on our footprint over the past ten years. We're really set up regionally to make sure we're set up to serve our customers. Sometimes we're doing optimizations on our footprint that we don't even talk about in terms of the materiality of it, but it's something that we always keep a focus on, especially as we grow inorganically.
Strong organizational capabilities, execution capabilities, and we normally have initiatives that we're driving, like we had our Focus 2025, internal program for driving growth and efficiency. We'll be kicking off a new program as we enter this year with our leadership team as well. Just back to the secular themes on growth, where do we focus? Automation, Industry 4.0, passenger safety, driving zero accidents and help getting our products to do that. Autonomous underwater vehicles or unmanned vehicles. As I mentioned just a few minutes ago, minimally invasive applications and improved diagnostics. So, medical ultrasound, we've got a lot of blue chip customers in this space. Therapeutics is an area that's been growing steadily for us as well. It's a new area for us in the last several years.
And then, the patient experience that can be temperature controlled, or it can be dental equipment and applications as well. And then on the far right for sustainability, you can see here electrification, reducing harmful emissions, reducing emissions on ICE engines with our actuators and diesel applications as well. Energy efficiency and fluid metering where our products are replacing mechanical solutions today, with our ultrasonic solutions as well. This appears to be a very busy chart, but I just take you to the what's your left-hand side here as you look at it. You've got advanced ceramics and magnetics. You can see the multitude of things that we do here for a small company. We're pretty well diversified, and the applications. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I do want to highlight what the core competence is here.
On advanced ceramics, what we're known for is the quality of our material formulations. We have bulk processing foundry, we have a tape casting foundry, we have a single crystal foundry, and those also combine and complement each other into other material formulations. When our customers come to us, it's one of the things that surprised me in the early days of being with the business: our customers find us. If we don't find them, they find us because of the applications that we have and that material capability. There are not a lot of companies in the world who have all these three technologies and what you can do with them as well.
On the foundry side, we have foundries in different parts of the world here in North America, but also two in Europe, to make sure we've got nice redundancy for our customers to support them going forward. And then on the magnetic side, we have a deep expertise in packaging position sensing in safety-critical and harsh environments. And for the most part, that's in transportation markets. So that's where we play in this area. But we may have ten different products, but they all use that as the core of the technology. So when you think of us, some people look at us and say, "You're very complicated," and in parts we may appear to be, but the core is advanced materials and what we do with magnetics as well. So hopefully that's helpful in terms of giving you some insight into us as a company.
I started out with diversification. If you go back, we were 65% transportation in that small circular area there. We've been organically and through acquisitions moving the business much more into diversified markets in terms of aerospace and defense, industrial and medical markets as well. As I mentioned at the start today, that mix, this is a year to date, but if I look at where we ended the third quarter, it was about 52% diversified markets, 48% transportation. As we move into 2025 and beyond, we would expect and have ambitions to move that towards 60% and beyond that to help improve the quality of the earnings and the setup we want to have for our company over a longer period of time. I had a one-on-one meeting this morning and people were asking me about defense because our last acquisition was in this area.
We love this market. We think it's going to be a great market for the next five, ten years. I don't know if there's going to be peace after that or not, but I would tell you, we would also put a cap on what we do in those markets as well, right? It's just in terms of we, we want to get the right mix of end markets for the company. When you go into each of the markets here, let's talk about some of the more, more difficult, things. The industrial market for us has been a headwind for the last two years, as it has been for other companies in the space. You can see here we're in HVAC, we're in micro-positioning in terms of semiconductors, we're in industrial printing for ceramic tiles and packaging, and metering for scarce resources.
Our revenue has been down because of the buildup of inventory with our customers and with distributors. What I will tell you is we got it wrong in 2024. We said we expected better growth as inventories burned down. It took longer than we expected. But in the third quarter, we reported a 2% sequential increase in revenue. So we'll give a further update on that as we get into our earnings call in the February time period here as we go forward. This is a market we're committed to. We believe that the rebound will happen here as the inventory is correct. And as I said, we saw some signs of that in the third quarter of 2024.
If you look at the medical market, this is a market where we have a lot of blue chip customers like we have in the other markets as well. In medical ultrasound, Siemens, Samsung, Philips, GE, Mindray in China. I was just with Mindray back in November in China and just to see the way they're driving the market, the way they're expanding their business as there are other customers here as well. Intravascular ultrasound, really minimally invasive applications as well. We've got some new technology that we're doing here with some customers where you can go down to the artery and in terms of real time, just see the diameter of the artery, where the blockage is, and then you can actually go in and be real accurate about where you're going to put that stent or do different types of surgery, as you go forward too.
We also do wireless pacemaking, cochlear implants for hearing, and then, drug delivery with some of our customers where we've got several innovation projects running here in terms of how we deliver the drugs to the area of treatment for a tumor and other applications as well. So we, we love this space. It's been very solid. We said in the third quarter that was going to be some inventory correction in the, in the fourth quarter. We'll give you an update on that as well on the next earnings call. Aerospace and Defense, up 25% year over year. Some of that's helped by the acquisition, obviously, but this has been a solid growth for us. We've talked all year, about the solid backlog we have in this business, and, we feel very good about the, mid to long-term prospects and near-term prospects too.
You can see here we're in underwater sonar, towed arrays, forward-looking arrays. We're in hydrophones, we're in countermeasures, vibration monitoring, and space temperature applications as well. I'll come back to this a little bit more later in the presentation as I touch on the SyQwest acquisition that we did last August. But we're really pleased because back to our materials formulations, with our bulk processing, with our tape casting, and with our single crystal, we have technologies that not only support this industry today, but will be supporting new innovations for the next ten plus years. We've got really strong technology in this area and are happy with how we're progressing here too. Industrial was a little bit of a tough story. Medical good, Aerospace and Defense very solid. Transportation has been a tough, a tough run through 2024 as well.
We talked about it in our last earnings call. While it's a big market, we're down year over year. We're down for two reasons. One is in the China market where some of our bigger customers in transportation, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, they've been losing share in the China market to the local Chinese OEMs, as has everybody else. So that's been a tough battle for us. And then on the second part of that is we have some second source competition in the commercial vehicle market. Still in the commercial vehicle market, we've just developed the next generation product, which will run for the next seven-eight years as well. So we feel confident in terms of maintaining solid share as we go forward here in the business too.
What I do want to point out here is I've talked mostly about the diversification, but I also said electrification will be important for us as we go forward. If you look to the right-hand side here, we have a product called eBrake. This is a market that will be over $800 million as it matures going forward. First revenues won't come until the 2027 time period. We've had our first win, as we've talked about in past earnings calls. We've had a second progress here with a pre-development with a European premium OEM, so we feel very good about this space. We have our Drive Pad technology, which customers are evaluating. This is, if you think about sitting in your car with an accelerator pedal, just think about that pedal being flush into the floor.
As vehicles over time become more autonomous, it's going to be important from a space perspective, and also by doing that, the firewall becomes less of a safety issue for the OEMs. So these are just some of the things here we're doing. Current sensing in many applications, not just in transportation, but also in industrial applications, that was aided by the MagLab acquisition that we did over two years ago out of Switzerland. Very small acquisition, but moving well in terms of what we're trying to do here as well. Again, I want to emphasize that most of our products are agnostic to the powertrain. That's how we've been. The exception would be the actuators on diesel for the commercial vehicle market, and as you know, those diesel engines are not going to disappear in the next five years.
So I wanted to give you a perspective on that end market too. From an execution perspective, you know, our focus is partnering with our customers to make sure they have the technologies they need, and we're solving the relevant problems that they have. We don't, we're not out there doing blue skies. We're staying very close to our customers. In many cases, we have our applications engineering resident with our customers. So when they have a problem, we're talking to them before it's going into the purchasing department and other areas to make sure we're coming up with the best solutions. You can see here we've made some strong gains in our gross margin over the years. This shows the last few years adjusted gross margin improvement. From a cash flow perspective, operating cash flow 74% of adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow 106%.
So always solid on our cash, cash management, and returned about $230 million to shareholders. And then on the right-hand side, you can see here solid focus on investments in the business. We're very disciplined in terms of our R&D. There's lots of things that our engineers would love to do, but there's certain things that we want to accomplish as a company. So that means we say this is where we're targeting. We're not playing around over here. And this falls in line with our strategy to diversify and electrify in our end markets as well. And we've completed nine acquisitions since 2013. Mostly, mostly small acquisitions. We started out first with sub-$20 million. The last acquisitions have been over $20 million. We'd like to do acquisitions more in the $50 million range in revenue. And we've looked at larger acquisitions, to help transform the company.
But on those larger ones, they got to be pretty much spot on for us to make that move because if we're buying something that's $100-$150 million in revenue, that means you're betting the company on it. So it's really important that we get that right. Capital allocation framework here. You can see operating cash flows in the 15%-18%. Capital structure leverage 1-2.5. I think we're somewhere just under 1 at the moment or around 1. We would leverage up to 2.5 times EBITDA for the right acquisition. We in the last few years, we've never gone over 1.5-1.6, I think, mostly. CapEx pretty consistent at about 4%. Our material side of the business, the foundries, tend to be more capital intensive.
We like to keep on top of that, making sure we're doing the right upgrades and investments on the appropriate time frame versus leaving it all back and loaded. Acquisitions, obviously, is a big focus for us. That's 60%-80% of the free cash flow. And then obviously dividend and repurchases. So, repurchases, we have an open buyback. I think it's somewhere in the region of $50-$60 million at this point in time. I might be slightly off on that number. But, that's where we stand on that. Acquisitions, what's important for us is the return on invested capital, compared to our cost of capital. We like to achieve that usually within a three-year time period.
Sometimes if it's a technology, as an example, the single crystal technology we acquired in 2016, it's a little bit longer than that, but that's a technology that's going to be around for 30 plus years. Synergistic opportunities in terms of revenue growth and in terms of cost management. Accretive to earnings. We like it to be accretive to earnings in the first 12 months. And again, obviously, we like to keep a solid balance sheet in terms of how we move forward. Some people would say we're a little too conservative on the balance sheet. We will stretch ourselves in the right way, in a disciplined way for the right acquisitions. Back to the SyQwest acquisition. Just a little background on this, and it gives you a sense of how we operate as well. We knew this business for about 10, 12 years.
We have been a supplier to this company in the defense area. We've seen them evolve and grow over the years. Bob Tarini and the team we knew well, so why did we move into this area? First of all, we like defense. We're a component supplier into sonar, into hydrophones, into other unmanned applications. This takes us up, integrates us from a component supplier into the full sensor, transducer, and subsystems. So it accelerates our diversification as part of our overall strategy, moves us up the value chain, and expands our technical capability as a company. You know, if you look at the acquisitions we've done, they've always been within our core. This is just like a step from outside of the core, moving us into an area with greater value creation.
We would look at this and say it's a solid growth platform. There's a lot of things to be executed on in terms of the, the book of business that's in the, in the business today. There's some other things we'd like to do to expand going forward in terms of new products, but probably some of those things we won't do for 12-18 months because there's a lot of heavy work to be done on the existing backlog and execution as well. We really like the space. I would also tell you that, would we do other acquisitions in the defense space? Yes, but we will actually come to a point where we will cap it off in terms of what percentage of our business will be defense in the longer run.
This also helps us not only with the U.S. Navy, but also with Europe, Australia, Japan, gives us inroads into those markets where we didn't have as much access in the past as well. From a revenue perspective, I just want to, I'm not going to talk too much about this because we've got earnings on the third or fourth of February. You can see here our steady growth, 2022, just like for some other companies, it was a lot of overbuying going on, especially in the industrial markets. So you can see here where we corrected and getting back to that run rate that we have here and the EPS on the other side here. So we'll give you a better update on that. But what I do want to say about the end markets is very solid in medical.
We did say short term in medical in the fourth quarter there'd be some correction, but we're not concerned about it in terms of the mid to near term. The industrial side of it making small recovery. I would say, again, I'm going to emphasize we got it wrong in 2024. We expected a stronger recovery. We saw a 2% sequential improvement in the third quarter. We believe inventory levels are back to more normalized levels. And from everything we see in our markets and what we're hearing and reading in the public area, you know, inventories are correcting back to a level where demand will improve going forward. The transportation market has been challenging because of the Chinese situation.
And, we would be very focused on that in terms of how we are offsetting those things that are happening in China in other markets to give us strength as we go forward. And again, on the Aerospace and Defense, solid. So, we feel like that diversification is helping us as a company in terms of where we want to grow, but also in terms of the quality of our earnings as a company as well. And then, finally, just the financial framework for the company. You can see here where our revenue was in 2012 and the different parts of the P&L here. The thing I'd like to point out is the gross margin that was in the 35%-37% range. We've improved that to 36%-38%. Obviously, as a company, we want to execute on that.
I'd like to see us over time get into that 40% so we differentiate ourselves as a, as a company. That's not going to happen in the next year, but as we diversify the company more and more, we get to the top end of this range and can further advance our quality of earnings as we go forward as well. You can see our CapEx here, R&D expense. R&D is going to, if you look at us over a period of time of 10 years, we haven't strayed off too much in terms of where that R&D percentage goes. We keep very focused on that. And the final thing I'd say here, as we scale the business, we'll get some efficiencies on the SG&A part of the business as you'd expect as well. So, I think that's my final slide. Yeah, I've moved through that pretty quickly.
So I'm happy to take any questions that anybody would like to ask. Yes.
On the transportation side, you talked about China being a challenge. It doesn't feel like that gets easier. So maybe just give us a bit more on what your strategy is there because those suppliers are ramping up, the competition's ramping up. It's not going to get easier for you. How do you compete with China or do you decide, you know, what, that's not a key market? We're going to focus elsewhere.
I first of all don't think you can ignore China. I've gone through the extremes of the last 10 years. You don't have enough business in China to now you have too much business in China. So there's a balance to be had here. We've got our automotive business in China.
We've got our ceramics area in China, which is doing really well as well. So to answer your question, first of all, I actually, to your point, I think it's going to get tougher, for two reasons. Number one, you've got the Chinese competition and it is not going away. We've been looking at this for more than two years saying it's coming, it's coming, it's here. It's not just in China, it's now in Europe, it's in South America. Obviously, we're insulated a little bit in North America. But the second pressure point that's going to come here is not from the Chinese. It's from all the peer companies that are losing in China. They're going to put more pressure on those existing markets with their fellow companies. And I think that's going to put more cost pressure and pricing pressure in the area.
So we feel like we're ready for that and facing up to that. We believe we'll win through our new products. That's where we're going to focus. Our eBrake, which I said is an $800 million market. We work on that with companies in Europe, in North America. We do not actively sell that technology in China. We've no desire to do that. Over time we will, but this is not the time to do it. We want to maximize that. Our current sensing and our Drive Pad technology, we believe we've got more than enough there along with our current products and sensing to grow the business. So hopefully that answers your question.
My question was about the short term outlook in transport.
I you know, if I give you the last 10 years, we talked to different investors and analysts.
Transportation has always been a tough business. It's always been a tough business, and we've been pretty transparent in saying, hey, our financial or quality of earnings in the non-transportation markets are either at the company average or better. Transportation is a little below, but we do well. I think it's going to remain tough going forward, but you got to be smart about what you do. You got to stay in certain lanes. And that's why we're pursuing our diversification strategy as well.
With that $800 million market potential, it's clearly significant. You know, you could win a significant share of that, but you'd expect that to replace some existing business that will commoditize out perhaps. Is that the way we should start to think about that layering in over the next five years or? Well, it's going to take two years to get to.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I put it this way. I mean, most people would tell you that the accelerator module in the car is commoditized. I would tell you, I worked in previous roles outside of this company in infotainment and instrument clusters. It's all sexier and everything else and doesn't make as much money because it costs too much and the software's not free. But when you look at it, the brake, we were never in the braking space before. So it's a whole new market for us. I can remember first coming into the company saying we're on accelerator modules. Well, why don't we do the brake? Well, the brake's a dumb piece of metal that hooks up to a cylinder and hydraulic fluids out to the calipers. And the electronic accelerator is all electronic by-wire. Now the brake's going by-wire.
So it's our core area. It's a natural place for us to move in terms of safety and electronic systems. So that's how we see it. Current sensing is new for us. Drive Pad would be new for us, but there's going to be certain products, like you said, that will wean off over time as well. Yes.
Tell us more about who you compete against, like who your primary competitors are in each of your major groups.
Yeah, it's some of our markets tend to be niche, so it's not the competition's not huge, but as an example in where we're just talking automotive, Forvia would be a company that's a competitor to us. Other areas, Morgan Ceramics, TRS Technologies that was bought by a Japanese company. A little bit maybe CeramTec out of Europe. They would be some of the ones I would cite. Yes, Hendi.
Can you share how much automotive sales comes from China? And when it comes to China, do you have some guideposts in terms of like seasonality, let's say like Brent or Moye may react with like newer models? Are there certain times or certain periods in China that we need to be aware of in terms of like seasonality, for example, introduction of new products?
So Andy, I don't know that we've broke out our revenue in auto in China. What we do break out is our overall revenue in China, which is about. I think it was on the slide somewhere in the 20% range. And we have two factories in China. One is transportation, one is on the ceramic side. So, it's that that's probably as much information I think as we've given. So, not helping you much maybe on that.
What was the second part of your question, pleas
in terms of what China market looks like, like in terms of like seasonality of like new product introduction by foreign OEMs. Like how quickly foreign OEMs can react in terms of the opportunity windows.
Yeah. The seasonality portion, you know, first quarter tends to be on the softer side and then it picks up throughout the year. That's tied to the Chinese New Year and some other things that are happening there. In terms of, introduction of new products, it's, it's, let me put it this way. The Chinese companies are, OEMs are way faster. They're just way faster than Western OEMs in terms of, products. We have them as customers as well. We have select few.
There are certain ones we want to work with and certain ones we don't want to work with because they're more inclined to vertically integrate and just use your technology over time. But if you just look at, I don't know, take Honda as an example in terms of EVs, they're getting killed in the China market and they're slow to react. It's just one example. But we've got a lineup of products and launches that we have. We don't make that available to everybody for obvious reasons, but we feel like we've got a good handle on the market and where it's going and where our new products are launching. So hopefu lly that gives you some sense of how we look at it. Yes.
I have a question on the transport side. Who are you most exposed to?
What are your top three to five OEMs that you have products from? What's your product per vehicle roughly?
We haven't given the product per vehicle, but I can give you the first part of the question. Toyota would be large for us on the light vehicle side. Cummins is large for us on the commercial vehicle side. I would put up there, Honda as well, but also, Tier 1s Autoliv, some of those as well. GM, they're some big customers of ours. We've added one or two new customers in the automotive space in the last year as well. Yes.
So on your market profile slide, kind of trend from 2012 to looking forward, your R&D dropped from almost 7%- 4.5% and you wanted to go back up to 5%-6%.
So, kind of, why? What happened to kind of reducing R&D spend right now?
It's about 5.5% right now. Is that what you said? I think the slide says 4.5%. I think it was giving a range. Just, yeah, I'm sure it was giving a range. We're pretty disciplined about where we do the R&D and how we do it. We'll spend for the right projects, and engineers are great. They want to do everything. Okay. You got a strategy, you got to hold it, and saying no is sometimes more important. But we stay. We, I would say, we've always been in the range of somewhere between, I would say, high fours to 7%. That's the range we typically go within. And, there's times in there you get engineering efficiencies as an example.
across the ceramic side of the business, you can be developing something and it actually will play in two end markets versus one, right? So you get some efficiencies out of that as well. And on the transportation side, we've become a lot more focused on which sensors and actuators and things that we're going to do. So that's probably the best way of describing it. Yes.
On the defense side, with SyQwest rolled in, what is your pro forma exposure to A&D? And then what's the contract type? Like what's the mix of commercial terms versus kind of development cost plus type contracts?
The profile, we haven't reported the, you know, the fourth quarter, so I'm just wanting to be careful how I answer that. But we stay in the 10%-20% range and that was before SyQwest.
So we've moved up in the range there. So, that side of it is moving in a solid direction and we like where it's going. The cost plus would be the smaller part, in terms of the contracts. Even with SyQwest? Yes. Yes.
How surprised are you by what you've seen in the industrial market? I mean, the inventory overhang clearly, it's, and you're not alone. Everyone has talked about it taking longer than they expected. Or are there some subsectors of that industrial market where the demand has just been softer than you expected? The end market demand.
Yeah, we should have been smarter in 2022 when we saw that revenue go up that much. And, that was a challenge coming out of that.
I would say the distribution side, which is only about 10% of our revenue, because you're selling to the distributors and then the distributors are selling to OEMs, but also contract manufacturers, and we had a good handle on the inventory at the distributors because we're very close. But on the contract manufacturing side of it, we did not have that visibility that we needed, and then the other side of that is, people overbought. We had customers back in 2022 that were just going crazy saying, you got to get this product, you got to, you know, double up and do what you need to do, and I was with some of them a few months ago and they're still sitting on inventory and they're burning down.
And now I think everybody's gotten to the point of inventories are normalizing, but they're actually behaving such that they don't want to get burned again. So even at the end of a month, they'll say, oh, hold off that shipment until another week or next quarter, just because they're being extra cautious. It's human, right? It'll adjust over time. But I do believe you're going to see an improvement as we go forward. It's been a longer down cycle than I've ever seen before. I can take one more and then we'll wrap up. Okay.
Thanks for joining and coming today to the first day of the in-person portion of the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Jim Ricchiuti, Senior Analyst with the Equity Research Department covering industrial technologies companies.
We're going to kick off today's events with a presentation from CTS Corp, CTS, as many of you know, manufacturing sensors, actuators, other electronic components, you know, a wide variety of end markets, A&D, industrial, medical, transportation. We're pleased to have with us today Kieran O'Sullivan, President and CEO. Kieran, why don't you go ahead?
All right. Thanks, Jim. Good morning. For those of you that know the company well, I just want to reemphasize, we're focused on products that sense, connect, and move. Our biggest strategy is focused on diversification, growing our medical, aerospace, and defense and industrial markets at a faster pace than our transportation market. But in transportation, we're focused heavily on electrification. Most of our products are agnostic to the drivetrain, but there are certain areas that we're navigating for the future, which will be important for us as a company as well.
We also have a strong balance sheet and we're looking to leverage that balance sheet for organic growth, but also for acquisitions. You would have seen that we did an acquisition back in August of last year of SyQwest, which takes us into the defense area at a greater scale, and I'll come back to that. It's an integration into sensors and transducers. You're all familiar with the Safe Harbor statement here, so you can see that. Again, I want to emphasize our company is focused on products that sense, connect, and move. That's where we deploy our capital. That's where we deploy our talent. You can see our revenue here across the different end markets and regions of the world. Sorry, I should say regions of the world, not end markets. Our revenue, EBITDA margin, profile.
Our EBITDA margin over the last 10 years has gone from about 10% closer to 22%, been as high as 23%. And the one thing I want to emphasize here is in the last quarter where we reported earnings in the third quarter, our diversified businesses had grown to 52% of overall company revenue. That's from a few years ago when transportation was more like 65% and diversified markets were 35%. The reason we're also focused on this diversification is to grow the quality of earnings in our company. And you'll see on later slides that we've also expanded that range and increased that range of the gross margin expectation for our company as well. If you look here in terms of we're focused on driving growth at 10%, 5% through acquisitions and 5% through organic growth.
Obviously, that's been a mixed bucket in the last year. We'll give you a further update on that in the earnings call here in early February, but a few things to highlight from a single-digit growth perspective in organic areas. We're heavily focused on engineered products, highly engineered products in terms of the markets we play and in some cases vertically integrated in those markets as well. We're focused on automation, healthcare in particular for minimally invasive applications that can be medical ultrasound. It can be therapeutics where we're seeing steady growth as well, and also intravascular applications, which are really, really positive in terms of the impact they can have with the types of technology we have in this area as well, and electrification.
As I said, our product portfolio is largely agnostic to the powertrain, but we do have some things where we're focused on electrification as we go forward in a very controlled manner. We've got a very clear focus on how to leverage our balance sheet in terms of M&A, a clear strategy for diversification. We love our transportation business. We're going to keep it strong, but we're going to grow our medical, aerospace, and defense and industrial markets at a faster pace, and you've seen that from the actions we've taken as well. We have a good balance sheet. We're a little bit conservative on the balance sheet, but we have the capability to do larger acquisitions as well. From a footprint and execution perspective, very solid in terms of where our footprint is at.
We've been doing a lot of work on our footprint over the past 10 years. We're really set up regionally to make sure we're set up to serve our customers. Sometimes we're doing optimizations on our footprint that we don't even talk about in terms of the materiality of it, but it's something that we always keep a focus on, especially as we, as we grow inorganically. Strong organizational capabilities, execution capabilities, and we normally have initiatives that we're driving, like we had our Focus 2025 internal program for driving growth and efficiency. We'll be kicking off a new program as we enter this year with our leadership team as well. Just back to the secular trends on growth, where do we focus? Automation, Industry 4.0, passenger safety, driving zero accidents and help getting our products to do that. Autonomous underwater vehicles or unmanned vehicles.
As I mentioned just a few minutes ago, minimally invasive applications and improved diagnostics. Medical ultrasound, we've got a lot of blue chip customers in this space. Therapeutics is an area that's been growing steadily for us as well. It's a new area for us in the last several years. The patient experience that can be temperature controlled, or it can be dental equipment and applications as well. On the far right for sustainability, you can see here electrification, reducing harmful emissions, reducing emissions on ICE engines with our actuators and diesel applications as well. Energy efficiency and fluid metering where our products are replacing mechanical solutions today, with our ultrasonic solutions as well. This appears to be a very busy chart, but I just take you to the what's your left-hand side here as you look at it.
You've got advanced ceramics and magnetics. You can see the multitude of things that we do here for a small company. We're pretty well diversified and the applications. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I do want to highlight what the core competence is here. So on advanced ceramics, what we're known for is the quality of our material formulations. So we have bulk processing foundry, we have a tape casting foundry, we have a single crystal foundry, and those also combine and complement each other into other material formulations. So when our customers come to us, it's one of the things that surprised me in the early days of being with the business: our customers find us. If we don't find them, they find us because of the applications that we have and that material capability.
There are not a lot of companies in the world who have all these three technologies and what you can do with them as well. On the foundry side, we have foundries in different parts of the world here in North America, but also two in Europe, to make sure we've got nice redundancy for our customers to support them going forward. And then on the magnetic side is we have a deep expertise in packaging position sensing in safety-critical and harsh environments. And for the most part, that's in transportation markets. So that's where we play in this area. But we may have 10 different products, but they all use that as the core of the technology.
So when you think of us, some people look at us and say, "You're very complicated," and in parts we may appear to be, but the core is advanced materials and what we do with magnetics as well. Hopefully that's helpful in terms of giving you some insight into us as a company. I started out with diversification. If you go back, we were 65% transportation in that small circular area there. We've been organically and through acquisitions moving the business much more into diversified markets in terms of aerospace and defense, industrial and medical markets as well. As I mentioned at the start today, that mix, this is a year to date, but if I look at where we ended the third quarter, it was about 52% diversified markets, 48% transportation.
As we move into 2025 and beyond, we would expect and have ambitions to move that towards 60% and beyond that to help improve the quality of the earnings and the setup we want to have for our company over a longer period of time. I had a one-on-one meeting this morning and people were asking me about defense because our last acquisition was in this area. We love this market. We think it's going to be a great market for the next five, 10 years. I don't know if there's going to be peace after that or not, but I would tell you, we would also put a cap on what we do in those markets as well, right? It's just in terms of we want to get the right mix of end markets for the company.
When you go into each of the markets here, let's talk about some of the more difficult things. The industrial market for us has been a headwind for the last two years, as it has been for other companies in the space. You can see here we're in HVAC, we're in micro-positioning in terms of semiconductors, we're in industrial printing for ceramic tiles and packaging, and metering for scarce resources. Our revenue has been down because of the buildup of inventory with our customers and with distributors. What I will tell you is we got it wrong in 2024. We said we expected better growth as inventories burned down. It took longer than we expected, but in the third quarter, we reported a 2% sequential increase in revenue.
So we'll give a further update on that as we get into our earnings call in the February time period here as we go forward. This is a market we're committed to. We believe that the rebound will happen here as the inventory is correct. And as I said, we saw some signs of that in the third quarter of 2024. If you look at the medical market, this is a market where we have a lot of blue chip customers like we have in the other markets as well. In medical ultrasound, Siemens, Samsung, Philips, GE, Mindray in China. I was just with Mindray back in November in China. And just to see the way they're driving the market, the way they're expanding their business as there are other customers here as well. Intravascular ultrasound, really minimally invasive applications as well.
We've got some new technology that we're doing here with some customers where you can go down to the artery and in terms of real time, just see the diameter of the artery, where the blockage is, and then you can actually go in and be real accurate about where you're going to put that stent or do different types of surgery, as you go forward too. We also do wireless pacemaking, cochlear implants for hearing, and then drug delivery with some of our customers where we've got several innovation projects running here in terms of how we deliver the drugs to the area of treatment for a tumor or another application as well. So we love this space. It's been very solid. We said in the third quarter that was going to be some inventory correction in the fourth quarter.
We'll give you an update on that as well on the next earnings call. Aerospace and Defense, up 25% year over year. Some of that's helped by the acquisition, obviously, but this has been a solid growth for us. We've talked all year about the solid backlog we have in this business. And we feel very good about the mid- to long-term prospects and near-term prospects too. You can see here we're in underwater sonar, towed arrays, forward-looking arrays. We're in hydrophones, we're in countermeasures, vibration monitoring, and space temperature applications as well. I'll come back to this a little bit more later in the presentation as I touch on the SyQwest acquisition that we did last August.
But we're really pleased because back to our materials formulations, with our bulk processing, with our tape casting, and with our single crystal, we have technologies that not only support this industry today, but we'll be supporting new innovations for the next 10 plus years. We've got really strong technology in this area and are happy with how we're progressing here too. So industrial was a little bit of a tough story. Medical good, aerospace and defense very solid. Transportation has been a tough run through 2024 as well. We talked about it in our last earnings call. While it's a big market, we're down year over year. We're down for two reasons.
One is in the China market where some of our bigger customers in transportation, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, they've been losing share in the China market to the local Chinese OEMs, as has everybody else. So that's been a tough battle for us. And then on the second part of that is we have some second source competition in the commercial vehicle market. Still in the commercial vehicle market, we've just developed the next generation product, which will run for the next seven, eight years as well. So we feel confident in terms of maintaining solid share as we go forward here in the business too. What I would do want to point out here is I've talked mostly about the diversification, but I also said electrification will be important for us as we go forward. If you look to the right-hand side here, we have a product called eBrake.
This is a market that will be over $800 million as it matures going forward. First revenues won't come until 2027 time period. We've had our first win, as we've talked about in past earnings calls. We've had a second progress here with a pre-development with a European premium OEM. So we feel very good about this space. We have our drive pad technology, which customers are evaluating. This is, if you think about sitting in your car with an accelerator pedal, just think about that pedal being flush into the floor. As vehicles over time become more autonomous, it's going to be important from a space perspective. And also by doing that, the firewall becomes less of a safety issue for the OEMs. So these are just some of the things here we're doing.
Current sensing in many applications, not just in transportation, but also in industrial applications. That was aided by the MagLab acquisition that we did over two years ago out of Switzerland. Very small acquisition, but moving well in terms of what we're trying to do here as well. Again, I want to emphasize that most of our products are agnostic to the powertrain. That's how we've been. The exception would be the actuators on diesel for the commercial vehicle market, as you know. Those diesel engines are not going to disappear in the next five years. I wanted to give you a perspective on that end market too. From an execution perspective, you know, our focus is partnering with our customers to make sure they have the technologies they need, and we're solving the relevant problems that they have.
We don't, we're not out there doing blue skies. We're staying very close to our customers. In many cases, we have our applications engineering resident with our customers. So when they have a problem, we're talking to them before it's going into the purchasing department and other areas to make sure we're coming up with the best solutions. You can see here we've made some strong gains in our gross margin over the years. This shows the last few years adjusted gross margin improvement from a cash flow perspective. Operating cash flow 74% of adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow 106%. So always solid on our cash management, and returned about $230 million to shareholders, and then on the right-hand side, you can see here solid focus on investments in the business. We're very disciplined in terms of our R&D.
are lots of things that our engineers would love to do, but there are certain things that we want to accomplish as a company. So that means we say this is where we're targeting. We're not playing around over here. And this falls in line with our strategy to diversify and electrify in our end markets as well. And we've completed nine acquisitions since 2013. Mostly small acquisitions. We started out first with sub $20 million. The last acquisitions have been over $20 million. We'd like to do acquisitions more in the $50 million range in revenue. And we've looked at larger acquisitions to help transform the company. But on those larger ones, they got to be pretty much spot on for us to make that move because if we're buying something that's $100-$150 million in revenue, that means you're betting the company on it.
So it's really important that we get that right. Capital allocation framework here. You can see operating cash flows in the 15%-18%. Capital structure leverage 1-2.5. I think we're somewhere just under 1 at the moment or around 1. We would leverage up to 2.5 times EBITDA for the right acquisition. We've in the last few years, we've never gone over 1.5-1.6, I think mostly. CapEx pretty consistent at about 4%. Our material side of the business, the foundries tend to be more capital intensive. We like to keep on top of that, making sure we're doing the right upgrades and investments on the appropriate timeframe versus leaving it all back-end loaded. Acquisitions obviously is a big focus for us. That's 60%-80% of the free cash flow. And then obviously dividend and repurchases.
Repurchases, we have an open buyback. I think it's somewhere in the region of $50-$60 million at this point in time. I might be slightly off on that number, but that's where we stand on that. Acquisitions, what's important for us is the return on invested capital compared to our cost of capital. We like to achieve that usually within a three-year time period. Sometimes if it's a technology, as an example, the single crystal technology we acquired in 2016, it's a little bit longer than that, but that's a technology that's going to be around for 30 plus years. Synergistic opportunities in terms of revenue growth and in terms of cost management. Accretive to earnings. We like it to be accretive to earnings in the first 12 months, and again, obviously we like to keep a solid balance sheet in terms of how we move forward.
Some people would say we're a little too conservative on the balance sheet. We will stretch ourselves in the right way, in a disciplined way for the right acquisitions. Back to the SyQwest acquisition. Just a little background on this, and it gives you a sense of how we operate as well. We knew this business for about 10, 12 years. We were a, we have been a supplier to this company, in the defense area. We've seen them evolve and grow over the years. Bob Tarini and the team, we, we knew well. So why, why did we move into this area? First of all, we like defense. We're a component supplier into sonar, into hydrophones, into other unmanned applications. This takes us up, integrates us from a component supplier into the full sensor, transducer, and subsystems.
So it accelerates our diversification as part of our overall strategy, moves us up the value chain, and expands our technical capability as a company. You know, this is, if you look at the acquisitions we've done, they've always been within our core. This is just like a step from outside of the core, moving us into an area with greater value creation. And we would look at this and say it's a solid growth platform. There's a lot of things to be executed on in terms of the book to business that's in the business today. And there's some other things we'd like to do to expand going forward in terms of new products. But probably some of those things we won't do for 12 to 18 months because there's a lot of heavy work to be done on the existing backlog and execution as well.
We really like the space. I would also tell you that we would do other acquisitions in the defense space. Yes, but we will actually come to a point where we will cap it off in terms of what percentage of our business will be defense in the longer run. This also helps us not only with the U.S. Navy, but also with Europe, Australia, Japan, gives us inroads into those markets where we didn't have as much access in the past as well. From a revenue perspective, I just want to. I'm not going to talk too much about this because we've got earnings on the 3rd or 4th of February. You can see here our steady growth. 2022, just like for some other companies, it was a lot of overbuying going on, especially in the industrial markets.
So you can see here where we corrected and getting back to that run rate that we have here and the EPS on the other side here. We'll give you a better update on that. But what I would do want to say about the end markets is very solid in medical. We did say short term in medical in the fourth quarter there'd be some correction, but we're not concerned about it in terms of the mid to near term. The industrial side of it making small recovery. I would say again, I'm going to emphasize we got it wrong in 2024. We expected a stronger recovery. We saw a 2% sequential improvement in the third quarter. We believe inventory levels are back to more normalized levels.
And from everything we see in our markets and what we're hearing and read in the public area, you know, inventories are correcting back to a level where demand will improve going forward. The transportation market has been challenging because of the Chinese situation. We would be very focused on that in terms of how we're offsetting those things that are happening in China in other markets to give us strength as we go forward. Again, on the aerospace and defense, solid. So, we feel like that diversification is helping us as a company in terms of where we want to grow, but also in terms of the quality of our earnings as a company as well. Then, finally, just the financial framework for the company.
You can see here where our revenue was in 2012 and the different parts of the P&L here. The thing I'd like to point out is the gross margin that was in the 35%-37% range. We've improved that to 36%-38%. Obviously, as a company, we want to execute on that. I'd like to see us over time get into that 40% so we differentiate ourselves as a company. That's not going to happen in the next year. But as we diversify the company more and more, we get to the top end of this range and can further advance our quality of earnings as we go forward as well. You can see our CapEx here, R&D expense.
R&D is going to. If you look at us over a period of time of 10 years, we haven't strayed off too much in terms of where that R&D percentage goes. We keep very focused on that, and the final thing I'd say here, as we scale the business, we'll get some efficiencies on the SG&A part of the business as you'd expect as well, so I think that's my final slide. Yep. I've moved through that pretty quickly, so I'm happy, I'm happy to take any questions that anybody would like to ask. Yes.
On the transportation side, you talk about China being a challenge. It doesn't feel like that gets easier, so maybe just give us a bit more on what your strategy is there because those suppliers are ramping up, the competition's ramping up. It's not going to get easier for you.
How do you compete with China or do you decide, you know what, that's not a key market, we're going to focus elsewhere?
First of all, I don't think you can ignore China. I am, I've gone through the extremes of, over the last 10 years, you don't have enough business in China to now you have too much business in China. So there's a balance to be had here. We've got our automotive business in China. We've got our ceramics area in China, which is doing really well as well, so to answer your question, first of all, actually to your point, I think it's going to get tougher, for two reasons. Number one, you've got the Chinese competition and it is not going away. We've been looking at this for more than two years saying it's coming, it's coming, it's here.
It's not just in China, it's now in Europe, it's in South America. Obviously, we're insulated a little bit in North America. But the second pressure point that's going to come here is not from the Chinese. It's from all the peer companies that are losing in China. They're going to put more pressure on those existing markets with their fellow companies. And I think that's going to put more cost pressure and pricing pressure in the area. So we feel like we're ready for that and facing up to that. We believe we'll win through our new products. That's where we're going to focus. Our eBrake, which I said is an $800 million market. We work on that with companies in Europe, in North America. We do not actively sell that technology in China. We've no desire to do that.
Over time, we will, but this is not the time to do it. We want to maximize that. Our current sensing and our Drive Pad technology, we believe we've got more than enough there along with our current products and sensing to grow the bu siness. So, hopefully that answers your question.
My question was that I also around the short term output.
If I give you the last 10 years, we talked to different investors and analysts. Transportation has always been a tough business. It's always been a tough business. We've been pretty transparent in saying, hey, our financial or quality of earnings in the non-transportation markets are either at the company average or better. Transportation is a little below. But we do well. I think it's going to remain tough going forward.
but you got to be smart about what you do. You got to stay in certain lanes. And that's why we're pursuing our diversification strategy as well.
With that $800 million market potential, it's clearly significant. You know, you couldn't win a significant share of that, but you'd expect that to replace some existing business that will monetize out perhaps. Is that the way we should start to think about that? They're in over the next five years or?
Well, it's going to take two years to get to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I put it this way. I mean, most people would tell you that the accelerator module in the car is commoditized. I would tell you, I worked in previous roles outside of this company in infotainment and instrument clusters, that's all sexier and everything else and doesn't make as much money.
Because it costs too much and the software's not free. But when you look at it, the brake, we were never in the braking space before. So it's a whole new market for us. I can remember first coming into the company saying we're on accelerator modules. Well, why don't we do the brake? Well, the brake's a dumb piece of metal that hooks up to a cylinder and hydraulic fluids out to the calipers. And the electronic accelerator is all electronic by-wire. Now the brake's going by-wire. So it's our core area. It's a natural place for us to move in terms of safety and electronic systems. So that's how we see it. Current sensing is new for us. Drive Pad would be new for us.
But there's going to be certain products, like you said, that will wean off over time as well. Yes.
Tell us more about who you compete against, like who your primary competitors are in each of your major groups.
Yeah, it's, some of our markets tend to be niche. So it's not, the competition's not huge. But as an example in, where we're just talking automotive, Forvia would be a, a company that's a competitor to us. Other areas, Morgan Ceramics, TRS Technologies that was bought by a Japanese company. A little bit maybe CeramTec out of Europe. They would be some of the, the ones I would cite. Yes, Hendi .
Can you share how much automotive sales comes from China? And when it comes to China, do you have some guideposts in terms of like seasonality, let's say like brand forwarding only, or may react with like newer models?
Are there certain times or certain periods in China that we need to be aware of in terms of like seasonality, forwarding, or introduction of new products?
So, Handy, I don't know that we've broke out our revenue in auto in China. What we do break out is our overall revenue in China, which is about, I think it was on the slide somewhere in the 20% range. We have two factories in China. One is transportation, one is on the ceramic side. So, it's that that's probably as much information I think as we've given. Not helping you much maybe on that. What was the second part of your question, please?
In terms of what China market looks like, like in terms of like seasonality of like new product introduction by forwarding OEMs.
Like how quickly forward-looking OEMs can react in terms of the opportunity windows. Yeah.
The seasonality portion, you know, first quarter tends to be on the softer side and then it picks up throughout the year. That's tied to the Chinese New Year and some other things that are happening there. In terms of introduction of new products, it's let me put it this way. The Chinese companies are, OEMs are way faster. They're just way faster than Western OEMs in terms of products. We have them as customers as well. We have select few. There's certain ones we want to work with and certain ones we don't want to work with because they're more inclined to vertically integrate and just use your technology over time.
But if you just look at, I don't know, take Honda as an example in terms of EVs, they're getting killed in the China market and they're slow to react. It's just one example. But we've got a lineup of products and launches that we have. We don't make that available to everybody for obvious reasons, but we feel like we've got a good handle on the market and where it's going and where our new products are launching. So hopefully that gives you some sense of how we look at it. Yes.
Question on the transport side. Who are you most exposed to? What are your top three to five OEMs that you have products from? What's your product per vehicle roughly?
We haven't given the product per vehicle, but I can give you the first part of the question.
Toyota would be large for us on the light vehicle side. Cummins is large for us on the commercial vehicle side. I would put up there Honda as well, but also Tier 1s Autoliv, some of those as well. GM, they're some big customers of ours. We've added one or two new customers in the automotive space in the last year as well. Yes.
So on your margin profile slide, kind of trend from 2012 to looking forward, your R&D dropped from almost 7%- 4.5% and you wanted to go back up to 5%-6%. So kind of why, what happened to kind of reducing R&D spend in the right now?
It's about 5.5% right now. Is that what you said? I think the slide says 4.5%. I think it was giving a range. Just, yeah, I'm sure it was giving a range.
We're pretty disciplined about where we do the R&D and how we do it. We'll spend for the right projects and we'll, engineers are great. They want to do everything. Okay. You got a strategy, you got to hold it and saying no is sometimes more important. But we stay, I would say we've always been in the range of somewhere between, I would say high fours to 7%. That's the range we typically go within. And, there are times in there you get engineering efficiencies as an example. Across the ceramic side of the business, you can be developing something and it actually will play in two end markets versus one, right? So you get some efficiencies out of that as well.
And on the transportation side, we've become a lot more focused on which sensors and actuators and things that we're going to do. So that's probably the best way of describing it. Yes.
On the defense side, with SyQwest rolled in, what is your pro forma exposure to A&D? And then what's the contract type? Like what's the mix of commercial terms versus kind of development cost plus type contracts?
The profile, we haven't reported the fourth quarter, you know, so I'm just wanting to be careful how I answer that. But we stay in the 10%-20% range and that was before SyQwest. So we've moved up in the range there. So that side of it is moving in a solid direction and we like where it's going.
The cost plus would be the smaller part, in terms of the contracts. Even with SyQwest? Yes. Yes.
How surprised are you by what you've seen in the industrial market? I mean, the inventory overhang clearly, and you're not alone. Everyone has talked about it taking longer than they expected. Or are there some subsectors of that industrial market where the demand has just been softer than you expected? The end market demand.
Yeah, we should have been smarter in 2022 when we saw that revenue go up that much. And that was a challenge coming out of that. I would say the distribution side, which is only about 10% of our revenue, because you're selling to the distributors and then the distributors are selling to OEMs, but also contract manufacturers.
And we had a good handle on the inventory at the distributors because we're very close. But on the contract manufacturing side of it, we did not have that visibility that we needed. And then the other side of that is, people overbought. We had customers back in 2022 that were just going crazy saying, you got to get this product, you got to, you know, double up and do what you need to do. And I was with some of them a few months ago and they're still sitting on inventory and they're burning down. And now I think everybody's gotten to the point of inventories are normalizing, but they're actually behaving such that they don't want to get burned again.
So even at the end of a month, they'll say, oh, hold off that shipment until another week or next quarter, just because they're being extra cautious. It's human, right? It'll adjust over time. But I do believe you're going to see an improvement as we go forward. It's been a longer down cycle than I've ever seen before. I can take one more and then we'll wrap up or if there's. All right. I guess we're wrapping up. Thanks everybody. Appreciate your time. Thank you.