Oh, God. He's already.
More photos. He's like a social media guru here.
You're told.
He's saying he was told, but you know he really loves it.
Oh, wow. All right. I guess we're getting right into it. There's limited transition time here. Very pleased to welcome Curtiss-Wright. We have the CFO and CEO of Curtiss-Wright here with us today, Lynn Bamford and Chris Farkas. I've covered the company for over 20 years, seen a few evolutions. This one is the best. I said that about the second one and the first one. This one is definitely the best. As you'll see from Ariel here about the story, it's pretty diversified. At the same time, it has a lot of cross- currents of technology that flow through it that make sense, even if it looks complex on the surface. I was hoping maybe, Lynn, you could start. You've had an investor day about a year ago.
You issued a few-year targets that were continuing to drive along that pivot to growth strategy as you took charge of the company right around COVID times. Curious how things are trending relative to what you laid out at the investor day just a year ago.
Thank you for that. I'll try and make sure I stay on mic so you all can hear me. Thank you for inviting us here. Thank you to the [Wolfe Conscious Degree] Conference. We are very pleased to be here. I am obligated to say there may be forward-looking statements that contain risks and uncertainties. These are outlined on our SEC filings on our website. With that put aside, I do not know, I am sure Curtiss-Wright is a fairly new name to many of you in the room. Just to give the one-minute flyby, it was a great introduction from Miles. On the surface, we can seem like we are a complex company. There are really some strong stitchings that weave together the products and the services that we bring to our end markets.
Part of the power of the company is the fact that we do leverage technologies and services across different markets and hence spend an engineering dollar once and bring products to market in different things. That has been part of the margin accretion we have achieved over the years. I'm proud that we celebrated our 95th year anniversary of being continuously traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's roots have many firsts in industry, whether that's the Wright brothers, which is Glenn Curtiss, which is the origins of our name, to all things naval nuclear, commercial nuclear, COTS electronics that we really have been in the industries we are in. That is just to name a few since the inception of those industries. We really focus on producing highly engineered, safety-critical, mission-critical types of applications.
We design, we manufacture, we test, and deliver to our customers. We are a full turnkey company. We tend to be a tier two or tier three supplier in most of our end industries, really developing products that have completely unique IP and a unique value proposition. That is part of how we go to market and manage ourselves. Proud to be the CEO of the company. It has been a great couple of years. There is a lot in our windshield. Hopefully, we can touch on some of those things today. We will talk a little bit about the top- line growth that we rolled out in our investor day, and then ask Chris to speak to the rest of the financial metrics. We have projected a greater than 5% organic growth CAGR over the three-year window.
We are well on track to achieve and beat that target. If I walk through a couple of our major end markets, we projected our defense business would grow at mid to high single digits across the different pieces: aerospace, ground, and naval. We achieved double- digit last year. We are well on track to grow that, as you can see in our guidance this year. I feel confident we are on track to achieve those targets. There is a lot of reasons behind that. We are very well aligned with the defense priorities that exist and have a growing direct foreign military sales. If I move on to the other part of our A&D business, which makes up about two-thirds of who Curtiss-Wright is, just to put it in perspective, our commercial aerospace business is largely OEM-based and has had great growth.
We see great things coming as Boeing and Airbus are just really beginning to hit some of the ramps that they're targeting. That will be great for us. That group is well on track to exceed its high single-digit growth rate, which we projected in our investor day. A topic that's top of mind for everyone is our commercial nuclear content, which we're kind of a ubiquitous player across many aspects of the nuclear industry. We've targeted a low double-digit growth rate. We achieved that last year. I feel good that we will achieve that over the three-year horizon. I'm sure you're probably going to ask more about that later. Without going into it, our revenue growth is the pivot to growth strategy. It is ingrained in the company at this point.
There are so many great things that hopefully we'll get to talk about in the next half an hour that are just going to take the growth we have achieved and keep accelerating it. Maybe that, Chris.
Sure. Lynn gave a great overview of what's happening within our end markets right now. The other KPIs that we set for ourselves at investor day were that operating income growth would be faster than sales growth, which implies continued operating margin expansion, and that we would maintain top- quartile operating margin performance. What I'll say about Curtiss-Wright is operational excellence and commercial excellence is deeply ingrained within our culture. Over the last 12 years, we've expanded our operating margin 900 basis points. Eleven out of 12 years, the one year we didn't was during the pandemic. We fell back 10 basis points. We lost $300 million of sales overnight. That is remarkable consistency. That is something that we're delivering. We're doing that while we're increasing our R&D investment spending at a faster rate than our sales growth.
We're also covering the initial dilution from acquisitions that we're bringing onto our portfolio. Beyond that, we said that we would grow EPS at a greater than 10% CAGR. Obviously, a lot of that strong sales growth Lynn was mentioning and the profitable earnings and the margin expansion that we're talking about contributes to that. It's also about balance sheet and tax efficiency contributing to that. Capital allocation, being able to take that strong free cash flow that we're generating on an annual basis and putting it into the right acquisitions or in returning capital to shareholders. This last year, we bought back $250 million in shares and bought $240 million in high-quality commercial nuclear acquisitions and stayed off of our revolver. We're really well-p ositioned from that standpoint.
Then the last target we set for ourselves, which we're really doing well on, is free cash flow conversion greater than 105%. Similar to operating margin, we have a long track record of being greater than 100% free cash flow conversion. We said we'd get $1.3 billion of free cash flow. With this year, we're on track to get about $1 billion. That is two years through. We are really well- positioned to meet or exceed all of our targets. We are building momentum as an organization.
Awesome. We can focus, maybe, on each of the subsegments that you laid out, Lynn. On the defense side, you have a $150 billion reconciliation bill that is piling on top of an $850 billion base budget bill. We do not have a ton of visibility into the base budget. We can see what is in the reconciliation budget.
Are there any puts and takes in there that are particularly noteworthy for Curtiss-Wright in this portfolio?
I think from what we know, the reconciliation and the skinny budget tend to have pretty similar priorities. Just walking through a couple that are the first mentioned in that is shipbuilding in the industrial base is always kind of the first on the list when they give that. Obviously, our naval footprint is the largest end market segment for Curtiss-Wright. That's great for us. One thing that we've highlighted is we mentioned it in investor day a year ago that we had received $15 million of industrial base funding. That's up to $21 million now. There's a lot more coming. It's not that the dollars are necessarily the significant fact. I think it's the fact that our Navy customer knows what business is coming to Curtiss-Wright and wants to help support us to make sure we're ready to ramp for it.
That's the reason I mentioned it. We are across all the major platforms, and we're very well positioned there. If I talk about the next thing that is kind of hot off the news, the Golden Dome initiative is something that I think is going to be very good for Curtiss-Wright. We have things. We've announced our partnership with Leidos for Enduring Shield. That is considered most likely will be a part of the Golden Dome. Not all the pieces have been laid out. When I look across all of our C5ISR capabilities that bring smart weaponry to the battlefield, we will have great content across many platforms. Some are public, and I know, but we haven't talked about them yet. I'll leave it at that. Golden Dome is going to be great for Curtiss-Wright.
Then there's the core business we have, making the Air Force more operationally ready and upgrades, nuclear deterrence. These are all places where we have great content. We were excited to see Boeing pick for the F-47. That's going to be a good revenue generator for Curtiss-Wright. That's over the horizon a little bit. As a company, we manage ourselves to make sure we're doing the things for the here and now, things for the next three to five years, and planting a lot of seeds that future generations of Curtiss-Wright will benefit from. That's just a couple of things. To kind of flip and not talk about programs, some of the things that are coming through in the budgets and through executive orders are a focus on how the government, the DOD, does contracting.
There is a real push to move to more commerciality, which is excellent for Curtiss-Wright. The types of ways they want to go to market, whether it's firm fixed price contracts or commercial-based pricing, very much aligns with how we manage the company. Those trends are great for Curtiss-Wright. There is a move towards promoting more OTA acquisition, which we're well aligned for. That is good for us. There is a push in the area of additive manufacturing, which is an area we've been building capability in over the past five years. A lot of it is classified. We can't talk about so many of the things we do. All those are areas that are shifting how they're looking to contract work that will be very good for Curtiss-Wright.
I guess that's mostly applicable to your defense electronics area. Does it also roll into your naval business or your aircraft business?
Specifically, the additive manufacturing. That's much more on the naval side.
Sorry. I meant more specifically the change in acquisition approaches.
Oh, it will be both. There are things we have, whether it is our arresting systems business that are in the naval and power segment that will have commercial pricing and maybe less the content on like a Virginia or a Columbia class. Again, even there, we take almost 99% plus of our business as firm fixed price, which is what they are looking to push away from, the big cost-plus programs that can have these large overruns. We will step up to the plate and take firm fixed price contracting. That will definitely support the naval business. The commerciality, we already go to market from a commercial standpoint in our defense electronics team. I think there are incremental places we can even do that.
Maybe just the defense electronics, because I often have trouble explaining it. Somebody lets you do it. Defense electronics can be a big thing. It can be a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe just describe where your niche sits within defense electronics and how do you go to market your customers.
The roots of our defense electronics was the COTS or commercial off-the-shelf industry was really born, for lack of a better word, back in the mid-1990s with a directive from Admiral Perry to force the primes to try and leverage commercial technologies and not have every radar system, every mission processor be a custom design that took years to bring to market. The company got into the industry. We have developed, I think, a world-leading position in the space. We really do lots of things, all things computing.
We're proud of the broadest portfolio of products that come in various sizes, from things that are the size of an iPhone to fuller-sized computing cards that bring all the different technologies you would want from processing, recording, ingesting radar data, all the different parts that you need that are tested and delivered in a ruggedized form factor that can be made into the products that are in jets, on tanks, on a naval battleship, and solve just so many problems. Some of the power in what we do is we're very, I think, skilled in architecting products that we can architect a product and will very frequently sell to tens and tens of applications.
If you take that engineering dollar, similar to what we talked about at the beginning, about spending an engineering dollar and leveraging where all you can gain market share from that one engineering dollar, that's true in the defense electronics by having a product that can go both in a battle tank as well as a jet.
The margins on that piece of business, because of the commercial approach to the customer, are the highest across the company, at least at this point in time. How high can those go? I think they were 27.5% in the first quarter. What is the theoretical limit? Or do you think about it just on the perspective of incremental margins? And what would those be?
I'd ask Chris, maybe, to speak to some of the drivers of the margin. Then maybe I'll talk about where we're taking that team.
Yeah, thanks for that. It was a record first quarter for us. We actually increased our guidance on the full year, and that's a record for us as well. Lynn and I and the rest of the management team take very seriously the commitments that we make when we lay out targets to the street. We approach this year a little bit cautiously, candidly, given the fact that we entered the year with a continuing resolution. There was a lot of defense budget uncertainty going on. We have a full ERP upgrade going on across the entire segment this year. We're in the process of restructuring to build capacity for additional growth. Some of those risks have simply gone away, right? Tariffs being one of them. We've released some conservatism on the full year in the way that we're looking at this.
We've also been seeing that those restructuring programs that we put into place are producing savings at a faster rate. We're getting increased throughput through our tactical communications product line, which is the resulting increase to our ground defense market guide. Operational excellence and commercial excellence, which I had mentioned, is ingrained within our core, is having some pretty strong effects on that business this year. It's not just cost containment, but it's pricing in a very high-margin environment. The first quarter benefited a little bit from mix. There was a little bit of FX. It's never really a perfect story, but certainly strong volume absorption, certainly strong margin expansion from operational excellence. As we're looking across the full year, we're taking a very conservative view still, right? I mean, a full-scale ERP implementation across an entire segment is a big project.
We think that if that project continues to go well and some of these other risks that we are managing go better, then we will be in a good position to provide some upside as we kind of go deeper into the year.
And just to round that out with probably not what you want to hear me say, but we're not going to forecast how high. We're not really saying this is the new bar for the organization. We will be talking about 2026 when we get into 2026. But I say that. But we're proud of the margins. And we've made great margins out of that business for years and years and years. This isn't some, if you're less familiar with this, one-time spike. I mean, the business has a value proposition. We price our products based on the value we bring to our customers. And it has afforded us very, very strong margins for years, as you say. But this is also the area where we spend over half of our IRAD, is spent in the defense electronics team.
It's an area we're very committed to ongoing investments to make sure we can maintain a state-of-the-art, leading portfolio of products. For example, something I'll just bring you, we announced just a couple of months ago our partnership with NVIDIA, which is opening up a whole new avenue of product development areas. We want to make sure we're giving dollars internally to the company to invest in those things so we can just keep projecting this growth forward.
Okay. The competitive landscape within defense electronics, there's been there's really only a couple others who do embedded computing similar to what you do. Are you seeing benefits of other competitors who maybe aren't performing on their contracts in your financials yet? Have you seen them in the past? Do you anticipate seeing them in the future?
It is definitely a dynamic landscape out there. I will not hesitate to say we have market share take in our future. It is not really at all in any meaningful way part of the revenues and the performance we are having today. I am confident that we are building traction in that area. I think in the next 2026, 2027, it can turn into meaningful revenues. That is just on top of what the team is doing organically with the products we bring to market.
Great. Outside the U.S., I think NATO has a summit coming up in a month. 2% is the current target for spending of GDP. Anticipating they'll increase that. What is the exposure you all have to international and the European build-out?
Sure. I'll take that one. When we talk about international military sales, we typically categorize these as sales directly to foreign customers or foreign primes. I mean, we do have content on the F-35 and F-16 and Stryker and other platforms that ultimately goes international. We're tracking the direct international. We've got a pretty broad portfolio of products that serves both NATO and allied countries. That's across aero defense, ground defense, and naval defense markets. We've seen some pretty solid demand more recently coming out of those increases in GDP. Over the past two years, our revenues have grown in the mid-teens.
Now it's approximately 10% of Curtiss-Wright's total portfolio. It's accelerating. As we are now in 2025 and looking forward this year, we expect it to grow in the high teens. I think when you think about what's been happening, that increase in NATO spending, 70% of NATO countries reaching 2% or greater of their GDP this last year, now you have NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stating that that will increase further beyond the 2%. Certainly, that's obviously something that our president supports. We're excited for his upcoming meeting here with his NATO colleagues in June and the outcomes there. You also have programs like ReArm Europe. We look at that as a positive event as well, taking additional state or private capital into that equation to help stimulate that. I think that positions as well.
If you step back to what we committed to at Investor Day, and as Lynn had mentioned, that mid to high single-digit growth rate across our defense markets, it's clearly in excess of what the domestic budget projections were, the international budget projections were at that point in time. Direct military sales and this growth that we're experiencing is an important part of our ability to exceed those growth rates.
On the last call, I think part of the increase to guidance was also on the flight recorders. Could you give some pictures to how material that is for this year and also for the coming years?
Yeah. As I mentioned in our opening comments about product areas and industries where we've been in since the inception, this is one of those examples. We've been building flight recorders for 60 years and have that long expertise that has been transferred through generations of employees. Again, it also is another example of where we work both commercially and in the defense space to leverage those same R&D dollars into a multiple customer base. It really was the rise in the commercial aerospace guide that was driven by the flight recorders. We've been working with Honeywell for several years, when we announced our partnership back at the end of 2019. It's taken time. The European Union announced their 25-hour mandate, which is the new recorder, up from two hours, back at the beginning of the decade in 2021.
It was just last summer that the FAA mandated the 25-hour recording for both new aircraft and a retrofit across the fleet in the U.S. by the end of this decade. We are really early days of what this is going to drive to Curtiss-Wright. As we see that ramp taking hold this year, you can see the increase in our guide that it drove. We have not really sized the opportunity yet. We are certified across the Boeing aircraft, 737, 767, 777. We are working with Airbus to be certified across the A320 family, which should happen in 2026. There are regional jets that are also subject to the FAA mandate where we are actively working a lot of opportunities there. It is going to be a meaningful driver within defense electronics going forward.
It sounds like more than just annualized this year, next year. It sounds like annualized plus it gets certified into new platforms next year.
Yes. If we capture Airbus and things go well there, which they are, that's another half of the market. I mean, there's a lot of business to be won yet in regional jets.
Shifting gears to commercial nuclear, five minutes left. This is an area of interest. You have had and played on new nuclear power plants with China and then a couple in the U.S. And then it went away. We are now hopefully on the front side of Eastern Europe picking up steam with Poland and Bulgaria. What is the timeline we should expect for that to come through as an order and revenue? And how big could it be?
Yeah. No, thank you for that question. It's an exciting part of our portfolio that is very much a strong growth driver for us going forward. Just to put some context with maybe those of you who do not know, we said that that portion of our portfolio from the 2023 baseline would double by 2028, so just around $300 million doubling by 2028, and then going to $1.5 billion by the middle of the next decade. There are a lot of aspects of that, both the work we do in the aftermarket, the work we're doing with SMRs. To talk specifically about your question, Poland and Bulgaria, I'm very proud that when we announced back in 2022 that we had had some longstanding contract disputes with Westinghouse, we had put those to bed. We're back working with them. At that time said three to five years.
As the years have marched along, it's quite wonderful to say each year we've taken a year off of that timeline. At this time, we believe that we're on track to get orders in 2026. That's pretty exciting. In Poland, just last month, they signed an agreement with Westinghouse and Bechtel to extend their engineering services through the end of 2025, which is really the last step before negotiating the contract with Westinghouse, which will lead to our long lead item orders. The Bulgarian energy secretary is out in the press making noise that he wants to see Bulgaria have the first new nuclear power plant in Bulgaria ahead of Poland. We're all for that. Good things.
The $600 million in 2028, how much of that growth from the $324, I think it was, how much of that is the expectation of maybe $1,000 new nuclear build?
We laid this out for those of you who maybe have never looked at our investor slides. It is in the back portion of the Investor Day. We do think we will be in production with Poland and Bulgaria by 2028. There are four-, five-, six-year programs that will take a bell curve of revenue over. We have given that in the past. I do not think we have given a specific number, but it is one of both plant life extensions in the aftermarket that, and then moving to prototyping and first production business across the SMRs are all three anticipated in that 2028 time frame.
I think it goes to once you get the order, the revenue does start to kick in pretty quick.
Yes. We'll take that overtime revenue and begin working, so.
Capital allocation. So you've done share purchase tactically. You've also been active on M&A over the last few years. How is the pipeline today? What are the areas of focus? What's the size that you're kind of focused on?
OK. I mean, I'll talk about the M&A pipeline and then ask Chris to speak on our share repo. The pipeline is very good right now. I'm pretty excited about it. We've built up a little bit of a war chest. We're financially ready to act if we complete the diligence process and want to bring one of these companies into Curtiss-Wright. I'm also pleased that our largest acquisition to date was Pakstar back in 2020. We have targets that are in that same size and some that are larger in the pipeline. It's exciting to see we might really raise the bar in the companies we bring into the portfolio.
The areas we are the most purposeful about communicating to the street that we are looking to acquire in is for sure defense electronics, that companies that can come in and take part of that machine, their market reach, the engineering capabilities they have, we can always make them better. That is one. Major naval safety and propulsion systems is another very steadily, well-performing portion of our portfolio. Commercial nuclear, which would have thought that it would be harder to find targets in that area. The two acquisitions in 2024 were both in commercial nuclear. We were really pleased to see that.
We're generating strong cash flow. We certainly believe in returning capital to shareholders. We believe that share buyback is the most effective way to do that. If you look at what we've bought back over the past four years, it's $700 million of stock. We don't just buy stock when we don't have acquisitions in the pipeline. It's a very thoughtful analysis. We consider our growth and earnings and our valuation and make a conscious decision when we're in the market to buy our stock. We'll continue to kind of approach it that way going forward. We are excited about the pipeline here that's in front of us for 2025. I'll say that we recently went back to our Board of Directors, and they expanded our authorization another $400 million. We now have $534 million of authorization.
That is going to position us well for the next two years under the pivot to growth. While the dividend is less important to us, we do believe in aligning our dividend growth to sales growth over time. We just increased our dividend 14%. It is the ninth consecutive year of increasing our dividend. We will continue to be thoughtful, making sure that we are putting our capital towards the highest and best use. Acquisitions remain our first and top priority. We are excited. A lot of cash in front of us.
I'm just going to squeeze one more in. I know I'm at time. On SMRs, I know you're doing development work on some. Quantify your size today of the work you're doing. Also, from a milestone perspective, looking forward, what would be the next material milestone for Curtiss-Wright within the SMR landscape?
We do work across all the major SMR providers. We've given a range of $20 million-$120 million plus content per plant that they build. We've been the most purposeful and open about our content with X-Energy, which is the $120 million content. Across the others, we've talked about our content on NuScale being in the $40 million-$50 million range. The others, we haven't been as specific because they don't want us to be. Of our nuclear revenues, it's about 10% is the design work we're doing now. I think it's going to be significant. I think in the next 12 months, 24 months, we absolutely will be moving into a prototyping phase where we're building the first-of-a-kind equipment for these SMR producers. That will drive some meaningful growth.
We very much see the supporting them later in the decade as we build first production units for them.
Fantastic.
About 10% today.
Awesome. Thank you both.
Thank you.