Good afternoon. Thanks for joining. My name is Trip Caldwell. I'm with Wells Fargo's investment banking team here today hosting select members of the EnerSys management team: Andrea Funk to the far right, CFO; Joern Tinnemeyer, Chief Technology Officer; and Lisa Hartman, who leads the IR. We're going to start with just some prepared remarks and a short presentation, and then we'll turn to some fireside discussion and Q&A.
Thank you, Trip, for the introduction. Thanks for all of you for being here. It's great to be back in New York City. Before we begin, I'd just like to direct you to our forward-looking statement that we have in our presentation. I don't plan on reading it. I know you're familiar with it, but I just want to point that out. For those of you who are not familiar with EnerSys, we are a $4 billion publicly traded company with over 10,000 customers. We really are at an inflection point in our company's evolution from an industrial to an industrial tech company, having gone from a mostly lead-acid battery company to a company that provides energy systems solutions. Our EPS last year, fiscal year 2023, our year-end is 3/31, so that was last year, was $5.34 per share, which was up from $4.47 in the prior year.
And through the first three quarters of fiscal 2024, we're at $6.27 a share. We also have a strong balance sheet, and we generate significant cash flow. And we have, as we'll discuss today, significant revenue and profit growth opportunities in front of us. So what is driving that growth? One of the things that's really exciting about EnerSys is the megatrends that are driving the business to us. So as I start on this slide, you can see on the bottom left corner the diverse end markets that we participate in: communication networks, data centers, industrial powers and utilities, logistics and warehousing, transportation, and aerospace and defense. So you'll see that we have these diverse end markets, but affecting all of those are the megatrends that you see in the arrows across the right: energy transition.
There's a tremendous amount of increase and driver for our business, and the reason why many of you are here today as we're transitioning energy from more to electricity and away from fossil fuels and petroleum-based systems. EnerSys is a critical enabler of this transition. Second, energy security. Think about the fragility of the grid, the ice storms in Texas, the wildfires in California, and how important it is to have backup power at times to make sure that we're staying safe, that we're providing emergency services. The demand and access to reliable power is growing exponentially and cannot be handled by the grid infrastructure alone. It needs energy systems and energy storage solutions. Connectivity. What element of our lives isn't more digitized than it was yesterday? How many apps did you run this morning?
Controlling your smart house, checking the weather, everything we do now is on our cell phone. The amount of energy and electricity and data storage it takes to make that successful is a key driver of our future. We power communication networks, and that's why it's an enabler. We're an enabler of this megatrend. Automation. This is big in distribution center environments. There's just not enough people around, let alone the efficiencies you can gain from automation. So automation is a megatrend that's going to be around for some time, and our maintenance-free batteries create solutions to these issues. Then finally, most importantly on the list, is decarbonization and what we can all do to help protect our environment. Batteries are a clean and sustainable source of power, enabling a lot of these decarbonization efforts.
Now I'm going to talk a little bit about our financial targets and the growth and profit our solutions to these megatrends are driving in our strategic roadmap. This lays out our 2023 baseline and what our 2027 targets are. We have a very exciting future in front of us. There really is no better place to be right now than energy storage. In June, we hosted our Investor Day, and we kicked off and introduced our fiscal 2027 targets.
So first, on net sales, we anticipate our sales CAGR going from approximately 6% in the three-year period ending fiscal 2023 to 8% to 10% through fiscal 2027, as we benefit from the high growth markets linked to the multiple global megatrends we just discussed, a richer sales mix, new product introductions with additional upside from the possibility of a steeper launch in our fast-charging storage line of business that Joern's going to talk about a little further in our new ventures. Second, we expect our adjusted operating margin to go from about 9% in fiscal year 2023 to 14% to 16% through fiscal year 2027, reflecting the richer mix of products and channel sales, EOS or our LEAN initiatives, cost improvements, OpEx leverage, a creative fast-charging storage launch, and the full-year impact of our IRA benefits.
This will result in adjusted EBITDA going from about $388 million in fiscal 2023 to $850 to $950 million through fiscal 2027, and adjusted EPS accelerating from $5.34 per share to $11 to $13 per share in fiscal 2027 before any positive impact of reinvesting or excess cash flow and borrowing. We track and hold ourselves accountable for a dozen or so commitments we laid out during Investor Day, and our fiscal year 2024 results are tracking towards those objectives in the aggregate. At our guidance midpoint, fiscal year 2024 EPS will be approximately $8.31 per share. So now let's start talking about that growth by each of our lines of businesses. Each line of business has a clear path to achieving their targets, supported by the megatrends and long-term business drivers that I just laid out. First of all, Energy Systems to a 6% to 8% CAGR.
This is mostly network powering, so think of 5G small-cell rollout as well as data centers growth driven by some of the AI. Motive Power, 5% to 7% CAGR. This is ongoing with the forklift electrification. About 40% of forklifts are still internal combustion engine, as well as the lift that we get from our maintenance-free offerings, which provide both a revenue and a profit mix growth. Finally, our Specialty line of business, which is made up of aerospace and defense and over-the-road transportation, has a 10% to 12% CAGR opportunity as we increase our thin plate pure lead capacity and are able to get our aftermarket sales at the same penetration rate as our OEM sales. Finally, Fast-Charging Storage is fully incremental.
Joern will talk about this a little bit further in a moment, but this is the launch of our battery energy storage system with EV fast charging attached to it, and we expect to get our first revenues in fiscal year 2025. When you pull together the top-line growth from Energy Systems, Motive Power, Specialty, and our New Ventures, we expect to realize a full-year CAGR of approximately 8% to 10% through fiscal year 2027. This will be achieved by both market and share growth, as well as a richer mix of sales from higher-tech and software content products, maintenance-free solutions, more favorable channel mix, new product introductions, and capacity expansion. Fast-Charging Storage will still be in the early phases of ramp by the year fiscal 2027, with much more headroom in the years to come.
Overall, we're excited to accelerate growth in diverse end markets and have significant opportunities to continue to compound our growth. So now I'll talk a little bit more specifically about the LOBs and the end markets. We have four LOBs, three that we've talked about historically. Our first, Energy Systems, is our largest line of business, and that's primarily made up of communication networks. So think telecom and broadband, as well as data centers, industrial power, and utilities. Then Specialty. Specialty, as I mentioned, is made up of transportation and aerospace and defense. We are the largest supplier of batteries to the U.S. government, and in transportation, we source batteries for premium automotive and over-the-road trucking. Motive Power, our third line of business listed here, is batteries and chargers for electric forklifts in logistics and warehousing.
In the U.S., we enjoy over 50% market share and have about 30% of the market share worldwide. And lastly, New Ventures. Not separately disclosed until it's going to be about 10% by GAAP, we have to separately disclose it when it's at least 10% of revenue, profit, or assets. This focuses on the battery energy storage system that I mentioned, so it's basically an energy management tool for large real estate development companies on which we can tie an EV fast charging pedestal to it. And Joern's going to talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes. It can be sometimes confusing for someone from the outside to understand who EnerSys is, since we have so many diverse end markets. And that's actually one of our core values, the diversification.
What ties it all together is we have three core technology platforms that we plug and play on all of these end markets: energy storage, power electronics, and software and services. So with that, I'd like to introduce Joern Tinnemeyer, our Chief Technology Officer, who's going to talk a little bit more about each of these technologies. Thank you.
Wonderful. Thank you, Andy, and good afternoon, everyone. As Andy mentioned, it really simplifies our story when we think about these three technological pillars. I mean, obviously, EnerSys has always been in energy storage, building lead-acid manufacturing lead-acid batteries. But what you may not know is the degree of power electronics that we're placing into the business. These power electronics power, for instance, the forklift trucks to which we build our batteries for. It's so much so that we're one of the largest electric vehicle charging manufacturers in the world, if we consider every forklift an electric vehicle. And even more so is that we do full energy conversion for these electric vehicles and for these chargers, meaning that the level one and level two chargers, the typical chargers you might find for your electric vehicle at home, that's just an elaborate plug with some metering.
We actually do this at an industrial scale for industrial-style application, making us highly suitable to enter into this market that I'll talk about. The other piece, of course, is software, and this is a very new transition for EnerSys. Moving into this space allows us to bind all of these components together in order to create not only Fast-Charging Storage but to create next-generation charger technologies. We already have our Motive Power lithium line, and moving this into more energy storage devices, for instance, telecom networks and also the controllers for those. All of this is always based on the same underlying LEGO blocks or modular system, a concept called Baukasten, which comes out of the German for the automotive OEMs, meaning construction kit. We're highly disciplined to work on this. This is, again, very unique to EnerSys.
Rather than looking at each of these businesses in its smaller niche play, we look at it always from an enterprise play when developing our product line. To see how this transformation is going, we need to look no further back than say FY 2017, where a large proportion of that mix was commodity-based flooded lead-acid batteries. Lead-acid batteries, to us, are still very important even today. However, we see that transitioning moving over to maintenance-free systems or Thin-Plate Pure Lead technology, which works very much so like any lithium battery. And for those customers that do need lithium, we have that full lithium platform. So you can see that mix starting to increase into a much healthier system side for EnerSys, in essence, putting the Sys into EnerSys.
In that time, we've developed many new products, obviously hired more engineers, but done this growth in a very controlled manner not to impact our operating earnings. If we start to think about fast-charging storage, where does EnerSys want to play? We don't want to play in the commodity part of that market. We're not interested in developing chargers for at-home use. We're also not, which is the ones that you'll see to the far end of this. We're also not interested for those highway stops, those very large stations that we see with multiple charging pedestals, and they're typically hooked up to high-tension lines. What we're interested in is this middle space, this fast-charging space, which we believe will have enormous growth associated with this.
Think of this: when you drive your electric vehicle, rather than just charging up at a fuel station when your vehicle is empty, that you would charge up at every grocery store that you go to when you do your shopping and you plug in and you get 50 to 80 extra miles, when you get your lunch, when you pick up your coffee. We call this opportunity charging, and likely this will be a very large proportion of charged vehicles. A lot of people believe that you can just charge these vehicles at home. You need to look no further than California. With a recent study done in Nature Energy, we said 60% of the homes can only take 2 kW of additional charge. If I charged a modern-day electric vehicle at 2 kW, I'd have to wait 4 days.
The other thing is, people think that I can just charge at night. Well, there's a lot of renewables that are coming online right now. Obviously, most of those renewables are not apparent at nighttime, meaning that electric costs will go up because those renewables are not available, because I have to use peaker plants to do this. This is why we believe fast charging, ubiquitous fast charging, where vehicles will stay 30 minutes, is likely going to come to a significant rise. When we speak to customers about this, though, think about 1 of these chargers requires 150 kW. 150 kW is equivalent to about 22 North American-style homes. If I have four of these pedestals there, now I'm hooking on a small village onto the network. These transients are exactly what the grid doesn't want.
If everything we hear today is about grid resilience in order and what we're doing with fast charging is almost going in the opposite direction. This is why people have a lot of fear about electric vehicles going onto the grid due to the issues and strain that'll start to happen. When we talk to our customers, the other problem is, where do you get that 600 kW from? If I have a regular grocery store or something, do I have access to that additional power? I may need extra permits from my utility. I'll need transformers. By the way, transformer wait periods today are in the order of 36 months. There's a lot of time that's required, permitting time, which we can avoid.
We can avoid all of this, plus allow freedom of this system to be relatively close to the store entrance, rather than placing this directly where the substation is, in most cases uniquely placed directly next to the garbage bin at the back of the building. If we look at this, and you can see one of these units, they're relatively small footprint, and this is precisely what we mean. We want to put this directly in front of the store. We want to make sure that people who are driving those electric vehicles to those stores are able to park directly in front of that rather than in an inconvenient location.
The other thing that this brings forward is, as I already mentioned, is the degree of energy management that needs to go into it, not only to support the electric vehicles but to also support the loads of the building. If we consider the cooling loads that need to come in, for instance, into that building, we can provide power to that in order to reduce demand charges on those hot days in the summertime. This, again, gives a massive advantage to this. So not only does the owner of the asset win revenue off of the plug-in to the vehicles, they actually win more revenue off of the energy management side of this: demand charge reduction, energy arbitrage, virtual power plants, all of which are enabled in this device.
What's more, due to the high degree of modularity that we have, the asset and capital need not be deployed all at once. For example, the customer can actually change the amount of storage content and grow that storage content as their loads increases or the utility profile increases with enhanced demand charges. The same thing is true with penetration of electric vehicles. If they don't see within that region a high penetration yet, they don't need to fill those slots with the DC/DC power converter. They can slowly add to this as the business sees fit to expand, something, again, very unique to the offering. The other thing that we add is, of course, all degrees of renewables can be attached to this. This could be wind, this could be solar, this could even be offline generators if necessary for the event of UPS-style operations.
All of this is controlled by our software, our own artificial intelligence systems that we've designed in our software systems group. Finally, what we also want to provide is that same degree of customer service. When we hear today a lot about people's experience with EV charging, if anyone has that electric vehicle out there, 60% of typical chargers have problems. This may be hardware problems or software problems related. This is something that EnerSys is extremely good at, is serving our customers. We have our full service network. Because we rely on the same components that we put in the motive power system group, in the energy storage group, we can apply those same storage or service capabilities into our new venture group for this, for the DC fast charger. Finally, what's the business behind this? And so we actually announced this a few months ago.
We have an initial order of 50 units that we will be placing into Canada at a particular grocery store. First 15 units will be deployed by halfway point in this year, with more units coming following those initial deployments. Each one of those systems is about 1.2 MW in energy storage. We can go higher to this. It's about custom principles, that LEGO technique. We can just add another 1.2 MW as the customer sees fit. Plus, we have four pedestals connected to it with 150 kW charging. With that, I will end there, and we'll take your questions.
Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Joern. Exciting stuff. Andy, let me take us back to the long-term targets for just a moment and ask a little bit about your progression in that journey, recognizing that one of your key end markets at the moment is behaving in a, as I've heard it described, anomalous way. Talk about what you're doing in terms of sizing the business for the current environment and anything you can share about outlook for the telecoms spigot to turn back on.
love to know exactly when that's going to happen. But first, I'll say on our long-term targets, our fiscal 2024 forecast that we have, in line with the guidance that we laid out, is right in line, targets that we set out at earnings yesterday. There are some puts and calls. We had a little bit more of the IRA benefits we could talk about further. We had some pressure from telco broadband, both in that Energy Systems line of business as well as Motive Power and Specialty line of business from the lower absorption. And in our model, in all years of our model, we also have a cushion that we put in place for unknown items such as the telco broadband spending costs. But that aside, our bottom line EPS number that we had for 2024 is right in line with.
Telco broadband, as many of you know, there is kind of a spending freeze that's happening on some of the network expansion. It is unusual. So typically, in the fourth calendar year of every year, there's an increase in spend. We didn't see that. We think that a lot of the carriers are destocking some of their inventory and planning for their next rollout. We still are very bullish on the end market. We don't think there's anyone who's saying, "We don't want faster internet or more access to internet." But as a result, we've taken this opportunity. Sean O'Connell, who led our Motive Power line of business that is just doing phenomenal and was really a strong operator at putting in some elasticity in our costs, is now leading the Energy Systems line of business.
During this slow period, not just in reaction to the slowness but in taking the opportunity to look at the health of the overall structure, has closed one of our plants, also exited one of our non-strategic product lines, and put in place a reaction. Those three actions combined would generate about $17 million of savings beginning in next fiscal year. There's more work that he's doing as well, just to increase the overall cost profile of this segment. That'll benefit us when the business comes back, as well as in a slow time like right now.
Then perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, the data center market. Talk about, I guess, first of all, what you're seeing from an activity level of activity perspective, and then perhaps more importantly, how you're positioned for that from a product perspective and the considerations of your technology and your portfolio applied to that market.
All right. Well, I'll start a little bit on the revenue side, and then I'll turn it over to Joern, who I think can expand a little on the technology side. But data centers is an exciting area, as I'm sure all of you hear about, driven a lot by AI demands. It's not a huge portion of our business, but it is about $300 million. In the Americas, we're up about 51% versus fiscal 2022. So there is a lot of growth that's happening. And I think this is a perfect just like fast charge and storage is, it's a perfect example of how our modular Baukasten principle for technology allows us to plug and play and take solutions across these different end markets. And, Joern, I'll let you talk about that a little bit more.
Sure, sure. I mean, I had the pleasure on the weekend to just have some communications with the CTO of one of the major data centers here in North America. He mentioned that the amount of data centers that will be constructed in the next six years is equivalent of what happened in the past 34 years. I mean, that is an incredible number of new green sites, mainly based, of course, on our insatiable need for data and now processing of that data via AI. If you look at our energy storage system and think about that for a bit, it's a high-voltage DC bus. What do you need for a UPS center, a high-voltage DC bus?
In a lot of these cases, what they're also looking for is no longer just that UPS load or that uninterruptible power supply load when the power goes out, but how do you start to manage all of that power that is necessary for the processing and cooling, more so, of that facility? We offer already a lithium technology that has the ability of high energy density to provide a significant level of energy to that facility. At the same time, we already have the full assortment of software that can support predictability of loads, predictability also in terms of utility cost structures, and thereby both optimize when grid power is to be used, when renewable power is to be used, or a conjunction of both plus storage into the device.
This device is not ready yet from an EnerSys side, but certainly on a targeted list of an area that we see as a potential massive area of growth, using precisely the technologies that we already have in our basket today.
You touched on lithium as a solution. Maybe just to step back and level set with the audience, where is EnerSys today in terms of its lithium offering? What are kind of the key applications where you have product? We'll talk about South Carolina in a minute. Just sitting here today, what is the scope of the offering and the key applications for those offerings?
Sure. I think we've had a very long history, actually, in lithium even before I came to the company, seven years ago, through a Quallion acquisition. So with this acquisition, we actually build our own cells, I would say, at extraordinarily small scale. However, these cells are also very special. They're able to take 30,000+ cycles. They can go down to zero volts. They're typically used for space-based operation. And I think right now we have about 6.8 billion hours of error-free operation. The James Webb Space Telescope, that's our lithium battery that's powering that telescope today. So we have more lithium in space than I believe any other company in the world does. So we know how to work with lithium. We know how to work with this in critical situations.
However, you would never place that same battery that I just spoke of in the satellite system into a forklift. That would be an extraordinarily expensive forklift. And so what we've done is this boutique-custom enablement. Today, we purchase the cells. They're automotive-quality cells. We laser weld them. We put them into modules. And those modules have been designed to not only work in motive power, to which we're already providing that offering today, but we're also putting it into areas, for instance, in broadband, in CPUC. So California Public Utilities Commission came to us and said, "We need 72-hour runtime. But we only have an enclosure size that has a certain limited size." The only solution there was lithium. Because we already had it in our portfolio, we were able to act on that in about 18 months and put that system onto the market extremely quickly. Why?
Because the platform was available. That same platform is now being used, as you already saw, in our DC fast charger for that energy storage system. Deployment will happen there towards the midpoint of the year. I already mentioned the fact that we're working on our UPS situation. That platform growth with lithium is becoming very important to EnerSys. But the only way we do it is to make sure that one cell type can be used across the entire enterprise.
I referenced South Carolina. In February, you made a significant announcement about intentions to invest meaningfully in a lithium battery plant. Andy, maybe you can talk us through any updates on size, cost, and purpose, primarily.
Sure. So what we've announced is we have negotiated a site selection for a potential lithium plant that we plan to install in South Carolina. It is intended to be a four-gig factory. External market data would say a cost for a factory of that size is around $500 million. We were able to negotiate a selection package from the state of South Carolina for about $200 million. The bulk of that is long-term incentives, but there's some upfront incentives as well. We also would be using some of our IRA benefits that we get. We get about $120 to $160 million a year of IRA benefits, which we want to use as the government intends, which is to increase the capacity of domestic-sourced lithium batteries. And on top of that, I think additionally we're applying to the Department of Energy for funding as well.
They've set aside $300 million of funding specifically for non-EV battery lithium plants in the U.S. As we mentioned, we're the largest provider of batteries for the U.S. government. We did submit a preliminary application in January, and we're encouraged to submit the full application in March, which we did. The awards will be given in August. When we get that award, we would present to our board what the return on this investment is. As long as the board supports it, we would continue to move forward. The difference, I think, between us going forward with a lithium battery plant and maybe other lithium startups is, number one, this is all for internal consumption. We did our model going out 15 years. This would be able to provide about 75% of the capacity that we need internally.
We also would be able to secure some additional DLA revenue as part of their electrification strategy. The biggest user of the batteries would be our fast charge and storage launch and where we expect that going. But Motive Power and Energy Systems would also be large consumers of the cells as well.
The purpose for the cells takes you into no new markets, necessarily. It's, as you said before, all internal consumption and with the DC fast charging as the primary consumer, if you will.
The biggest.
In your earlier remarks, you called out industrial and utility as end markets of interest and focus. As I think about EnerSys historically, those are probably not markets I would associate with you as a primary provider. I guess just trying to better understand how you participate in utilities, as an example, and what the value proposition is for the utility customer, the commercial customer. How do you sit in that ecosystem today from a storage perspective?
Sure. I think a really great example is what we're doing right now with the DC fast charger. I mean, obviously, in the utility space, we've had certain revenues, for instance, backup substations and also power plants. But really, that entering into the market space is that leveling of that electric load. I think every utility right now and I mentioned this in my opening remarks is that those transients are extraordinarily difficult for the grid to control. And if we talk about grid resilience, what they prefer is a load user where that load is highly predictable and very steady, if not more. Even that signals can be given out to those users. For instance, this could be a grocery store to say, "Your power level is too high right now.
I need you to reduce it to level X." We are providing that capability with our DC fast charger and storage device. That energy management software is able to predict those hot days, is able to predict the timing of those events, and thereby save significantly for that end customer because they will be paid an extreme extra amount on their electric bill due to those demand charges. The other thing is what we do is called Global Adjustment. We're able to control devices in the building to actually shut those loads off as well, again, in order to mitigate that energy signature for that customer. This goes right back to the grid again in order to help steady those loads and make those loads much more predictable. At the same time, our device is already OpenADR certified.
This allows us to participate as a virtual power plant on the grid as well, meaning that if the grid requires extra power, it can actually query our device, and we can provide that power if we do choose to do so at that particular point, again, earning revenue for the asset owner. And this is just the start of what we're trying to do. A lot of the software that we're putting in play, our next-generation chargers, for instance, for Motive Power, will have full dynamic load management associated with them, taking a lot of the software that we're developing right now for the DC fast charge and then putting them into other parts and aspects of our business.
Great. I see we've just got a couple more minutes. Andy, maybe any update on capital allocation, particularly in light of some of the slowdown in the telecom market for now. But welcome any updates for the group on that point.
Sure. Thank you. So our capital allocation is pretty straightforward and consistent. Our first line of business is to invest internally. We typically have anywhere from $80 to $120 million of CapEx. Second would be to look at strategic acquisitions. We are a company that's grown a lot by acquisitions over the years. We've had over 30 acquisitions since we went public. We recently brought on a head of business development to go more on the hunting space. Our targeted leverage range is two to three times levered. Right now, we're beneath 1.5. We're around 1.2. And so we certainly have some dry powder, which we will use some for the lithium plant, but certainly have a lot of other dry powder as well. Our targeted acquisition is probably $100 to $300 million.
We're not looking at something transformative, a nice bolt-on, not a turnaround, not a startup, but something that would have revenue with a growth above GDP and accretive margins that is in our transformative stages. So not anything in flooded lead assets, but maybe power electronics, lithium, aerospace and defense, chargers, data centers, something of that kind. So invest internally, strategic acquisitions. And then we have a consistent dividend that grows with earnings and returning cash to shareholders through buybacks once we're staying within that two to three times levered range. And in the current interest environment, we're interested in staying on the low end.
Great. Any questions from the audience? All right. Thank you all for your time.
Thank you.