Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the Oppenheimer Conference. I'm really pleased that Christina and I are here to talk about Crane NXT. For many of you, I know that may be a new name, and for some, you've been with us on the journey since separation. I'll introduce myself, I'll pass it to Christina, and then I'll jump into a few slides, and then we'll go to questions. With that, my name is Aaron Saak. I'm the President and CEO of Crane NXT. Christina, I'll hand it over to you for a brief introduction.
Thank you, Aaron. I'm Christina Cristiano, Chief Financial Officer.
Great. Of course, before we jump in, and I know you have these slides, we're going to go through the normal forward-looking statements. I'll let you read those on your own time, but standard fare for discussions like this. Let's talk a little bit about Crane NXT, a premier industrial technology company that is really two and a half years old since our separation in April 2023 from Crane Company. We positioned the company over these last two and a half years to be a leader in technologies that we say secure, detect, and authenticate our customers' most important assets. I believe as you look at the financials of the company and our products, you'll find a lot to like in what we're creating in this portfolio. Sales last year and projected for this year are around $1.6 billion, with about 50% of that revenue being recurring or reoccurring.
Very good segment operating profit margins in the mid 20% range, high free cash flow, which helps us keep our leverage in a very nice place to keep doing M&A. Today, we stand at about 2.6 x that leverage. When you put all this together of who we are, a technology leader around authentication and anti-counterfeiting technology, underpinning what we do is all the Crane Business System and a drive for operational excellence and continuous improvement. I think you see that playing out in how we run the company day to day. As I think about who we are from segmenting the portfolio, we have two reportable segments: security and authentication technologies. I'll talk about that in a little more detail, particularly with one of our acquisitions more recently. That's about 45% of our revenue, and the balance being Crane Payment Innovations, or CPI, at about 55%.
We have a high degree of geography disbursement in terms of our revenue. A little over half comes from North America, about 25% from emerging markets. That's an area that's been growing for us, particularly in our SAT segment. I think what's really unique about the company and makes us special is the longevity of our customers and how they've been with us, in some cases, not just for decades, but for a century or more. You'll find that, I think, very unique to the portfolio of Crane NXT, the stickiness we have with our customers and the longevity of our relationships. Now, when you talk about the company and how we report, we report in these two segments: security and authentication technologies.
This year will be about $735 million in sales with two operating companies, Crane Currency and now the new Crane Authentication that we just put together with our two acquisitions that we've done over the last year and a half. That would be OPSEC and De La Rue Authentication. This really coming together to form Crane Authentication just about 100 days ago when we closed our De La Rue acquisition. The second segment, as I referred to before, is Crane Payment Innovations, about $860 million in revenue. Both of these companies are all focused on technology that secures, detects, and authenticates our customers' assets. Both of these segments have leadership positions, being number one or number two in most of the markets they play in around the world. What binds us together at the bottom here is this Crane Business System.
It's operational discipline and rigor to drive continuous improvement, pricing process discipline, as well as operational discipline. You see that particularly as we talk about our new acquisitions. All of this together is creating a portfolio that we really believe is the market leader in authentication technologies. Let me take a moment and talk about our newest acquisition in the formation of Crane Authentication. For us, this is a major step forward in the evolution of our portfolio since our separation, where now we have the market leader in authentication technology, leveraging outstanding technology that's come from our currency business, put together with our first acquisition, OPSEC, and then De La Rue Authentication, which closed May 1, to form this unified portfolio. It's really focused in three areas. The first is brand protection, which makes up about 60% of the revenue of this business. This is selling our technology to major customers.
Think about sports leagues and apparel companies around the world. It provides both physical authentication and track and trace online software to help make sure that their products are real and authentic, not only through their supply chain, but to their consumers. We have government solutions. You can see in this picture, these are rolls of tax stamps. This is what goes on wine bottles and other kinds of articles so that governments can track shipments through their countries and collect their tax revenues. Finally, identification security. This is really looking at making passports and national IDs secure and preventing counterfeiting of identities. Three pillars in this business, all of this now coming from the combination of OPSEC and De La Rue to form this new brand.
We're off to the races in terms of the integration, very actively deploying the Crane Business System that includes 80/20 to do product rationalization, supply chain, and rooftop optimization, simplifying the organization as we brought the two companies together, and updating our pricing and what we call pricing standard work. I'm really excited about where this company is going in terms of the portfolio. Even more excited about where we're going to end in profitability as we exit 2026 with a company that's going to move from low to mid-single-digit operating profit to one that's going to be close to 20% operating profit as we exit 2026, all from the diligent execution of the Crane Business System. Let me talk a little bit about the company holistically and where we're at. If you looked at our Q2 results, 9% sales growth.
That was in line with our expectations for the full year, where we maintained our guidance. Excited about the performance of the company and particularly both CPI, where we're seeing some strength returning in some of our key segments, and then in SAT, an international currency business that's just done fantastic through the first half of this year. We're deploying the Crane Business System to execute on our integrations. Free cash flow has been strong, 120% in Q2. That's led us to be able to be in a very good position on our balance sheet with net debt at net leverage at 2.6 x, with a lot of firepower for M&A, and very confident in the activity in our M&A funnel that we'll see another deal transpire here over the next 12 months.
We have high conviction that we're pivoting as we exit 2025, actually midway through 2025 into higher growth and operating improvements in OP, great free cash flow, and position for great 2026. Hopefully that's a little bit of an overview of where we're at, where we're going. Ian, good to see you and happy to go to some questions here.
Oh, you're on mute, Ian.
Thanks for doing that. That was very helpful, and hopefully you could hear me now. Thanks for the overview, especially on the product portfolio. If I was to kind of summarize this, how do you think about just like your overall growth strategy across brands and commercial and government IDs? How do we kind of like synthesize that strategy into what you're doing going forward?
Yeah. I assume, Ian, you're specific to Crane Authentication with that?
Yes, yes, because OPSEC and De La Rue Authentication, et cetera.
I think about them in these three pillars or these three segments as we laid out in the slides. In total, I believe the company of authentication is going to be about a mid-single-digit grower. Some of that is dependent on each customer in each segment adopting the technology. If you start at brands, this is the area where the value prop is very clear because brands are getting counterfeited and they know it to some degree. It's just a question of how quickly they can implement our technology into their supply chain, both the software and the hardware. The hardware being the label technology, the software being the track and trace of that article through the supply chain. The beauty of the business is once you get that customer, it's like an ERP implementation. It's very hard to dislodge us because it's sticky.
You want to keep having the reporting of the goods and where they're manufactured and how and where they're sold through the supply chain. Again, a mid-single-digit grower with the potential always for some upside depending on how brands adopt the technology. Similar in governments. This business is primarily in emerging markets. Think the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, where governments are trying to find ways to ensure that their tax revenue is being collected. That's where we're seeing growth as those economies grow. Think about that as kind of a mid-single-digit, mid-single-digit plus type opportunity. Very large projects typical in that business, similar to our currency business. When you win a book of business from a government, you tend to have that be very sticky, and those tend to come in larger wins time over time.
Finally, in ID, ID definitely a mid-single-digit growth type business growing with GDP plus accelerated beyond kind of GDP growth with the need for governments to add more authentication technology to their IDs. Very similar again to the dynamic we see in our currency business, where you kind of have a lower growth in volume, but you have this additive effect of people upgrading the core product based on the need to prevent counterfeiting. In full summary, Ian, a mid-single-digit growth business, but one that's again going to get sequentially more profitable every quarter based on our deployment of the Crane Business System.
Okay. You know, when we think about the partnerships, I know you have some professional sports partnerships. What's been the receptivity by other leagues? What's sort of the opportunity, whether it's domestically or internationally? How do you view that?
Yeah, I think in the domestic leagues, if we just talk about sports leagues, for example, that's going to be expansion within those leagues to more products. Think about a good, better, best strategy where very high-valued products want increasing authentication. Take the example of like an Aaron Judd bat versus a keychain. You're going to have very different levels of authentication security on those. Why I say it this way, Ian, is because we own most of the sports leagues already today. There aren't too many more for us to get. All the big ones have been using our solution for some period of time. In the first quarter, we announced a major renewal of the NFL during the Q1 Earnings Call. Your point though is correct on international. I think that's a real opportunity for us as we look at leagues in other regions of the world.
That's one the team is actively exploring, particularly when you think about the geographic diversity of those leagues, some of which aren't even aware of us here in the U.S. Same dynamic, same amount of counterfeiting going on, same opportunity for us that we appreciate here in the U.S.
Okay. I know you've referenced the CBS a bunch already, but can you maybe give us some tangible examples? Maybe we pick on either OPSEC or De La Rue. You know, what are you doing? Where's the CBS helping you? What's the real potential for that? What are the levers?
I'll give you two examples. They'll both be operational in nature. One is in OPSEC, where we posted several Kaizens in each of the factories to go through and look at how we can improve the layout and what we call the standard flow of the factory to improve overall productivity. That's true in the factories here in the U.S. and in the U.K. Each of those Kaizens will last about a week with the team, with the operators on the line, with the leaders of those factories, and some coming from the corporate CBS office that we have here in the company to put forward what we call a future factory vision and then a vision for that particular production line with a goal for productivity.
In the case of OPSEC, what that's doing is driving several points of incremental productivity inside of the factory, particularly on the manufacture of some of the holograms that are used. That's kind of the traditional example. Now that we have De La Rue in place, we've also run an 80/20 process, which is a different tool in our CBS toolkit that probably many folks are familiar with, to look at how do we rationalize two product lines, one from OPSEC, one from De La Rue, understand what we should be doing on driving pricing in those product lines or which ones we should eliminate and rationalize to improve the cost structure.
We've done that already in the first 100 days to go in and look at a particular type of products inside of OPSEC and De La Rue and stop manufacturing one, move to the other, lowers the cost structure, and also allows us to get some pricing out of the customer. Those are two examples just in the last, call it, 100 or so days since we've done the acquisition that are going to drive real value for us. Those happen over and over in the company. We're going to do over 100 Kaizens this year inside of Crane NXT. Imagine that, a week of people's time out to simply drive continuous improvement in the process. That's just the DNA of the company. I'd say, Ian, that's not always true. As many folks on this line probably know, that's not true of every company. When we get into an OPSEC that's not used to that, we can drive real meaningful improvements in the operating performance of the business.
Okay. If we were to shift to the currency for a second, when we think about the new launch cycle of the new bills coming out of the U.S. government, if we were maybe to look at the revenue opportunities, what do the revenue opportunities look like by year? What's going to be the biggest opportunity? What's going to be really kind of the ho-hum opportunity? Also, maybe when you talk about that, talk about margins as well amongst the different denominators.
Yeah, maybe I'll start, Christina, and hand it over to you.
Sure.
You know, the way the U.S. currency program works, just for a little primer, is you want to look at the total volume of bills being produced, but what's more important is you want to look at the mix of those bills. Because as we all know, the $100 bill has a lot more security features on it than the $1 bill. It's worth quite a bit more to us, on the order of, you know, 2x-2.5x the amount of technology in it. You can see that in the variable cost to produce that's published by the U.S. Treasury Department. The growth algorithm for this business is going to be probably, you know, flat, low single-digit volume growth over the next five or 10 years. However, the amount of technology adding into this is going to get, you know, not just incrementally higher.
When you look at the step up from the redesign, it's a real opportunity for us, to your point, to drive both revenue and margin growth. Let's take the $10 bill, Ian, as an example. The upgrade of that bill will include new security features that will allow us to have a product that looks, you know, closer to like in the range of what the hundreds are looking like than what the existing 10. On a variable cost basis, while we can't disclose that at this point in time, the cost difference in these security features is, you know, almost double depending on the exact design that gets chosen.
What we see happening is this accelerator every two years as a new bill is launched, that the incremental improvement over the prior bill is going to bring, you know, a significant step up in revenue for us, as well as increased operating profit because the margin of those security features is very high. Now, I can't speak to a specific model because we haven't released the designs of the new 10 and certainly the 50, the 20, and the 100 that'll be coming. If you follow what's happened in our international currency business over the last four or five years, I think that's a very good proxy for what's going to happen in the U.S. business. That's a business that's expanded operating profit by hundreds of basis points over the last several years and one that's growing at mid-single-digit plus consistently. I think that's how we should be framing the U.S. business over the next four or five years.
Okay. When we think about the launch, is this just a launch where the new notes will just replace the old ones coming out of retirement on a natural basis? Is there an acceleration of that? How does that work?
You're not going to see any kind of cliff, Ian, where the old notes are called back in. Think of it more like a gradual, as notes are returned back into the bank, then new notes will be released. There won't be any step change, let's say, in the volume of notes out there, but over time you'll start to see that change.
Right. You won't have a big spike followed by, like you were saying, a cliff.
That's correct.
Okay. That makes sense. I know we did talk about international a little bit, especially on the league side, but is there any other opportunities internationally to grow? I know that's actually been a big driver of some of the margin expansion opportunity that you've recognized already. Maybe talk a little bit more about the international opportunity and how we think about recurring versus new wins and just adoption of micro-ops.
Yeah, maybe I'll start that one, Aaron, and then you can jump in. You know, when you think of our share today in the international currency market, we're actually in the early innings. We estimate between 15% and 20% market share in the world. Plenty of room for us to grow, and we are winning share. What you're seeing now is a record high backlog level, which gives us very high confidence in our sales forecast for this year and also sets us up well for success in 2026. In terms of the mix between existing customers and new wins, Ian, I think this is a very sticky business. Once you've got your technology specced in on a bank note, the customer tends to renew. When they're reprinting, they'll keep the same technology and design in the note. That means a lot of what we call recurring revenue for us.
We're seeing significant growth in recurring revenue, meaning repeat orders from existing customers. We also expect to win 10 - 15 new denominations each year from new customers that haven't been doing business with us in the past. We're on track to hit that target for this year.
Okay. If we were to shift to CPI, maybe give us an around the world of the different segments, what you're seeing as far as order patterns and inventory levels, and just sort of overall underlying market growth in those.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Ian. I would just start by saying I'm very encouraged by particularly what we're seeing with CPI in gaming. I think for a lot of investors, that's been a question mark for us as we've come through the COVID inventory normalization cycle. We said a few quarters ago now, probably about a year, a little less than a year ago, we thought inventory would get normalized somewhere in the second quarter, third quarter. We start to see a return of orders and we'd be on a positive growth trajectory as we got to the second half of this year. That's exactly what's happening. We've seen orders now up significantly year -over- year, and we have very high confidence we're going to see double-digit sales growth in the second half of the year in gaming because the in-market is healthy, growing, call it low single digits.
Our OEMs are healthy. They've drawn down their inventory. We're the number one provider still with leading technology position. Now the orders are just following the recovery from this very high level of inventory. That feels very good to us. You're going to see that positive growth in the back half of the year. That's going to help our margins too because gaming is the highest margin part of the CPI portfolio. That feels good. The next area I'd talk to is vending. We had a lot more commentary on that in Q1, where that's the one area of the portfolio that's been impacted, particularly in demand by tariffs. We put in price increases in the 2Q time period to get ahead of the tariffs. We saw some pull forward in customer orders getting ahead of the price increases that landed in Q2. That's going to come out of Q3.
It's really the China tariffs that is what we're looking at. That's really what affects the vending business. We'll make up for them in price. The question will be on demand. We're hopeful for a resolution there on the China tariffs. The rest of the business performing as we expect it, both our retail business doing what we thought for the balance of the year, no change, same for financial services. When you back up, I think, Ian, you look at CPI as a technology leader, number one technology position in its market, low single-digit type growth dynamic in that market long-term with fantastic free cash flow that we use to deploy in the rest of the portfolio. That's how I'd frame CPI, but feel good really where we're headed exiting this year back to growth.
Okay. Any trends you'd like to kind of call out there, whether it's like adoption of self-checkout or how's self-checkout going or any other kind of category?
You know, I think each one of those you could pick on something a little nuanced in each vertical. Let's talk retail first that you mentioned it. You know, self-checkout is continuing to get adopted. The form factor or the design of the self-checkout system has changed from where it was five to certainly 10 years ago to be less the standard box that just gets put at the end of a checkout line to something more custom and designed. What we're seeing is a real change in the channel for our products, where three or four years ago it was 70% - 80% OEMs that we're selling our components to that are putting those in their standard self-checkout lanes. Those are getting sold to the Walmarts and Targets and CVSs of the world.
Today, we're going to move very quickly to that being about 50/50 as we exit this year, which is a big change. That's because custom self-checkout is now the growth in this market where the big retailers are disaggregating the OEMs and are putting together the products themselves. They get the best of breed of what they want to look at or have their checkout look like for their consumer. They're picking their own POS or point of sale. They're picking their own credit card terminal. They're picking our cash and coin components, you know, someone else's scanner, and they have their own teams developing it. It's a real change in the channel. For us, it almost doesn't matter because we're agnostic in many ways to the channel. We'll sell to either the OEM or to the retailer or their integrator.
It really doesn't matter because we're still the number one technology leader. That's the key to CPI is to maintain that technology leadership.
Okay. Yeah. Speaking of that, maybe touch upon the competitive dynamics that you're seeing in CPI, market share shifts, or anything else along those lines.
Market share is pretty stable. You like that in what I would say is a mature business. It's an oligopoly. There's maybe one or two other major competitors, very rational competitors. One is a company out of Japan called JCM. The other is a company out of Japan called Glory. They play in different parts of our market. What I would say is we're always occupying that number one leadership position in technology, and we're investing there. You can see it still, as we talked about in our Q2 earnings, where we've launched new products in CPI, one called the Jet Scan Ultra that's gone very, very well in terms of initial sales into the financial services sector. That offers higher speeds, more automation, and a better sensor package to pick out counterfeits and soiled currency. We are going to continue to launch new products like that in CPI. It's critical. Again, not too much changes in share, very incremental, just due to the maturity of the market.
Okay. I know you mentioned tariffs, but can you maybe talk about what you're doing to mitigate them and what the impact is going to be?
I'll let Christina.
Yeah, just a reminder, Ian, that tariffs were not material for us overall, about 4% of our COGS, and primarily related, as Aaron said earlier, to tariffs out of China that impact our vending end market within CPI. We sized the direct impact originally at about $25 million, and we updated that to about $15 million in our most recent earnings call just based on the changes in tariffs. Overall, not material, primarily related to China, and we're mitigating that direct impact with pricing and productivity. What that does do, though, on an indirect impact is it causes some changes in buying behavior, primarily, again, in vending, just based on customers trying to get ahead of pricing increases, which we saw in Q2, and perhaps even pushing out some orders because there's too much uncertainty, which we're anticipating in Q3, and we signaled in this quarter's earnings call.
I think overall, you'll see a little bit of noise around the underlying demand as people wait out, you know, what's happening with tariffs, but on a direct basis, fully mitigating with pricing and productivity.
Okay. Christina, since I have you here, it just looks like things are on the upward for you here. It seems like backlog and gaming is getting better. We're getting closer to the launch of the redesigns from a currency perspective. How are you thinking about capital allocation here, your free cash flow, and anything else, more deals? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, I appreciate the question. I would say you're right. The year is unfolding as we expected it would. We're starting to see positivity in gaming, which will return back to double-digit growth in the second half of the year. International currency continues to be very strong, very high backlog levels. This is all really as we planned. We feel really great about that. In terms of capital allocation, in general, we're CapEx light, right? We'll be approximately around 3% of sales in CapEx. Over the last two years, as you know, we've made significant investments in upgrading our U.S. currency equipment. That's going to support the whole new series for 10 years to come. We're not going to see another big investment coming out of the U.S. Of course, we're highly focused on investing in organic growth.
We will make investments into other programs as we continue to evaluate the businesses. You're going to see that we're going to continue to pay a competitive dividend, as we always have, targeting a yield of approximately 1%. I know Aaron loves to talk about M&A. That'll be a primary focus for us in the future as well. Aaron, I don't know if you want to maybe end on that note.
No, I think that's right. Number one priority is invest in the core. Number two, pay a competitive dividend. Three is M&A. We've done two deals in the last year and a half or so. Funnel, Ian, is as active and robust as it's ever been for us, and we feel very good about that. That's where I think there's high, high confidence that in the next 12 months, we'll have another deal coming through. We want to stay disciplined in the framework, right? We're looking at M&A that is a one-step adjacency from our core. It's very clear how we can add value either commercially or operationally off the existing portfolio we have. It continues to diversify us to be less reliant on cash in markets and can generate a good return.
Of course, last but not least, I would say in that financial criteria, it keeps our net debt below 3x. That's our target. Those are going to be deals of $100 million, a couple hundred million dollar revenue, probably lower OP or EBIT than we have today, but that's because we see this opportunity to improve it. That's where the value gets created over the next three to five years. I feel very good about that, Ian. Of course, should M&A not be there for us, we're in this very nice position to think about share buyback as well. I would just put that as the level of priority. Again, the funnel's strong and most of our deals that we really spend a lot of time on are all cultivated. They're not getting shopped around.
They're things we're in negotiating with the owner that we think we can get a very good deal on for our shareholder and add a lot of value to.
Okay. This is really helpful. I know we're pretty much out of time. I want to say thank you again for this. I think the outlook is very, very favorable here, especially kind of with things getting better.
Yeah, thanks, Ian. It's good to see you again. Appreciate it.
Thank you.