Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2022 Ducommun Investor Day. I'm Suman Mookerji, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations at Ducommun. We have a lot of people here attending today virtually, but also, we're really grateful for those of you who made the effort to come here in person and meet with us, and hopefully you find that interaction fruitful as well. We have a lot of good information to share with you, but before we dive into that, I would like to draw your attention to the disclosures on page two, particularly the language relating to the forward-looking statements, risk factors, and non-GAAP financial measures referred to in the presentation. A few other logistics.
From a safety perspective, there are, you know, two exits behind you. In the case of an emergency, please take those and exit the same way you came in to the hotel. The presentation material that you're going to see is also posted on our website. It will be available to you, as well as a replay of the event today. We will have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. For those of you here in person, you know, we'll take the questions live.
For those attending virtually, and I believe we have, you know, several people, 30 to 40 people right now who are joining us virtually, you will be able to submit your questions through the Q&A box on your screen, and those will flow through to the moderator, to me, and I will ask those questions. For those here in live, please wait for the microphone to come to you. Michael behind, standing behind us there will bring the microphone to you. That way, everyone, including those attending virtually, can hear you. With that, let's take a look at the agenda. First, Steve Oswald will give you a quick recap of our performance in the last few years, as well as in 2022. Then go into the key items that we believe drive shareholder value at Ducommun.
Steve will go through our post-pandemic strategy or plan. This will be followed by a deeper dive on our electronics, structures systems and electronic systems segments, covered by Jerry Redondo and myself respectively. I will then discuss our M&A strategy, after which Chris Wampler will come in and take you through our financial outlook. Finally, Steve will come back and give his closing remarks, as well as summary comments before we go into Q&A. The plan is to kind of cover our presentation in the first 90 minutes and leave 30 minutes for Q&A at the end. With that, I'd like to introduce Steve Oswald, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, onto the stage, please.
Thank you, Suman. I'm gonna be down here. Is that okay? You guys can follow me a little bit. Thank you. First, I just wanna welcome everyone. I really appreciate seeing everyone, and I know it's great to be back together, plus everybody on our Zoom. We appreciate as well you joining us, and we look forward to a productive two hours. Let me get started here. First, just a little bit of a recap. I think this is important. I put this in there. This is 2017, when we kinda started a new trajectory. I came in in January of 2017, and we had a, I think, a really nice run. Obviously, you know what happened, in 2020 and 2021.
We really got hit hard with commercial aerospace. I wanna also show that, you know, our defense business really came to the front. Because people would ask me, you know, "How's everything going at Ducommun?" You know, I know commercial aerospace is really, really tough. I said, "Yeah, but you know what? We did some really good things in 2018 and 2019, which prepared us to really get going in defense." This really came through. From an investor standpoint, this was a real savior. We built this out nicely, as you can see here, which I'll get into next. You know, just our recap is, you know, we're gonna be high single. That's confirmed.
You know, coming out of 2021, we feel a high single number is a really good number for us, we'll have more to say obviously when we report our earnings. We feel really good about 2022. Maybe not 60%, but we're gonna be coming back very strong on 2021 over 2022 in commercial. You know, that's a good sign for us is that, you know, we're in really good shape. We're just a bit dependent on build rates, but we continue to drive share on these programs and more to come there. Our defense business, and I've mentioned this on the call before, you know, we've built our defense business nicely. If I see $100 million-plus in defense each quarter, I'm pretty happy.
We're a bit down this year. I mean, not much, but a little bit. We know the story with OEMs. All the OEMs are down, pretty much on revenue, and that impacts us somewhat. Just heads up on that. I think overall, defense is a really good story. You know, you're not hearing a lot of issues from us. Regarding our supply chain and our labor shortages, I think that bodes well for investors and for our customers. One thing I was thinking about last night is that, you know, for Airbus, we're four years now, 100% on time. A 100% on time for four years for all Airbus business. We're really proud of that. We've been able to manage that.
Lastly, which I'll get into, we are involved and gonna be involved the next year or two on some pretty significant restructuring, which I haven't done in the past, and I will get into that in a minute. Okay, delivering shareholder value. We put this in here. I think it's important to put it in the front of the pitch. When I came into the business in 2017, we had this engineered products business, HMI, we had RF, and we had motors. Okay? That's all we had. That was probably right around 9% of revenue in 2017. Through a lot of good work, we're able to add really four excellent businesses to our portfolio for engineered products. Okay? We have Nobles, Magnetic Seals, LDS, and CTP. So you can see the acquisition dates there.
All these, CTP even opened up proprietary very similar with an aftermarket. These, you know, have been very important to shareholders and to the company. Suman's gonna talk a little more about their performance, which we committed to in the past. We'll mention that. Here's the target, okay? 15%, we're gonna work to get to 25% by 2027 of revenue. We're gonna continue to try to do these bolt-ons, these acquisitions, which, you know, are really accelerators in lots of ways to our manufacturing services business and continue to be successful, I think, in this area. If we get to 25%, we'll be in great shape. Again, aftermarket, when I came in, we were only 6% of revenue was aftermarket. Okay?
I told the board, I said, "Look, you know, we need aftermarket." Okay? This is part of the deal in aerospace. I think we've done a good job to get it to 10%, and we're targeting 15% by 2027. I think that's the first takeaway is that we've had a lot of good success. We compete with all the majors. You know, we compete with HEICO, we compete with, you know, all different types of companies on these acquisitions. For the most part, each one we really wanted, we got, and at a good price. I think overall, more to come on this. Suman will get a little bit more into the performance. Okay, next. This is brand-new. Okay? We made the difficult decision to close some factories. Okay?
This is something that is not easy to do, but it's the right thing to do for the long-term health of the business. First, Monrovia, California. Okay. This operation is, you know, it's like an aircraft carrier. I mean, the size of this operation, okay. This is a major operation. It's been around since the 40s or the 50s. You know, ran 24/7 during Vietnam, you know, with lots of different operations. We've got to the point where it just doesn't work for us anymore. You can see the square footage is 274,000, but it's 9 acres. Facility is 9 acres in L.A. County in California. We made the decision there. Also, Berryville, Arkansas, which is our electronics business, and this is structures. Our electronic systems business, we've also decided to announce a closing.
We've told the employees everybody's still on the team. We're gonna continue to drive the business. In 2023, we're gonna consolidate these business. Mainly, it's gonna go to Guaymas, Mexico. Guaymas is our operation. We've increased square footage from 62 to 115,000. We just expanded. Here's a shot of our operations there. Okay? This is in Sonora County. This is over towards the Pacific, south Sonora County, Mexico. We've been there for over 10 years in this industrial park. I just want everybody to know, we know. They know us, we know them. We have a team that's been there for over 10 years. We're obviously gonna expand the team with additional business, but, you know, we feel very good about this. Same thing with Berryville. We're gonna, you know, maybe a little bit in Joplin.
We are gonna put one thing here in Coxsackie, which is the Apache back blade. We make the back blades for the Apache attack helicopter for Boeing. You know, it's just not a good idea to put it in Mexico. We're gonna put that up by near Albany in Coxsackie, New York. We'll be able to do that and take care of that there. Now, when we close these factories, we think at least $11 million-$13 million in annual savings starting in 2024. Okay? We feel good about that number. Could be higher, for today's purposes, that's where we think we are. A lot of it comes to, obviously, headcount and everything else, even our electric bills in Monrovia, you know, for a year, over $1 million.
There's a lot of savings there we're gonna consolidate. We really like Guaymas. We know Guaymas. They know us. We have a good partnership. Again, good things ahead. The other thing I wanna just cover before I get into the main presentation is we did the sale lease back in Gardena. You can see here that we, the sale was $143 million in December of 2021. That was really at the height of everything as far as, you know, cheap money and lots of opportunities and we were able to, you know, really get a nice price here. After tax, we walked away with $113 million, which is a real home run for Ducommun. We bought MagSeal with that money.
You know, we're still there, right? We're gonna be there for at least another four years, right? We have headwind 'cause we have to pay rent now, and we have to pay real estate, right? There's, you know, it was a really nice deal, but a few more years down the road it's gonna be a great deal. Here's the thing about Monrovia. We're gonna sell this, okay, and we're gonna move it. No OI headwind for rent or real estate taxes or anything else. All the proceeds for that sale are gonna go to the company and shareholders. This is gonna be a big win for us. Again, it's nine acres. We're targeting the second half of 2023 for the sale. We'll keep you posted on that.
That's just some of the highlights I wanted to just briefly go over, and let me get into our post-pandemic plan. A lot of you have seen this chart, maybe some have not. This is our LTM on the left here through Q3. You can see here, Military and Space. Commercial is starting to come up a bit, which we want. We want some more, at least wanting around 40%, and I think we're heading towards that. Right now we're still heavy in Military, which is fine. We like Defense. We still do a lot of things proprietary. What I mean by that, not only our engineered products, but we don't do machining. We don't have 5-axis machining businesses. We don't have things where there's, you know, 200 competitors. That's not our model.
When you think about Ducommun, you know, we do things that are complex. We do titanium, hot form, superplastic forming. We do very difficult circuit cards. We do very difficult ruggedized cables. Okay? That's what we wanna do. Okay? We're not interested in and not to say about a machining business, they can be very successful, but we're not interested where, you know, we have 200 worldwide suppliers to machine a part. Okay? That's not for us. That's why we say we have proprietary for most of our business. You can see here on the commercial aero and narrow body is in great shape. You know, we really lean into narrow body. We really lean into the A320 and the 737. I mean, we like our 88, 787 business and other things, but this is really a strength for us.
On the right here, you've seen these before. These are all the programs we're on. I talked about the Apache, the back blade here. That's manufactured right now in Monrovia. You can see the rest of it over here, the commercial aerospace. We have a very nice position on the A220. We make the fuselage skins. Not a lot of people know that, but we're major players in A220 through our relationship with Airbus and before that Bombardier. Missiles, we're on lots of missile programs. I'm sure you saw the note that came out about the defense bill, and both the Army and the Navy and the missile businesses are gonna go way up in this budget. That's we're gonna feel that, and we're gonna see that. I think that's a big positive for us.
One other thing I put in here, you know, obviously we're on space. We do cables for Artemis. Here's an interest in the Stryker. This came to us through Nobles. Nobles is the worldwide leader in ammunition handling, and they're very big on tanks and ground vehicles. That's been a big boost for us because we're now in that business and we're, you know, making contacts and we're driving the business there. There's more to come on that, but that's been a great thing. You can see down here some of our customers. We've talked about this before. Oshkosh Defense is the Stryker. Just so everybody knows. You know, we're pretty much, as we've talked about, we're a tier one and we like our position there. Here's our team.
We have lots of folks here today, I wanna thank my team for being here and all their hard work for this program. You can see that, you know, we don't have that many people. That's how we run it, okay? We really run a lean operation from corporate on down. We think that's the right thing. It certainly helped us during the pandemic because you gotta understand, in 2020 and 2021, we didn't use any restructuring money. We didn't have to, okay? We didn't have to, you know, redo corporate and do these other things 'cause we have all these vice presidents. That's a positive. I talked about Tier 1 . I think for a small cap, we do an excellent job with our customers. We're really in contact with all the top people here for the most part.
We have relationships, and they know us, and we know them. We also have a few Tier 2 , like Spirit. Shenyang is for our A220 skins, so that's our relationship there. Overall, within aerospace defense, we're in great shape. Just two slides on commercial aero. We all know that this is coming back, so, you know, thank God for that. We had the recovery expected. We've got improvements. We are planning for and seeing mid-20s in 2022. We certainly hope we'll get to 31 out of Boeing. This is, you know, we'd like to see 50. We're not really sure at this point, but we think that might be in the cards for Boeing. You know, Boeing is very important to us. Very important to us. We continue to work with them, support them, okay?
We want them to be super successful. You know? It's been a long, long road for Boeing. I think hopefully that the best days are ahead for them. Again, let's all hope so. We all know Airbus and their success. We are running right now around this rate. If they could get to 65 early 2024, I'm not really sure about that. I hope that's the case. I will tell you again, we're ready for this kind of uptick. The thing about Airbus, you have to understand, they're the only true OEM that does titanium. When you think about Airbus, we have a good position with them. They have a lot of mouths to feed, right? They have the internal operation, they have a couple small companies in France. They've come to us in 2017.
We're a major titanium supplier, and once they get to 60 or 65, we're really gonna see a lot of that business. Just like in the past, they just can't keep up. We're ready. We have a good business. It's only gonna get better. You can see the trajectory here on commercial register. Let you know where we're coming from here with Ducommun. Better days ahead. Just next level down here for Boeing. We obviously the MAX is extremely important, 787. We're doing a lot of work. We not only do titanium work, we also do interiors with our CTP thermoplastics business. We do lightning protection products, ramp up. 787 production, a positive. We are continuing to gain share in these programs. This is our ship sets right now.
Airbus, you know, I've talked about this many times, we had no business with Airbus before 2017. Zero. I mean, I know it's hard to believe with only two people in the game, but we had zero. We've really come a long way with them. Again, Airbus is all about metrics and, you know, they run a good shop, and they expect 100% every day, and that's what we give them. It's really been a nice thing for us. We got a new contract. I mentioned that last year in a press release. A220 fuselage, working on getting more share here. A330, though not a large build rate, we're still on that, and we're working on A350.
We have some major things discussed on A350, which is a major user of titanium. Stay tuned on that. Okay, just a couple of things on defense. You can see here that, you know, we've kind of broken this out, request, and the potential upside. I won't get into all the details, but I mean, the trending is very, very good for Ducommun. Missiles, aircraft. I'll get a little bit more into it in the next slide, but, you know, we have a really good defense business, and it's only gonna get better. You can see here the DOD, I'm sorry, this is the global defense here. This looks great, you know, for our future. Everything's pointing in the right direction on defense. I've talked about offloading. That continues.
This is our major program here. We already have this is already being produced in Appleton, Wisconsin. We have this is, you know, one of the crown jewels of Raytheon, it goes a little bit slower 'cause this is a major. To take these cards out of an operation which they've been doing for a long time, it's really hard because you have testing equipment, you have lots of things. Everything's done internal. We are working on that. We are making cards for that, SPY-6. We still have work to do there. More to come later next year. We think we'll be ready to go on that.
Just as I mentioned earlier, our missile businesses are excellent, and all indications are the NDAA is gonna be, you know, straight up on missiles, both for the Navy and the Army. Hypersonics, not too much to talk about that, but we are partnering there with different types of applications. UAVs as well. Good stuff on the next generation. Lots of things happening here and a market that's going the right direction. Okay, just two more slides and I'll turn it over to Jerry. I talked about manufacturing services. This is, this is the other part of Ducommun, okay? This is the part I showed you the first slide with engineered products and things like that. This is the other part of our company. This is more of our legacy.
I think we've done some really nice work here. I talked about titanium. We're the world leader outside of Airbus in titanium. Very few people can make titanium. It's not the biggest market in the world. It's like $600 million. It's not like, you know, structures, you know, fuselage is $20 billion. You know, it's not that big, and it's very nichey, but there's, like, very few people that can do it and do it well. That's the key. You can do titanium, but you have to do it well 'cause there's a lot of hand work, there's a lot of different things that happen. You have to heat it up to 1,800 degrees. You know, you have big sheets of titanium. It's not easy to do. We feel very good about that.
We had some investors up at our Appleton facility in Wisconsin. You saw my note that we got, we're over $100 million in Appleton, so we're really happy about that in revenue. 70,000 sq ft plant. These are the circuit cards. A lot of automation. Defense, commercial, some industrial. We feel very good about our business there. This interconnect business is excellent. This is, you know, all different kind of interconnects for Artemis, ruggedized, molded, you know, not just, you know, hand work, okay? You know, put it in perspective, Berryville, which we're closing, okay, it's a lot of hand work for those, okay? We're gonna do those in Guaymas. All right. Here it's different, okay? It's much more of a full complement of manufacturing. This is in Joplin, by the way.
Chem mill. People say, well, chem mill is, you know, not so great, but when you're like only two or three people that can do it in the world, and it's still, people still use it, okay. I know it's from an ESG perspective, it might not be the greatest story, but it's used a lot in the industry, and for the kind of parts that we make, big parts, large structural parts, we do it probably just as good as Spirit. We're in that game still, and I think that's something we're gonna stick with. Finally, VersaCore. This is also done in Guaymas. People might not be familiar with this, but this is a new composite that we own, okay. This is actually our own material called VersaCore. What we've done is we've made a lot of inroads into cells.
For the, for the GE LEAP engine on the A320, we make the blocker doors now. We make, you know, the beavertail, which is the fairing outside. We make closeout panels on the side, and we make blocker doors. We just commercialized that this year. We send it to Middle River, it goes to Safran, and then it goes to the A320. All right? That's a very nice program for us. It's gonna be about, at least for that nacelle application, that's $20 million of revenue. That's only 55% of the A320, right? We have more work to do there. It's a very nice product for us. All right, let me just wrap up real quick. It's very important people know that we're expanding, we continue on engineered products.
All right? We're going to 25%. You know, think HEICO, right? My friend Eric, okay? Some of the great work they've done over the last. They got a 20-year head start. You know what I mean? All the great work they've done. You know, we admire them. You know, obviously, we compete with them, but we like that mix, and we're gonna keep charging ahead in that way. We like the recovery. Defense. We think our defense business now is built out. We have a nice system there. We are a Tier 1 player committed to aerospace and defense. We wake up every morning just thinking about A&D. When we're gonna do manufacturing services, we're gonna do it where we can have a niche. Very important. That's how, you know, the success of the game is with the niche.
Cost reduction, it's coming. Okay? This is the first time I've really closed a major plant since I've been here. Okay? I don't like to close plants, but this was the right thing to do, and we closed two. Okay? We're gonna close two next year. The benefit for the shareholder is gonna be significant, and it's the right thing for everybody in this room and our people at the company. Those are my opening remarks. I thank you. Turn it over to Jerry.
Thank you, Steve.
You're welcome.
Good morning. I'm gonna talk about our structures business, and with that, our focus on structures is with complex products, both Commercial and Defense. Our key focus there is on specialty products that require niche processes, as Steve had referenced earlier. Key products across our portfolio are quite an array, but again, the focus is on titanium, superplastic forming, miscellaneous hard metals, various forming assemblies, composites, VersaCore, and that translates to engine nacelles, inlet bulkheads, fuselage skin panels. As Steve referenced, we have the entire A220, the skins. Firewall and exhaust ducts, that's a continuously growing portfolio for us. It's just recently expanded to include titanium hard metals, as well as integrated composites that go into that inlet duct assembly, and that's on the CH-53K.
Flight control surfaces, again, metal bond, pylon and auxiliary power units, rotary blades, primary there are the Apache tail rotors. We have Bell tail rotors. We also have a depot repair for blades. Structural missile components, we have dorsal fins as well as the case, the entire case for the TOW missile. Ammunition handling, MagSeal, magnetic and mechanical seals and extruded thermoplastics, all of which these last three were part of our acquisitions, which are all going well. Quite an array of products, but again, specialty complex products that require niche processes throughout. Titanium, who we are. Titanium, again, superplastic forming. Our focus there is on the larger, very complex, high tolerance, highly contoured products that go into the major platforms.
We have a significant portfolio on the single aisle that's also expanded on the wide bodies as well. We're very well positioned for commercial aerospace, the recovery. We're capacitized. We've provisioned for the material, so we're provisioned for growth as well as increased workshare, which we're prepared to support. We're also been very focused on our growing defense business. More on that here shortly. Our VersaCore Composite. As Steve shared, we're on the GE LEAP, the nacelle, the blocker doors. It's part of the thrust reverser system, and we're actively working with OEMs on other opportunities. We're quite optimistic about VersaCore and what's in front of us, and we do all this through seven scalable performance centers.
You can see our end market breakdown between narrow body, military and space, wide body, biz jets and other. We have a nice portfolio with Gulfstream as an example and the progression looking forward looks very favorable there. Our customer breakdown, you can see, Boeing, Spirit, significant percentages there, and Spirit's not exclusively but primarily a Boeing product. Raytheon, Middle River. Middle River supports the nacelles, which we provide the VersaCore to GKN, GD, and all others. Quite an array of all other. On our platforms, significant portfolio on the 737 MAX. Our focus there is on increasing our workshare. There is some risk-sharing as workshare percentages. We're making good inroads there in increasing that, as well as actively pursuing additional content parts that we don't have today.
Same scenario for Airbus, right? We have a workshare opportunity with Airbus. We feel there's good opportunities in front of us with Airbus, both with active proposals we're working on today, as well as further supporting higher rates on both the A320 and A220. Biz jets, Black Hawk, actually all the Hawks, Seahawks. We're on all the eight variants of the Hawks with Sikorsky and GKN, and then Apache, Stryker and all others. Key here is growing defense business, well-positioned on the narrow bodies, again, our focus is on niche processes. Key sectors and applications. As you can see, commercial, military rotorcraft, the ground, vehicles, missiles, and then biz jets. Key on the commercial platforms, again, superplastic forming is a significant content for us. Differentiating capabilities, performance throughout.
The composite metal bond, again, on the flight control surfaces, we actually have a nice outlook in that arena. Large aluminum stretch form skins. Probably best example of content is on the A220, where we have most all of the entire fuselage skins, and we do that in California. The VersaCore Composite, nacelle components, and we're looking at expanding that into other applications, so we're actively working with OEMs on opportunities there. Extruded thermoplastics. On the military rotorcraft, again, metal bond, abrasion strips, exhaust ducts, inlet ducts, a significant opportunity for us still in front. MagSeal, the ammunition handling, as Steve had referenced, we had some nice success with the Stryker program. We are an approved OEM repair depot. Missile, ground vehicles.
The TOW missile case has been a very good volume program for us. Dorsal fins is part of the missile bill of material and mission handling. On biz jets, kind of in parallel to what we do for the single aisles, superplastic forming of titanium, stretch form sa-skins, and then MagSeal. The core key customers and platforms that we support. To emphasize again, we're world leader in titanium, okay? World leader in titanium, and today we're positioned as the number one tier-level supporter, provider in the world of titanium. And this is titanium stretch form, superplastic formed, hot form products. We're very focused on innovation throughout.
As a build-to-print provider, what differentiates us is our capabilities which result in value back to the customer, which is profitability, flawless performance, readiness for rate, you know, capacity readiness. We've continuously focused on how we reinvent our processes, how we improve them through, again, innovation, automation, just overall improvement to cost, quality, and delivery. With that, we've invested over $40 million pre-pandemic on technology, which includes capital, people, IR&D, other things that will make us better. We do have many years, 40-plus years of experience with titanium and competitive advantage with our value engineering.
Our customers come to us as, Airbus as an example, as a, quote-unquote, "expert in that arena." We look at products in their infancy stages of design, we look at products throughout their life cycle, and how that design can be enhanced to improve producibility, cost, and overall value to the customer. You can see our projection here, 2020. The A&D titanium sheet market growing from $560 million to, you know, close to $900 million in 2026. Our content represents, we believe, about 25%-30% of the A&D sheet metal fabrication. Airbus and Boeing. Airbus, we've worked very, very hard with Airbus over the past five years with a lot of emphasis. We are now a detailed parts partner, and we have been.
We're very, very actively engaged with Airbus. They come out, and they visit us in our, in our plants and, we're actually headed out there twice here first part of the year. Very, very active with them in collaborations which include R&D projects. Significant growth over this past five years. Again, we're very confident and positive about our growth with new products as well as being an increased workshare partner and providing that rate relief and that capacity to Airbus. We've been very focused on value, providing value and performance. We're coming up now to, Steve referenced, four years of being flawless to Airbus as far as our on-time delivery. With that comes different fluctuations of rates.
At times, there are surge requirements and we're provisioned for that, and we've been actively able to support that. Our superplastic forming, I mean, we're the go-to, regarded by Airbus as the go-to for that technology, and key provider across the narrow and wide body platforms. Boeing, we've been with Boeing quite a long time. We support an array of products, SPF, hot form, metal bond solutions. We're heavily on the 737 MAX, and we have content throughout all the other platforms, the 787, 767, Apache and F/A-18. We're both on the commercial and defense. We've been a sole provider of the Apache tail rotor for a very long time, since the inception, and we're quite proud of that, and we'll continue with that.
We're very actively involved with Boeing on continuous opportunities, as well as increased workshare for the products that we do have today. Defense. Very, very much a focus for us these last couple of years especially, and our plans in front of us. Very active this arena. A result of that, we've grown from $59 million to over $110 million since 2016. We feel very confident about the trajectory in front of us based on the engagements we have today with our key OEMs. Growth focus is on titanium. Again, superplastic forming, hot forming, complex metal assemblies. Again, the array includes rotorcraft, composite, metal bond, missiles, ammunition handling systems. Significant content wins on the CH-53K. We're referencing the ducts, both exhausts and inlets, and then the Stryker upgrades.
We have had good engagement on the FARA program as an example, where we've worked initially on value engineering designs with our customer, their IP, but we worked actively in the designs, and that's resulted in us having those initial awards on the FARA. Light content on the FLRAA, but very heavy content on the FARA, all of which, upon the wins and the awards that we'll be actively involved in the production contracts and competing with that. Mexico. Steve highlighted this earlier. We're quite proud of the processes that we do have in Mexico today and the expansion. We've grown from around 60,000 sq ft to well over 115,000 sq ft. We had our grand opening here recently and kicked that off.
Some of our customers came out, and we have a very strong presence of legacy team. You know, retention is, rounding error, about 100%. We're quite proud of our team, the talent. Our focus in Mexico wasn't simply to go to Mexico because the rates were lower. The focus in Mexico was the readily available workforce, right? The labor workforce, the talented engineering, the graduate engineers that we're able to hire there, the professionals that are available there as well. We work through a provider in the maquila, and so we have a quite array of products and processes there, and we'll continue to grow our footprint as well as our content in Mexico.
This has been quite successful, and we're looking forward to the months and the years ahead of us. Highlights for structures is ensuring rate readiness, right? Single aisle rate readiness, focusing on significant defense growth, continuation on our trajectory, commercial share gain on the products we have, and then being there for the rate rebound. Exemplary performance. It sounds like a standard thing. You know, deliver quality products on time, and that's what you have to do, and that's what we do do. It really is a differentiator. You know, we're seeing work shift, we're seeing new awards, we're seeing different value being placed on our products and our proposals because our customers can count on getting a product on time with the right quality. Expansion of our titanium market position.
Again, leveraging our value proposition, our differentiating performance, and key is our value engineering, right? Our value engineering to help our customers design products, both legacy and new, that are affordable, more affordable and producible. Again, defense targeted growth is a key focus for us. Our Mexico footprint provides a continued margin enhancement, right? The results of the products that we do there through this process, through the team, through the cost structure, you know, we're confident about the margin enhancement available for capacity expansion. That includes both people and square footage, and we have readily available talent there that we work with our provider on. Applications on VersaCore. We're quite active today in our pursuit and our engagement with the OEMs on applications where VersaCore can replace metal bond, composite, and even metal assemblies.
The differentiating point there is equal or better performance and lower cost, which equates to lower price. It ties in nicely with what our OEMs are targeting. With that, I'll introduce Suman, our electronic systems.
Thanks, Jerry. Give you an overview of the key products within our electronic systems business. First with the manufacturing services, our differentiated manufacturing services businesses. We have ruggedized interconnects. These are interconnects that are used in really harsh environments, high reliance applications. They're used in kind of nuclear submarines. They're used in rockets. They're used in missiles. Really applications where you can't have The product fail and in really very harsh environments. We have complex circuit card assemblies. Again, these are used in, you know, products ranging from, again, missiles. These are used in commercial applications as well, which we'll talk about in a little bit, with customers such as Viasat. We do the integrated box build.
This is not just selling an individual interconnect or a circuit card assembly, but combining multiple circuit card assemblies with interconnects and sometimes with third-party products to provide a integrated sub-assembly, which is higher value add. When we do, we have number of instances of that. Examples include like radar boxes, modems or servers for in-flight Wi-Fi, and other electronic boxes that go on missiles, which I'll also talk about in a little bit. Moving to our engineered products. We have cockpit avionics switches. These are push-button switches that are found in the cockpit of a military or commercial aircraft. We have lightning protection systems, which is from our acquisition of LDS a few years ago, where they are the leader in providing protection for radomes, again, on military and commercial aircraft.
They're, you know, they're, they have the best capability and technology on a worldwide basis there. Motors and resolvers. These motors and resolvers are used, you know, again, high reliance, rough environments. Examples include, you see the Mars rover there. Our resolvers are used there. They're also used on missiles for wing deploy actuation systems. Can't fail situations where we have an engineered product which is sole sourced on that platform and is a key element of that product. Finally, RF components, which is mainly microwave switches for various A&D applications. How does all this position ourselves and, you know, how are we positioned in the market with all these products?
From a manufacturing services perspective, we believe we're the leader in this, in a highly specialized mission-critical systems for defense, for harsh environments. We provide a lower cost, trusted domestic footprint for our customers, which is invaluable, especially in today's geopolitical environment. We really think we bring some real value to our customers by providing that. Then, as we look at the future, we have positioned ourselves on the long-term high-growth defense platforms. I'll talk you through some of those next-gen platforms where we have secured positions to drive growth into the future. On the engineered product side, you know, where we have, you know, more proprietary products, we have sole source positions in niche segments of the A&D market. That's really the unique differentiator for those businesses for us.
Finally, across both of these types of businesses, we have six very scalable performance centers that we continue to optimize to maximize revenue and generate maximum margin, and we'll talk about that as well in a little bit. If you look at our revenue breakdown, and a few different cuts are presented here, first by end market breakdown. You can see that our electronic systems business is skewed towards defense, which we call military and space. From a customer's perspective, Raytheon is our largest customer, and we've had great success with them over the last five or six years. We also have sizable businesses with Northrop Grumman and Viasat, which is a rapidly growing customer. From a platform perspective, missiles is a big franchise for us.
Steve talked about that a little bit, and I will go into some of the more detailed platforms in which we have presence. We also have commercial aerospace, which includes the work we do for Viasat, as well as presence on a number of fixed-wing aircraft, including the F-35, F/A-18, F-15EX. Most recently, we are now able to proudly say that we are also supporting the B-21 with our products, which we are very proud of. It kind of is a reflection of the fact that we are viewed by our customers in a way in which they feel like we're the right people to partner with on these next-gen programs, including the sixth generation bomber aircraft. Some more detail now on the sectors and applications for our products.
Missiles and radar, as I said, that is a very strong franchise for us. In particular, when it comes to missile defense and radar systems, we are really very strong. If you look at the slide here, the Patriot missile, where we have product on the missile, as well as the next generation radar system for the Patriot missile defense system, which is the LTAMDS system, where we have a lot of content. If you look at the NASAMS system, which is a mid-range air defense system, some of you may have seen the recent award to Raytheon last week for $1.2 billion for systems that we're going to send to Ukraine.
Uh, we have content both on the Sentinel radar, which is part of the NASAM system, uh, as well as on the AMRAAM missile, which is the missile, missile portion of this, uh, NASAM system. And then you can see the, uh, SM-3 and SM-6, which is part of a, uh, which is also a missile defense, uh-- has a missile defense application. And then we are also on, uh, the THAAD system with the TPY2 radar. Uh, so we have a really strong franchise when it comes to missile defense and radar, which we think is going to be a big growth area going forward and get a lot of attention and, and, and allocation from the defense budget.
Of course, also I, you know, should fail to mention the Tomahawk, which is kind of a key program for our nation and where we have had content for many years. Moving to the military aircraft and UAVs, we have content in the F-35, and I mentioned that F-35 and B-21, we're really proud of that. We do things from, you know, electronic boxes, radar racks, we do interconnects for avionics, fuel and weapon systems, and then we also have engineered products. I talked about the push button switches, which are on in the cockpits of many of these fighter aircraft. These are, you know, sole source positions with our proprietary IP, and is a great business for us.
Similarly, lightning protection, another engineered product business where we provide the diverter strips that protect the radomes, nose, tail, and other radomes on these aircraft from lightning strike. Finally, RF components as well. Third, our naval business. Again, you can see that we have good content on missile defense when it comes to naval, both with the SPY-6 radar, which is kinda the latest and greatest naval radar system that's being installed on our ships, as well as with the Aegis system, Aegis ballistic missile defense system, which is deployed on our destroyers. The combination of which provides us the ballistic missile defense along with the SM-6 missile, right?
The combination of the Aegis system with the SPY-6 radar and the SM-3 missile gives us that ballistic missile defense capability from our ships, we have content on each of those three components, which I think is going to really position us well for the future. Moving to space and communication, we do work with Viasat, which I mentioned a lot, cover that in a little more detail on the next page, but we also have interconnects, as Steve mentioned, on the Artemis program, the solid fuel boosters that are used on the rocket for that Artemis program, we're very proud of that.
Last but not the least, the Commercial and business aviation segment of this business, where again, we have a lot of content with our engineered products, with our switches, including, for example, the start-start switch on the 737 MAX, which we build and is a proprietary switch of ours. Then the lightning protection products, including their beyond lightning diverter strips, we also make suppressors on the 787, and we have good content. These suppressors are protecting the electrical system in a 787 in case the lightning damage kind of penetrates through the skin of the aircraft. This is again a very coveted position for us and should provide us with upside as the 787 program has now restarted and continues to recover.
You kind of got a flavor of the products, the revenue mix. What's going to drive growth going forward? Clearly, the growing defense budgets, as Steve pointed out, is going to be a strong tailwind for us. Beyond that, what are we doing proactively to drive this growth? First, the theme of defense prime offloading, which Steve has mentioned on the last few quarterly calls, and really is a big driver for us. You can see the targets that we've laid out for ourselves, and we've been able to hit the numbers for, you know, last year and this year, and well-positioned to hit it going forward. You can see some of the examples of the successes we've had. We really have a very strong value proposition when it comes to defense prime offloading.
It's a win-win both for the defense prime and it's a win for us. There is enough value there to be shared between them taking work off from a higher cost location, higher overhead location, to a lower cost location that we have and with lower overhead structure. I think that's going to continue to be a driver of success for us and for growth. Second is moving to higher value level assemblies. Not just providing, as I said, the individual interconnects or circuit card assemblies, but providing integrated systems. Two examples out here. First, Viasat, where we are providing the server and modem boxes for the in-flight Wi-Fi.
Not just the circuit cards, but a full system that is plug and play for Viasat, and it can take, you know, both for Viasat and the other example that I'll give with Raytheon, this move to higher level assemblies can take us from providing products that are several thousand dollars per unit to ship set values which are several tens of thousands of dollars. Really is a good driver for us, you know, as we move to these higher level assemblies.
The Raytheon example is for the SM-3 and SM-6 missile, where we are taking several complex circuit card assemblies, along with all the interconnects on that missile, combining it with the actuation system from a third party and providing an integrated unit that is controlling the nozzles of the rocket in that missile, and is controlling the direction of that rocket. Again, high reliance cannot fail application where we are providing a higher level assembly, and bring value to us as well as reduce complexity for our customer. The third element that's going to drive growth is our positioning on next-gen platforms.
You saw a lot of these on the previous page, again, I'd like to emphasize our strong position on missile defense and radar, which we think is going to be a growing business going forward. Our, the way we've positioned ourselves with hypersonics, partnering with multiple large OEMs and multiple programs. I think we are well-positioned to benefit from the growth in hypersonics. Then on fixed-wing and military aircraft as well, you know, you look at two really large programs on the fixed-wing military aircraft side. We have content in both the JSF and the B-21.
On the naval side with the nuclear submarine and the work we do on the destroyers, we really think we have a good portfolio mix, which is in the right segments, in the right platforms to drive growth for the future. Now that I've talked about growth, you're, I'm sure, also interested in understanding how we're going to grow margins, right? Chris is going to, in a little bit, take you through, our margin targets, for Ducommun as a whole. A couple of things that I wanted to highlight in terms of what we're actually going to do to get to those margin targets. One is gaining operating scale at our performance centers. A few months ago, we had a press release talking about Appleton getting to a $100+ million in revenue this year.
That is really a great example of a performance center that is moving towards an optimum state. 77,000 sq ft facility, more than 300 employees working three shifts, high level of automation and robotics that really help drive, are maximizing the revenue out of the square footage, out of the people, and are able to and also driving higher profits. That's the model that we are replicating in our other performance centers. Huntsville is also at a $100+ million, and then we have our other two manufacturing services performance centers that are kind of in that $50 million-$100 million. Our intention is to take those up to more optimum levels to drive margin. Then, the second element is to drive cost down, right? Both Steve and Jerry alluded to this.
We have this facility which is being expanded in Guaymas, Mexico. Not only will it be used on the structures side of our business, but also on the electronics side, where we're going to move selected interconnect work from our U.S . Locations, which are already lower cost, but we'll move it to even lower cost, and benefit from that, you know, not just the labor arbitrage, but also the access to the great talent pool that is more readily available there to help us. You know, what's not on this page, what I'm gonna talk about when I get to my M&A section is the accretion from acquisitions, and that's going to also drive margin enhancement going forward in the electronics business. I'd be remiss not to talk about Raytheon when we talk about our electronics business.
As you saw on the previous slide, they are our largest customer, and we've had really great success with them. We signed a strategic supplier agreement with them in July of 2019, and we've gone from strength to strength with them. You can see from $46 million in revenue back in 2016 to $120 million last year. This is just the legacy Raytheon business, not the UTC portions, where we also have a good position and significant revenues from. With that, I'll summarize electronic systems for you. You know, what are the key highlights? On the manufacturing services side, we have positioned ourselves really well on the next-gen platforms. We'll continue to execute on our prime, defense prime offloading strategy, which is really working well.
We'll continue to build scale at our performance centers to drive margin enhancement and move to lower cost locations where appropriate, again, to further enhance margin. Finally, one statistic that I want to leave you with on the electronic system side is the growth in our backlog. If you look at the growth from 2017 to our latest third quarter 2022, we've had a 75% growth in backlog. Compare that with growth in revenue in the 12-month period, 2017 versus LTM third quarter of 2022, we've had 30% revenue growth.
You can see kind of the implied book-to-bill ratio there, the continued strength in us building up our order book and our backlog is going to be a strong positive for us going forward. With that, I'll move now to our M&A strategy. What are we looking to do on a day-to-day basis on the M&A front? We're looking to acquire proprietary product businesses, engineered product businesses that are primarily focused on aerospace and defense. We like businesses where we have a significant runway to create value for Ducommun and our shareholders. Where does that take us? That takes us, as Steve mentioned, to a portfolio at Ducommun, which has an increasing amount of engineered product content. The target that we have laid out for ourselves there is 25% of revenue by 2027.
We are at, you know, 15% now, having gotten to that from, as you know, Steve said, a much lower number five years ago. As most of you know, acquiring these engineered product businesses automatically, in most cases, provides us access to aftermarket, which we really find attractive. We intend to grow our aftermarket as we grow our engineered product businesses, both through the acquisitions as well as focusing on our organic growth of aftermarket in our existing engineered product businesses to drive and get to the 15% aftermarket mix of our revenue by 2027. What do we do with these acquisitions that we execute on? How do we ensure that we derive the value that we see in an acquisition up front? It's fairly simple.
We have a detailed programmatic approach to kind of taking those synergy opportunities that were identified, those value creation opportunities that were identified up front in the deal process, and operationalizing them into discrete, actionable items with, you know, specific accountability to individuals, and then tracking them on a regular basis to ensure execution. Sounds fairly simple. It's not very difficult to do, but just requires that rigor and discipline and can lead to great success with acquisitions. What are those value creation opportunities that we typically see in the deals that we do? They tend to be more on the revenue side and, you know, a lot of companies are gonna hesitate on kind of signing up for revenue synergies. We've had great success with it and are proud of that.
You know, there are three buckets in which we see those. One is driving share gain after buying these acquisitions. How do we do that, right? We buy companies which have got strong engineering capability. We invest further in that engineering capability. We invest further in the sales resources. We invest further in distribution where needed or adjust the distribution strategy of the business to optimize growth and are able to, in many cases, fulfill unmet needs in the market. You may have a large incumbent supplier that has a significant share in the market, is not really very customer-friendly, does not provide that level of engineering support that is needed by the customer when they're going through new product development, and we're able to fill that void.
We're also able to fill, you know, grow by investing in new product development. A great example of that is Nobles, which Steve alluded to with the Stryker program. They were the leader in ammunition chutes when we bought them, the worldwide leader in ammunition chutes. They had a strategy which we post-acquisition helped them execute to move into broader ammunition handling systems. Again, this is an example where an ammunition chute, which can be several thousand dollars, versus an ammunition handling system, which can be tens of thousands of dollars. Now they were able to, with the investment we made in engineering resources and in driving that development program, move from just being a chute provider to establishing a new product line in a new segment for ammunition handling.
A great success with the Stryker program, which is a huge Stryker upgrade program, which is a huge program where we are providing a latest and greatest technology in a Linkless Ammunition Handling System, which is far superior than, you know, similar product from competition and has really helped the Nobles business exceed our projections. Finally, given the nature of this business and the value that we're bringing to our customers, we want to make sure that we are pricing our product appropriately. So we constantly monitor that and ensure that we're benefiting and getting the pricing that we deserve for the value that we provide. A little bit about the actual acquisitions that we've done in the past five years.
Lightning Diversion Systems, which I referred to, they're the leader in lightning protection for radomes. We bought that business for $60 million back in 2017. Certified Thermoplastics, which is amongst the less than handful of companies globally that can extrude these difficult resins for aerospace and defense applications. We've had great success with them. Nobles Worldwide, which I already talked about. Our most recent acquisition, MagSeal, which is the only magnetic seal provider for aerospace and defense applications. There are other companies that do it for industrial applications, no one is able to kind of take that technology to the level needed in an aerospace and defense application, and it's a great business. What are the common attributes across all of these businesses that we've bought?
Just to reiterate again, focus on aerospace and defense. They're engineered products. They have significant sole source positions. They have sizable aftermarket and access to that aftermarket. They're leading brands in those niche segments in which they play. Each of them provided us a runway for growth so that we can create further value for Ducommun and the shareholder, our shareholders. You've heard about the strategy. You've heard how we do execution on individual transactions. You've heard about the specific deals that we've done. How have we actually fared in terms of metrics? That's something I know that a lot of you have wanted to hear for some time, and we've laid out three items here. First, the EBITDA targets that we set ourselves for each of these transactions in our deal models.
If we look at all four of these acquisitions from the time of acquisition through to the end of this year, we are on track to exceed the EBITDA on a cumulative basis across these transactions. There are some puts and takes. Clearly, commercial aerospace has been softer than one would have expected in these last two years. We've been able to offset where we've had weakness in commercial aerospace with growth in defense, so that overall, we have exceeded our EBITDA targets across these four transactions. How have we done in terms of return on the capital we are investing? Are we deploying our capital in a smart way to generate good return for our shareholders?
If you look at our ROIC for all the transactions that have closed for more than four months, that's the first three transactions, we have double-digit ROIC for each one of those transactions already. You know, some of which are within the last two or three years, which we think is really good. I mean, we've not. You know that's driven, one, by the fact that we haven't overpaid for those transactions, and two, we've been able to, through our systematic approach, execute on the EBITDA expansion targets that we had for each of those transactions, so that we're able to generate this strong ROIC on each of those transactions. Finally, accretion, right?
If you look at the multiple that we paid for these businesses on an LTM basis when we bought them, versus the LTM through third quarter of this year, there has been a 4x reduction in the multiple for these four transactions that we have done. Again, a sign that, you know, we're buying companies at reasonable multiples and then aggressively growing the EBITDA to reduce the effective multiple that we've paid for them, so that kind of relative to where we trade these deals become accretive. With that, kind of summarizing, where are we today in terms of M&A and what's our outlook? 2022 has been a slow year, as all of you know, on the M&A front.
A lot of the businesses that we look at, as engineered product businesses, they generate strong positive cash flow even in a downturn and in tough environments. The owners of these businesses are not going to sell in an uncertain environment. I think that's kind of driven a little bit of the slowness in 2022, but we are beginning to see things warm up. We're seeing more activity in the market over the past few weeks and months, and we do feel good about being able to continue to execute on our M&A game plan and do one or more transactions every year. For every transaction we do to aggressively execute on our EBITDA plan so that we can drive shareholder value. With that, I will pass it on to Chris Wampler, our CFO, for the financial outlook.
Thanks, Suman. Good morning, everyone. All right. Before I jump in with a quick summary of where we've been and where we're going, just a quick comment. I mean, I've been with the company about 10 years. Steve joined almost six years ago, you know, the board clearly identified somebody with a huge energy and somebody bringing that sort of growth mentality to the business, and it was critical. Once he got here, I mean, the culture changed in terms of increased focus on managing what we can control, working through that, being aware of the other things that are out there, and really that accountability and that customer focus. You can see that served us well over the past several years. It's gonna be necessary as we, along with everybody else, sort of move forward through this, through this environment.
If you take a look at the total shareholder return, the TSR, it goes back just not long after Steve joined. You can see, you know, we've got the various compares there with Ducommun on the blue line, and then the Russell 2000. We've got our peers, the Dow Jones Industrial and then the NYSE Composite. You can see as we escalated through, you know, those first few years as some of the changes were being made and some of the ramp up on commercial was happening, that's where we got some nice separation, and then have managed through, you know, pretty well here through, you know, the last couple years as we got through the end of 2021.
You can see from, you know, over that four-year period, if you look at where we're at versus any of those indexes, as well as where we're at with our peers, you know, Ducommun, an investment in Ducommun has been a good investment. Take a step back to, just to look at sort of what's changed over this time horizon. You know, you think about this, and if you look at all these metrics that are out there and these 5 that we've put on here, I think if you...
All of them except for revenue, if there was no pandemic, I think we'd say, "Okay, that's probably pretty decent, you know, results when you think about market cap, when you think about enterprise value, adjusted EBITDA with 70% and 400 basis points on the margin." The fact that there was a pandemic in the middle of it sort of adds a level of difficulty to it. The thing that certainly, you know, the 25% there, a big impact from the pandemic for the reasons that, you know, Steve, Suman, and Jerry all sort of alluded to as they've gone through things here.
You know, if we hadn't had the pandemic and we're sitting here today, you know, we're talking about a business that's probably $850+ million on the top line. That's our reality.
We've sort of had to, like I said, manage through and take care of the things we can control to try to put our best foot forward and continue to serve customers and shareholders. If you look at some of the financial data, and Steve hit on sort of the revenue trend here, but if you look at where we're at from an adjusted EBITDA percentage and part of our, you know, part of our story here as we sort of ran through the growth of the commercial super cycle up towards 720 in 2019, and then the MAX challenges along with the pandemic sort of bringing us back down. Again, two things. One, that decrease, you know, if the 720 to the 630, it's two pieces.
I mean, it's a significant commercial decrease, and then it's our defense business coming up to sort of get us net back to that compare. Doing that and still keeping adjusted EBITDA percentages, you know, on an expansion basis during that stretch, was critical for the company and sort of kept us that foothold so that we can continue to move forward from a good spot. Additionally, you know, from a net debt perspective, debt as Suman has executed and the company's executed all the acquisitions, you know, the net debt still in the mid $200s as we sort of went through the last several years. You get to where our trailing net debt-EBITDA, our leverage sort of running north of 3% or right around 3% .
As Steve talked about a little earlier, we had our sale lease back, you know, at the end of last year, which helped us not only pivot and get MagSeal, but also pay down some debt and put us in a good position right here as we sort of finish 2021 with a leverage of about 2.3%, which is certainly the lowest that we've had in many years. If we look at where we're running this year, sort of similar there as well. On the overall financial performance, you know, we'll look at margin, adjusted EBITDA, operating income margins, and you can see the pattern sort of similar here. You know, nice improvements in the business through the commercial super cycle.
As we sort of flexed over and picked up the defense strength as well, that's what got us into, you know, into the low 20%s with the gross margin. Getting the EBITDA up to 14%, and then our adjusted operating income running right around 8%. How'd we get there? Again, it's been referred to in different parts of the presentation today. You think about what we're doing from a cost structure, the high-performance culture, some of the cost takeouts, pricing, and the product mix, that's what's helped us sort of get this foothold of operating performance.
This is a key point of the, you know, of what Jerry and Suman were talking about a little bit with the, with the customer base and what we've been doing as well, you know, with the, you know, with our backlog. At the bottom of the slide, you can see, I mean, customers speak with orders at the end of the day. Business several years ago was a backlog of about $640 million. Certainly a lot of, a lot of change in that as we now are in the mid-$900s . How did we get there? You can see, again, it's this slide in particular just demonstrates some of the benefits of our diversification.
It also highlights some of the emphasis as Steve got here and said, we've got to sort of get back after and rebuild some of our defense business as well. You're gonna see how that plays in because we had the commercial super cycle that was happening. We picked up that backlog as we went into 2017, then you saw the balance of commercial and defense sort of in 2018 as that business started to come back some, which then played out well over these last few years. The defense business then continuing to ramp up really carried the day through the pandemic on the backlog as the commercial challenges were there. Now flexing back with commercial, driving a little more of that, of that growth.
That's what keeps us now, you know, with the near and all-time high backlog, very strong place with, you know, with both businesses in a good spot. We'll shift though from looking backwards and, you know, look ahead with the key here being, as this says, significant long-term value creation opportunities at Ducommun. You know, as you've heard from Steve and you've heard from Jerry and you've heard from Suman, you know, hopefully you can feel and capture, you know, the type of energy and confidence we have about what's ahead of us over the long term. In VISION 2027, you know, you look at this, you say, okay, where are we at today? Where are we going?
You know, we're gonna, as Steve has signaled on the Q3 earnings call, you know, we're gonna be high single digits, for the top-line growth, so we'll end up, you know, north of $700 million for the year. Over the horizon, you know, we anticipate that going to $950 million and toward $1 billion in growth. There is some level of acquisition in there that we'll also talk about, you know, on the assumptions. That organic growth along with the acquisitions, you're getting us on that trajectory. When you look at the mix, and we've already sort of seen it again flex, which has been very helpful. You know, now we're back to more of a 60% defense lead, with commercial aero more like 35%.
We see that continuing to move a little more back toward commercial, but still in the 55%-60% defense over the next several years. With that, you know, we see that being a pretty key enabler of getting our top line scale that we're gonna need to continue to drive the business, satisfy customers, drive margin. Overall, that's gonna take us to about a 6% or 7% CAGR through the period. You take a look at where we're at from an adjusted EBITDA percentage and adjusted OI margins. Both Jerry and Suman and Steve, all of them talking about ways we're gonna continue to do this.
You know, if you look at what we're gonna do, you know, we've certainly, again, managing what we can control, sort of seeing what else is happening in the, in the world and trying to adjust to that as we go. With that being said, we're running about 14% on the adjusted EBITDA margin. We anticipate that moving up toward 18% as we go through toward VISION 2027, which is about a 350 basis points- 450 basis points improvement. On the adjusted operating income, we're running at roughly 9%, and we're looking at continuing the improvement there up toward about 45% of an increase to get us up near 13% in VISION 2027. Again, it's as it lists on here, you know, it's scale.
You know, it's the acquisitions that Suman was talking about, which are critical to our acceleration of the growth expansion. It's the pricing, which is always part of the game. It's facility consolidation, which, you know, has been a newer piece of it this year to help us drive where we think we need to be, and then the related cost reductions and the other improvements that'll come along with that. When you think about the model that we just sort of walked through, these are just a few things that are underpinning the logic. Defense business is strong. You know, it's gonna run out there at $525 + on that side of it. Commercial aerospace, as Jerry talked about, getting fully leveraged there. Titanium leadership at $325 million.
We've got about $75 million in there for a placeholder on the acquisitions. I talked a little bit about the mix, and then that's where we end up with the adjusted EBITDA. I got a few other slides here just to share on some other. I mean, they're more topical. When you think about, when we think about investors and people watching our company over the next stretch of time, things that are, I think, important notes and important things to take away. You know, one of them is that we believe we've got a significant working capital cash flow opportunity here. You know, when we look at, again, what we could control, what we thought was happening in 2019 over the next few years played out very differently.
Reacting to that and trying to put our right foot forward with customers, et cetera, and put ourselves in position, brought with it some different things. I mean, number one, there was just immediate, you know, sort of change from the level of velocity on the performance and the production rates that was happening on the commercial side of the business. That had an impact on what happened with our, what we had with our inventory, and sort of put us in that spot. From there, we had to make decisions on how to produce to go forward to hit what we're gonna need on this recovery.
There was some level loading of where, how we're gonna produce to sort of get to those places knowing that there's some challenges over labor and over, you know, over supply chain, et cetera, that we just wanna feel like we've got our best foot forward on controlling that. You know, and lastly is just to make sure we're ready for the customer drop-ins, other things that they may need and feeling like in a tough material market that we've got the inventory that we're ready to move forward with. That keeps us in a better position to be opportunistic and take advantage of those when others can't. With that, you know, that's what's has us sort of where we're at today. What do we expect?
We expect to get to normalized cash flow, you know, certainly throughout this period. Our goal of 100% conversion of free cash flow to net income still there. You know, believe we're gonna step toward that in 2023 and in 2024 and on. We think we can run at that level or beyond. How are we gonna get there? You know, continuing to support the growth in the business. We've got a, you know, working capital investment that's there today. We think we can leverage that. You know, basically move forward the next couple years without having to put that incremental working capital investment there. You look at where we're at as we sort of finish 2022, what will that translate to? You know, that translates to about a $30 million increase in cash flow in the next year.
Then you go out a couple years, and it's $40+ million . Just a couple minutes then on our credit facilities and our interest and also our hedge. We did take advantage of, you know, the environment and sort of where we were with our debt facilities earlier this year. The sale lease back, which has gotten mentioned a few times, you know, put us in a position with a very reasonable, you know, very reasonable debt situation. As we worked through the early part of this year, we were staring at loans that were out there. Their debt maturities were out there in 2024 and 2025.
Just opportunistically, we went out and got in place, basically a Term Loan A for $250 million with a $200 million revolver and took out our other Term Loan A, existing Term Loan A, and then our Term Loan B, which was at certainly a much higher interest rate. We got that done in July. That's where we're at. Certainly, the backdrop on interest for everybody's been very dynamic and unpredictable, you know, over the last two quarters and even going forward. This is just really to try to help everybody calibrate on what's the common situation, what might the interest mean to them, or what might the interest rate environment mean to them.
Really what you're gonna see is we're gonna finish this year with this scenario we put in here. We're gonna finish this year with about $12 million. About $12 million on our interest line this year. Assuming what we have in here, which you can see on the, on the table over here, sort of the assumptions we have as far as where the one-month SOFR rate is. You look at what our spread is on our debt, which is now 1.625% at the leverage we're at. You can see that we've got, basically next year we would run at about a 7% unhedged rate. That would take us from about 12% up to $12 million up to about $18 million, which is a roughly 40% headwind.
What we also did in November of last year was put in place a forward hedge that kicks in in the beginning of 2024 for $150 million notional, and that flips $150 million from floating to fixed. That'll take that piece of our debt down to 3.33%, which ironically then sort of takes it back towards, in this scenario, takes it back toward a $12 million interest line. That'll exist, that hedge will exist out there, 2024 through 2031. It puts us into that type of a hedge situation.
You know, with that being said, we feel like we're what we did has us in a good position to support the business with this facility as well as the current business, as well as the growth strategy we have moving ahead. Lastly, it's gotten some discussion already from Steve and others on the restructure. This is just one more time to just put it back in front of everybody. You know, I would say it this way. When you back up to the end of the Q1 call, we talked about restructure. Steve mentioned it on that call.
You know, we were doing that because we knew we had certain situations in front of us, and what we were trying to do with our Thailand facility, for example, as far as just pulling back out of there and moving that supply chain, you know, back onto, you know, back over to the U.S., which was critical. As the year went on, and then when you're in a restructure window, a lot of times you just continually assess what's going on and what does it look like? Where are we headed? That's what brought up and got us to where we made the decisions Steve talked about with Monrovia and Maryville. We think about the long-term strategy, what's the best place for us to be, and that's what we've got going on there.
All of that being said, you know, we're gonna end up with over the program, which we believe we're done with the footprint type of conversations, and then, you know, we're in the final parts of sort of the other restructure activities. It's $20 million-$26 million over the whole program, getting that payback within a couple years and $11 million-$13 million annualized savings. At the end of that, he talked about Monrovia as well. We'll anticipate selling, you know, selling the assets. With that being said, I'm gonna turn it back over to Steve for closing remarks.
Great. Okay. Thank you, Chris.
Yeah.
Okay, everybody, thanks for hanging in there, okay? I really appreciate it. I know it's a lot of information, and I appreciate everybody listening, and thanks for coming again and also being on our electronic feed. Just last slide here. Just to kinda regroup here. I talked about the proprietary product businesses when I first started, okay? Very, very important to our future. Very, very important to shareholders. We've done a nice job the last five-plus years, okay? We're gonna continue to do that. Suman talked about M&A. I think we have a very good plan. That's a big part of it. We feel good about commercial aero. We'd like it to go a little faster, right?
I think we all would, especially on the Boeing side, but we face reality as it is, not as we wish it were, right? That's kinda where we are, but we have really good prospects there. I think our Defense business is real good, and I've showed you that chart at the beginning, just kind of where we went on defense over the last couple years. Anything over $100 million a quarter is a good number for us, and it's gonna continue to build up. I talked about first tier aerospace. Our manufacturing services businesses, we've went over those, so I think that's clear. This cost reduction, you know, is a big deal, okay? Those cost reductions are real. Again, you know, Monrovia is 9-acre factory. 9 acres. I mean, that's a big, big footprint, okay?
We're gonna close it, and we're gonna move it to lower-cost facilities, and we're gonna sell the building, and we're gonna sell the land. There's gonna be no headwind associated with that, 'cause Gardena, there's headwind, at least for the next couple years, okay? Talked about that. M&A, you heard from Suman. He's the right person. He's doing a great job with it, him and the team, our whole team. No disasters, right? 'Cause everybody gets nervous about M&A, right? You know. You hear all these stories, and then it doesn't come through. Well, these four deals have been all good for us and for our shareholders, and we're proud of that. You know, we have our ESG report out, okay? It's on our website.
I think for a company our size, small cap company, I think we do a, I gotta go above average job on ESG. We do have a report. For your investors and people you're talking to, that is available, and we continue to take that. We take that for real. You know, this is not just, you know, corporate advertising on ESG. We're really trying to do better things for our environment and for the places that we live, our neighborhoods. Okay. Again, thanks for hanging in there. We're gonna go to Q&A. I'm gonna join the team over here. Michael, you have a microphone, correct?
Yes.
Okay.
Anyone have questions?
All right. You gonna make all the mics live? Okay. Come on, Ken.
Yeah. Hi, Ken Herbert with RBC. Steve and Chris, maybe just to start off, when we look at this relative to what you gave last year, you know, you sort of brought your top-line CAGR down a little bit. Obviously, it's apples and oranges somewhat in terms of the timeframe, and you sort of held the margins flat at the 18%, 2025 and 2027 now. Can you just walk through the moving pieces of that on the top line and the margin obviously, but the top line maybe in particular? Is that slower pace of recovery on aerospace relative to what you had last year? I think when you gave the margin targets last year, maybe you hadn't fully factored in the restructuring yet.
Sure.
Maybe if you can just bridge sort of last year to this year and a few-
Yeah, absolutely.
The key pieces that changed.
Absolutely. I'll take margin first. We talked, I think, May 2021, you know, with all sincerity, and, you know, to be honest, we thought Boeing would be in a much better place, okay? That's, that's the biggest rock in that story, okay? We felt we'd be 38%, 40%... I mean, we'd be, you know, really in a much better place. 787 as well, you know, those types of things. Like I said earlier in my remarks, you know, Boeing is very, very important to Ducommun. I think we've gone through hopefully the worst of it, and I think the next couple years, you know, are gonna get better. You know, we were more hopeful, and we put more of our plans in for Boeing to be stronger earlier. That, and that just didn't happen, okay?
I think that's the biggest answer, I think the most relevant for shareholders. We think eventually it's gonna get there, it didn't get to where we want it to be. Chris, you wanna talk about margin?
Yeah. Just here with absolutely, Steve. On the margin side, Ken, I mean, number one, I think, you know, we would have assumed just a stronger uptick as we went through the short term here. That was before sale leaseback as well. You had some headwind in there over that horizon.
As we've gone through this year, I think as everybody, you know, we just had the Truist conference a couple days ago talking through that with many investors, the dynamic of, you know, just what everybody's seeing in terms of how quickly some of this recovery is happening on the commercial side, you know, how things are happening on the defense side, and then how we're able to put that through our facilities, it's just kept us from really stepping up probably quite the way we would have said those first few years. Things have moved out a little bit.
The long-term view of where we're gonna land and how we're gonna get there, that's part of the reason you're seeing, you know, the actions we have, 'cause we still feel like that's the right answer to get to performance like that, and these are the things we think we need to do to get there.
Yeah. Just one thing on the margins again. you know, we were looking at a little bit different world in 2021. In May, we really thought, you know, we were gonna get there, and unfortunately, it's gonna get pushed. That's the end of that answer. Okay. Yes, sir. We're good. We got two more. Okay. Mike, please. Yeah.
Mike Ciarmoli with Truist Securities. Chris or Steve, just looking at the longer term interest rate assumptions. I think you said there was a placeholder in there for maybe $75 million of acquired revenue. You've got that hedge in place. We've got the interest going up, then dropping down. How should we think about, you know, the capital deployment and interest? You're gonna have the two facility sales, too. Target leverage over that timeframe. It seems like there could be a lot of moving pieces.
Yeah. Want to kick it off, Steve?
Chris, let's kick it off. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, you know, what doesn't change is the fact that we're, you know, pretty simplistic and minimalized on the clear capital spend. The footprint we have in place, we've talked about for a few years, even with these repositionings of Berryville and Monrovia, still has us out there and able to support our growth, you know, through this horizon we're talking about with some incremental sort of expansions in a few of these facilities that we highlighted, but no major expansion there on the capital side. Which then leads us to, you know, the acquisition side, you know, that Suman walked through.
You know, I think in the interest rate environment we are, I mean, in the leverage that we have, we just, we've got to be, you know, find the right ones. That's, you know, that's what Suman has been able to do over and over. We still see that that's why it's still built into the model. We still think we'll be able to do that and keep that going. Having said that, our appetite to lever up probably is a little less than what it was before, but getting to the right assets and it's still gonna be key, and I know that's what we'll work towards.
Yeah, Mike, just great point about, you know, it's a bit dynamic, right? You know, we want to be upfront about what we see, you know, but if we do this, you know, sale in California, which we're anticipating to do, as well as we're also gonna sell Arkansas, which is not gonna be anything, I think, great. You know, it's gonna be a bit dynamic. We're hoping that we don't wanna pay any more in interest rates. Let's put it that way. You know what I mean? You know, we wanna be upfront with everybody going in. It's gonna be dynamic, and I know Suman's gonna work hard as well as far as, you know, if we're gonna do something, which we like to do, we're gonna be very disciplined like we have on our acquisitions.
I think his report out. You know, we can't give you everything. I know people might want some more, but I think what we gave you today at least shows you that, you know, the money that we used was well spent.
Thanks. Brendan Hartman from Royce Funds.
Oh, yeah.
Steve, you mentioned in your opening remarks you guys have done pretty good job with supply chain constraints relative to some others, especially in the electronic space. Can you just drill down into that a little more and talk about maybe where the pain points are? Importantly, as you look at the aggressive forecast for Boeing and Airbus to ramp production as well as the increase in defense spending, you know, are you gonna be able to meet that demand?
Yeah.
where might.
Yeah, it's a good question. I know there's a lot of discussion around supply chain. First of all, just to let you know, we do, we have commodity management, right? We have a commodity vice president commodity. We have a vice president of commodity management or, you know. We look at everything, you know, titanium sheets, okay, you know, circuit card materials, semiconductor. You know, we drill down when we're very granular about how we manage our supply chain. You know, one of the things that, and it's not great sometimes for our cash flow, but, you know, during the pandemic, we didn't use a lot of titanium sheet that we had, right? You know, we're a little bit lucky, too, as far as that goes.
Systematically, what we do is we take a commodity management approach, okay. We're five levels deep on it, okay. We're not a $10 billion company, so, you know, we don't with the complexity is, even though it's there, it's not, you know, that high. We're also in a situation where, you know, we do strategic buying for certain products, okay. 'Cause we know that we're a little bit, I wouldn't say guerrilla tactics, but we're a little bit more fast on our feet when it comes to, you know, being able to be a little quicker around bigger companies. That's how we kinda get our margins up or we get our share up. We like that. Again, what I said in my remarks is that I'm proud of my team.
Jerry leads that, is that we're able to, you know, manage most things. We do. It's not just through luck. It's not just like, oh, you know, we didn't have automotive chips, so we did better, right? 'Cause we could get these. It's really about systematically driving the business through commodity management and then being smart about what we buy. You know, we do, you know, we'll go out a little bit if we feel like, you know what? Just to be on the safe side, we need to buy some extra titanium sheet, we will. Thank you for the question. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Next question.
Thank you. It's Douglas of WPC Capital. Just looking at your financial reports, the contract capital is like a big prominent on your balance sheet. You've got $160 million net there. It's about a third of your capital, and your customers are big and prosperous. Why are you having to bear that burden? With an increased interest rate environment, the opportunity cost is going up pretty dramatically on that capital. Is there a way to reset that relationship?
Yeah. It's a good question. It's absolutely a challenge. It's something we certainly know about. You guys wanna-
Yeah, I mean-
You know.
Let me chime in first. Jerry absolutely can jump in too. You know, part of that is, is again, there's an element of that contract assets which is us choosing to build toward that longer term for the customer. You know, they're gonna take product when they're gonna take it. We know what we need to deliver or what we forecast to deliver over a period of time. Some of that is us saying, "Okay, we wanna be able to do that so that we're not beholden to can we get the labor when they want it?" It's more puts us in control a little bit, but it is an investment that we've, that we've got on the balance sheet.
It's part of that working capital, you know, that I alluded to, that we feel like, okay, with where we're at now, we gotta lever the business up without further investing in that working capital, and those contract assets are a key part of it.
One of the key things that we're doing today, I would say over the last year, a lot more emphasis, especially going forward, is on progress billing. You know, we're very, very actively always looking at the horizon as far as lead times, titanium, electronic components, all the various things that we buy. We're very vertical, right? On the structure side, we buy raw material, right? That's the essence of our supply chain. The majority of that is with Airbus and with Boeing. It's the con bid process with Airbus, it's TMX with Boeing, right? We provide ourselves a horizon. We get those forecasts from Boeing and Airbus, we put our take on that, right? We're always more optimistic in the rate than our customer is.
Always, right? We do that for two reasons, because we wanna be prepared for that optimistic reality, but we also do that because sporadically our work shares increase. You know, we're 50/50, more times than not, the other side of the 50 isn't performing, and our customer comes to us, and we're there, and we're ready, right? We do that. That drives inventory. On the electronic side, more specifically, we have many opportunities for progress billing, right? We have, what? Performance-based payments from Raytheon, right? They like that. We like that. As a practice now, we're doing this. We look ahead, and our customers don't always order at lead time, right? 'Cause lead time's kind of a variable based on the market of the supply chain.
We'll look forward, and we'll project that, you know, maybe an 18-month lead time our orders might fill in because we're under contract. It's just when those orders firm up, might not firm up for six months prior to that release. We on our own have internal sales orders, and we'll launch that. We're constantly doing that. We're looking for it. We haven't been burned once yet in doing an internal sales orders where that didn't come to fruition. When we do that, we carry that inventory, right? What we're doing now, and our customers have all said to us, those that we do that with, that that's absolutely a differentiating customer service value add that we provide to them, and quote unquote, "No others do that." In doing so, we have opportunities for progress billing. We were reluctant in the past.
We're doing much more of it now. I'll say surprisingly enough, we're not getting a lot of pushback because we're protecting the customer, we're protecting the supply chain, and we're carrying that inventory on hand.
I will say this, it's too high.
Mm-hmm.
Okay?
Yeah.
We understand that. It's a good question. I will just say this, it just popped into my head, is that, you know, I've been at this company now for close to six years. When I came in, it was a real turnaround, or it was kind of a mess, and a lot of our customers were pretty unhappy with us, okay? For good reasons, okay? You know, I was at the Reagan National Defense Forum last weekend. I was at the AAA meeting in November. You know, I was at the Paris, the London Air Show. You know, I've met with all our customers in the last three or four months, I would just tell you that we have never been in such a good position with all our customers. I mean, everybody.
I mean, you know, 100% on time, great quality. You know, you can see it in the backlog. I just wanna make that point that, you know, I understand your question. It's a good one. In certain ways, it has paid off.
Good. Just before I turn this one.
No, question please. Yeah, that's fine.
Have you commented on the increased content or what your ship set would be on the A320 if they get to the higher level, and your participation on the titanium side is much higher?
It's gonna be more. I mean, it's tough for me to really say, but I mean, you know, again, we saw this previously, obviously it's in a lull now, right? A little bit 'cause they can't get engines. You know, they have an internal operation, okay, which is, you know, okay, that's what they have. You know, the Airbus built vertically integrated at the beginning because, you know, they want jobs, right? There's jobs in France there. They have a couple small French suppliers that have been with them since the A300 flew in 1983, right? They're not going anywhere. What happens is that, you know, they can't deliver. We're 100% on time.
All of a sudden they say, "Hey, you're 50% on A320 for this to sell part. We need 100 for the next six months, or we need 100 for the next year." That's what's gonna happen. It's gonna go up. I'd be... I'm a little reluctant to give you a number, but it's gonna be more.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
I'll stay tuned. Thank you.
Stay on me on that, okay?
All right, thank you.
Next question.
Do you have anything else coming in from our guests on the line?
No, we're good for now.
Can we do a few of those?
No, we're good for now.
We have no one. No questions?
Not at this time.
Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I didn't hear you. Okay. Great.
All right.
Okay.
Welcome back.
Hi again.
Let's give you a moment, Ken.
Thanks. Steve, how should we think about margins in 2023 and 2024? It sounds like, you know, we've been sort of stabilized at this 14% range?
Yeah.
for a few years now.
Yeah.
Do we see much of an inflection in 2023 with the restructuring and everything going on, or is 2023 at similar levels with maybe that more inflection in 2024 and beyond?
Yeah. Ken, it's a great question. I think more the same, I think, in 2023. A big increase in... I think the margins are gonna be really good. Just to let you know, it's not easy to close factories, as you know, and usually the payback is three years, at least at the big company, large cap. At least that was my experience. Three years, close a factory and get the payback. We're gonna try to get less than two, you know, the payback, right? I think that's gonna happen. We're gonna see a lot of that coming in because of the two-year window. More in 2024.
I mean, 2023, you know, I think is gonna be decent, but I think 2024, you're gonna see, you know, major, I think, a very good increases. I mean, just from alone, just, and again, I brought this up earlier, and I know you've gotten a lot of information this morning. We have Monrovia. It's a nice plant. You know, they've had their ups and downs a little bit, right? You know, but they're maybe $50, $55 million. You know, not that big, you know, but okay. Maybe 170 people, and they run one shift, maybe two. Not that much activity. I mean, our electric bill alone is $1.5 million.
$1.5 mil-- That's just turn on the lights and run some autoclaves. That is gonna go right to the bottom line. Okay? You know what I mean? Those are the kinda big thing. On top of the sale, on top of, you know, doing things in Mexico, the productivity. I hate to say it, productivity is better there, okay? You know what I mean? That's, you know, just our learnings. You know, we get more for less. You know, I feel very good about, you know, I feel very... It's a great question. I think 2024 is more where we're heading.
Great. If I could just sneak in one more.
Yeah, please.
You know, you've talked for a while about the success with Raytheon. Can you just give any more color on the opportunity with the other defense primes to replicate that offloading? Is it Raytheon maybe sort of a one-off or is there really a structural opportunity with the other primes? How do you see that now?
Yeah. I think it's a little bit of both. I think, you know, what you see with Raytheon, with the changes in the leadership, you know, and, you know, more of a UTC focus. You know what I mean? You just see a little bit more of an opportunity where, you know, people are moving work out of, especially out of the Northeast. You know what I mean? Things like that. I mean, I think that's, you know, just something that is just ingrained. I think there's a little bit of cultural change there, but I think, you know, it's structurally sound. I think that, what I've learned is that, you know, an OEM will sign up for a seven-year deal, right? They'll say, you know, they give a seven-year contract for a missile, right? Okay, fine.
Okay. They'll bid it and they'll run it at around year three or year four. You know, what I was told is there's just no other way to get any profit out of it at the first when you get to year three or year four. You know, there's just no opportunity. That's why, you know, within those seven years, you take the cards out of an internal plant, you put them through the Comet, okay, or some other supplier, okay? You can actually continue to drive your margins because generally after year three or year four, you're kinda... That's what I've been told, okay? You know, by, you know, the ex-CEO of Raytheon. It kinda just gets flat. Okay? I think that structurally, I've talked to Kathy Warden at Northrop Grumman. You know what I mean?
We've, you know, we're working with other primes. We had a lot of success with Northrop. We wish it was more. I think it will be. You know, a lot of these businesses are very, you look at it, they're very vertically integrated. I'm telling you, one of the reasons why they are, because they're like, "You know what? We need the parts." You know, their programs are so important at the front end that they feel like, "You know, we can't give this out to a supplier. You know why? Because we're not gonna get our parts on time." I think that's one thing, as I talk to you about our position with our customers, is that they trust us. That's why we're getting the SPY-6. I mean, that's, there's no fooling around with that.
I mean, that's a real, you know, that's a top-level program from a major prime. Anyway, so hopefully that's. I think heading forward, more to come. I think it's gonna be better.
All right. Thank you. Next question.
Hi. You mentioned capacity readiness a few times, at the same time, you know, some footprint consolidation. Moving towards that 2027, $950 million to $1 billion of top line, you know, do you have the capacity there now that you could reach that level or would you need, you know, CapEx investment to get there?
That's a great question.
Do you wanna take that?
Yeah.
Yeah, sure. I'd say if you go back a few years, right, we were at 55 + on the, on the MAX, right? We were at higher rates on A320. We were capacitized several years ago for much higher rates than we're at today. Okay? Since that time, when you look across the business from a structure standpoint, I think we're well-positioned from a capital standpoint.
The only differentiator for us to get to much higher levels is really staffing, and, you know, we work across multiple shifts. I think we're well-positioned there. Our focus on capital has been more on automation, efficiency, innovation in our processes that require some level of capital, but also that's increased our capacity. We're doing things quicker and more efficiently. On the electronic side, you know, you look at the harness business, and that's really driven by people, right? It's supply chain and people, right? There's not a lot of technology there. It's more about handwork and then test. Much of that, you know, we're transitioning to Guaymas. You know, we more than doubled our footprint there, right? We have readily available, very high talent, very trained, very skilled people there to grow. We're in good shape there.
On the circuit cards, the next level controllers, the higher level assemblies, we've capacitized with our surface mount technology, right. Our footprint in Appleton, right, the footprint in Tulsa, we produce circuit cards. We've invested in new SMT equipment, automated optical inspection. We're putting in robotic soldering. We'll have that, some capital in by the end of this year for that. I think we're well-positioned there as well, from a capital standpoint. We're expanding today. We're expanding the Huntsville operation. We're adding around 25,000 ft. It was a couple weeks ago. We're about two months out from being complete. We're adding square footage there. Is it populated? No, it's not. It's build it will come, right.
We have a new building that's just adjacent to a nice walkway between our main building. I think we're well-positioned. We're very frugal in our capital so that we're buying technology and funding innovation. It's really about people and, you know, grateful to our HR team, Laureen you saw earlier. They've done a really nice job of continuously looking at opportunities and how we draw in people. We feel very confident. It's not we're lying in wait. We're actively working on ensuring we're ready. Our customers are asking us to. Airbus says R75 . R 75. You know, we'll be up there in February and then later again in March, ensuring with Airbus how we're prepared for R 75.
The only thing I'd add there on the electronics side of the business is that the minor additions that Jerry's talking about, those aren't of the same scale as, for example, the investment we've made in our titanium business of $30 million-$40 million. We're talking about a few million dollars to increase, you know, 20,000 sq ft at Huntsville or if we need to expand Appleton at some point. Those are not going to be huge capital outlays.
We actually have a plan to expand Appleton. You know, we have the real estate, we have the square footage that's on the campus there, and we have the plans to do that. We're set to do that. We have another $1.5 million SMT equipment coming in within the next 60 days. That's been on order for a while.
We're gonna be frugal, though. You know, we wanna use Mexico, and we wanna consolidate. I mean, that's, we wanna have a big time shareholder value event with that versus adding more space. You know, we wanna use the space we have. We are gonna be selective, let's put it that way. You have another question?
Thank you.
Yeah.
Next question from Mike.
Thanks, guys. Steve, just on that 2027, how should we think about any share gains? Are those already contemplated? You just talked about, you know, the potential on the A320, and...
Yeah.
I think earlier in the presentation you hinted at the A350.
Yeah.
Would those be additive?
I think, Mike, at this point I'd say that they're in the mix, okay? You know what I mean? As far as, you know, we're anticipating. Look, the A350 is a titanium point. You know what I mean? It's, you know, it's titanium or us, you know what I mean? I mean, there's so much. We're not on it yet, you know? We think we're gonna be on it. You know, there might be some slight, I think, you know, based on the volume, maybe there's $10 or $20 million out there that's not, you know, we're not contemplating. Maybe if Airbus gets the 70, which, you know, I'd be cheering for them if they do, you know, that we were gonna see definitely maybe some uptick, maybe another $10 million, $20 million.
I would say at this point, everything is kind of locked in. We think that the A350 is something that we can, you know, certainly, you know, help them with. The A320, I told you about the situation there. I think, you know, there could be some upside though, but, you know, maybe $20 million-$30 million. Thanks, Mike. Okay, I want to be true to our time here. You know, we have just a few, we have five minutes left, but if we're, you know, everybody's good with questions, I'm just going to wrap it up real quick. Are we okay with that? Everybody good? Okay, great. All right. Look, I just again, I want to thank everybody for coming. I know it's been a long time.
I think we met with, I think our last investor meeting in person, because of the pandemic, was the end of 2018. It's a long time, right? I wanna thank everybody for hanging in there. I know it's a lot of information, okay? you know, you gotta get kinda locked in there. We feel very good about where we are. Hopefully you do as well. We have, I think a couple of big events coming up. These factory closures are gonna drive, you know, are gonna drive our earnings, okay? These are major things we're gonna do. This consolidation's gonna be really important. M&A is good. I told you about our customers. I mean, no customer, no company, right? Okay, that's the deal, right?
Our customers really, really like what we're doing. You know, are we the biggest player? No. You know, we're really part of this whole industry, and we're counted on, and we feel good about it, you know? Hopefully you do too. Again, wanna wish you a great holiday season. Thank you again for coming to be with us. Everybody that dialed in, we thank you as well. We very appreciate everybody's support. On behalf of the team and I, we just again wanna thank you. Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you.