Good afternoon. Thanks everyone for the time and the opportunity to connect with so many of you here. Really appreciate the opportunity here. Joined with Shawn O'Connell, Andrea Funk, and Charlotte Murnan over at EnerSys. Look, it's a great opportunity to chat with you guys. Really appreciate the opportunity here to walk through the story with you guys. Again, as usual, folks on the line here, ping myself or Dushyant Ailani on the team with any questions or comments. We're gonna try to moderate and facilitate a dialogue with you guys real time here. Stand by on chat or email if you guys like. Maybe, Shawn, with that, appreciate the opportunity to connect with you. It's a pleasure to make this come together here.
More to the point, Shawn, why don't I let you introduce the subject at hand? Introduce EnerSys as far as the background, what you guys are planning to do, and then more to the point, we'll get into some of the details here in a moment.
Yeah. Thank you, Julien. Pleasure to be here. As you mentioned, I'm joined by my CFO, Andrea Funk, and Charlotte from our IR team. Listen, EnerSys is a longtime provider of stored energy solutions at a time when they're all the rage. We've been quietly doing this for decades and into some of the most important applications on the planet. We have a full technology stack, certainly starting with the core energy storage unit, the battery. We started as a traditional lead-acid battery company, but we've migrated well beyond that, and we make some nine chemistries of lithium batteries today for various applications. Then we have the power electronics that keep those batteries charged and disperse energy to the end applications.
We have software systems to help manage those systems and aggregate power and help users remotely do this without a lot of human content. We have our own service company when human content is needed, and we can help our users with that. These are EnerSys employees, not subcontracts. We're in an amazing opportunity right now. As you know, we're exposed to really two of the best super cycles of our time, energy security and also, you know, we're the largest supplier to the U.S. military for energy storage systems and battery. We have really at the core of what we're doing two strategic pillars. One, this energy security issue.
We know that our users are facing both power famine and rising costs of energy, and the other is labor scarcity, whether that's elective or I'll put a spin on Larry Fink's words and say, you know, the data center space is gonna run out of electricians before electrons. We purport to solve both of those issues through our systems, through efficient power systems. I just wanna point out too that, you know, we really operate in niche markets where we have a one or two market leading position. We are not involved in the EV space, and we're not involved typically in open C&I. We're in places where we have deep customer intimacy, and we can do application stacking. Let me give you a couple ideas where we're at. We have the network and infrastructure segment of our business.
These are communication service providers, internet service providers. Data centers is another lane in network and infrastructure, and then power utility, largely backing up switchgear and control arrays and power utility. The next part of our business is warehousing logistics. We're predominantly involved in the electrification of forklift fleets and Class 8 over-the-road truck applications, and also solving for the total power demand of those warehouses in which those fleets operate with things like battery energy storage systems and forklift power back to BESS to manage that whole environment. Our final space is aerospace and defense, our specialty business, and we have multiple applications in this space, satellite batteries, submarine powering systems, unmanned vehicle, drone, soldier power, and munitions.
The critical business is what makes us the largest supplier to the U.S. military and several of the allied militaries around the world. Those are the markets that we serve. You know, just again, on how we win, we are not an open C&I. If we go into a warehouse, for example, we know exactly how that forklift battery is operating. In fact, we know how all the OEMs forklift trucks are operating. We have a proprietary knowledge there from decades of experience, the communication interface, how you charge that battery, what the optimum operating condition is, that we then bundle with our charging systems, our battery energy storage systems.
It's a real knowledge base there that we have that some of the new market entrants for mass energy storage don't have. In fact, because we're in niche markets, in some cases, our total SAM and TAMs just aren't large enough to catch the attention or to garner the investment from some of those other players. I'm about a year on the job, Julien. I'll be a year on the job in May. Since I joined, I launched a program called Energize, and Energize is all about doing a couple things really well. One, I think we're really strong. The research will tell you companies are stronger when you start with your core and lean out, you know, sequentially from your core.
The first pillar of this program was optimizing our core business, flattening management layers, cutting out extraneous costs and things that we shouldn't be doing. The next pillar of this system was what we call optimizing our core and invigorating our operating model, I should say. That's about putting in centers of excellence operationally and the operating rigor that enables us to execute. The final pillar is accelerating our growth. Incidentally, EnerSys is a net positive cash generator, extraordinary track record in cash generation. We have a lot of dry powder, very low leverage ratio. Accelerating our growth's about investing internally in the right things, using that dry powder, and also being opportunistic with things like M&A and share buybacks where necessary to get us to where we wanna be. We're focused on growth.
I'll sum that up so we can get to your questions by just saying we have a really invigorated management team, some of the most talented people you'll find in our industry, in any industry, I think, but I'm biased. They are working together to solve our biggest challenges, pick bets together and full ownership on executing on them. I started doing this in the nineties. Never been more time in our industry and our company where there's more opportunity, really thrilled to be here in this position.
That's awesome. Thank you so much, Shawn. Appreciate that. Look, maybe just at the top, you probably gotta lead with this question inasmuch as how do you think about the company seizing the data center opportunity here? Just a little bit more specific. You kind of framed it a little bit there. You touched on it. Let me ask you to double down, if you don't mind, on that statement.
Yeah. I'd love to go heavier into data centers. EnerSys has been. If you look at our lead-acid position, we've got, like, 55% market share in the U.S. in powering data centers historically. You know, that started decades ago when data centers were largely positioned towards financial institutions. Now with the hyperscalers, that business has just grown for us very, very well. Our position in the data center to date has been centralized UPS support. Some of the large UPS OEMs, names you would know, Vertiv, Schneider, Eaton, these are our customers, as well as the hyperscalers themselves. We have a seat at the table with the hyperscalers. These are, Julien, high trust environments. Having a product is one thing.
Having the knowledge and the experience in the space, being able to deploy at the pace that the customer needs you to deploy. You know, our industry council is called the 7x24 Exchange, just implying that you always have to be available, the systems have to be available, and you have to be available to the customer. EnerSys does this, and we wrap that all in a service experience, again, with our own service company. Our opportunity is this. If we have 55% market share in lead, and we're only now deploying our lithium battery, lithium is now every bit of 60%-70% of greenfield data centers for AI.
Our lead battery business is gonna grow at about 20% this year, but we know that the real robust growth and breakout growth for us will be in the lithium space. We're really, really pleased that we have now, this month, launched our first customer trials of our lithium battery offering in the data center. Again, because of that high trust, because of our right to win, customers are already so enthusiastic. Now it's just about validating the product, making sure it communicates well with the UPS and in the environment, and then, we're confident that we'll be able to get into the deployment cycle.
Yeah. You talked about getting the deployment cycle. How do you think about what this looks like in terms of order activity here, real quickly? I mean, you kind of lay out a timeline there. And then separately, you know, not that we've talked about, the industry's talked about the 800-volt DC transition and the architecture there. How does that impact you guys as well, right? Think about that in tandem with what you guys are, you know, kind of scoping out here as well, right? There's industry side changes that are ongoing, but also you kind of lay out a little bit of timeline dynamics yourself there implicitly.
Yeah. Let me start with the timeline piece first. I said these are high trust environments. They are, and we have that trust, but it's trust in the Reagan sense of the word, you know? Trust, but verify. What'll happen is we will go into these customer trials. They'll take time to validate the system, make sure everything's working the way that they want it to work, and as soon as that happens, then we can get into the order side of it. We are level setting expectations with our investors that because we're April to March, by the way, so we're about to start our fiscal 2027.
We think that the lift will begin to show up in the sales for lithium and data center in fiscal 2028, just to kind of give you an idea what that timeline looks like. That being said, we're already quoting some of these systems even as we validate. With that being said, the nice thing is when you hear things like transformers having a, you know, a two-year lead time, batteries are usually ordered towards the end of the cycle, so we typically aren't waiting the full lead time as maybe the UPS system itself or the transformers or switchgear or some of the other ancillary items. Now the other part of your question, 800 volts DC. Now, you have to understand a little bit the architecture of the UPS system.
Julien, I know you're very knowledgeable in this space. If you look at the old architecture of double online conversion, you had AC power coming in, a rectifier changed that to DC, that's when our battery came in, and then on the other end, an inverter changed that back to AC for the loads. If you look at it, EnerSys has always been providing a DC system, from the battery perspective. The only difference is traditional architectures were 480 volts. To get the efficiencies we need now and to cut down on the copper and all the things we wanna do, we have to go to 800 volts.
What that means for EnerSys is we're gonna sell more cells. We see that basically as a lift in volume, an accretive lift in volume, and we're very excited about it. For us, it's more battery.
That was awesome. I mean, how do you think about the traction, right? You talk about, I think the term of art is, you know, trust but verify, but also the fact that you have these entrenched relationships. How do you think about scaling? How do you think about taking this to the next level? How do you think about, you know, having this position, gaining maybe a share of wallet? Maybe that's the expression you wanna use here if you think about it.
Yeah. You know.
Pivoting from timeline.
We don't wanna approach it from a position of hubris, but I would tell you that we have deep customer relationships and in many cases global contracts with all of the hyperscalers that are buying lithium. They know us, and they have a very long track record. In many cases, we've got all the master agreements done, which sometimes, you know, you get the lawyers involved, and that could be a long tentpole. We have all that done. Really for us it's about adding products to our existing agreements, where all of our service companies have been vetted. They've been vetted at the sites. They've got all their certifications for the safety in the data center and this kind of thing.
Really the reality for us is that we're at a much expedited position once the customers are happy that. It's more that they've tested the system, they've done some discharges, and the communications are where they need to be, so they're getting all of the data back, you know, at where the monitoring location will be or at the NOC to make sure that the system's functioning, it's communicating with the downstream gear. Those are really the longer tent poles for us. It's just getting that validation. The ones that would traditionally hinder a new market entrant are the areas where we have a real advantage. I'll tell you one more thing.
Customers are asking us for this, so it's not like we're on the hunt to go out and see if one of these folks will talk to us. It's been the other conversation, which has been very telling for me as a new CEO saying, "Hey, O'Connell, hurry up. We need what you bring to the party in this space.
Julien, as far as lead time on orders, you mentioned some of these very large data centers can take up to 10 years to build. But the lithium versus lead decision is typically made about 12-18 months before completion, and the orders for us come in about three months. While there's very long lead times, we, you know, we're able to get into the mix, even though it'll probably take about a year till we get through validation, et cetera, as Shawn mentioned.
Awesome. Excellent. Thank you both very much. Appreciate that. Let's talk about power quality before we move away from this, right? Because there's another angle here. There's UPS, there's signal conditioning angle here. How do you think about your contribution on that front, any angles that you'd flag in particular here? And then ultimately, how do you think about, you know, competitive positioning and rollout of products writ large, whether it's tailored to the DCN market or otherwise? Again, Shawn, you know, new in the role, how would you set expectations on what is to come, if you will? You know, given let's tie to, you know.
Yeah.
UPS and signal conditioning otherwise.
We're very excited about this. Just starting with power quality. You know, battery technology is the absolute best capacitor, you know, that we're gonna have to address this variability of load of AI. It's the only near-term solution until some of the other ones come online, you know, downstream, which might be years away. We see this as a real opportunity. It's not an insignificant issue that a large language model center could go from 100% load to 20% load in milliseconds. This is a big deal for us. We deploy power systems in a variety of applications where we are addressing power quality, where we are removing those surges, spikes, where we are cleaning up, you know, that.
If you looked at some of these utility feeds coming in under an oscilloscope, we call it dirty power, right? I mean, that it's not a nice clean sine wave. EnerSys systems do that today, and the battery is the first and best line of defense. For us, that variability does a couple of things. One, when you have the battery clean that up, it is taking life out of the battery. The best of technologies, I don't care what it is, lithium, long-life lead, sodium, whatever these are, every time the battery is used in power quality, it's like using some of the battery's capacity. What that means for us is that it'll hasten end of life and certainly sell more batteries in the aggregate.
The other thing, though, where EnerSys believes we have a real right to win in a niche area and something we're looking at very carefully, you know, we make rapidly deployable smaller scale power systems that we are already participating in the edge, and we've been doing so through our telecommunications and cable and broadband business. As we start looking at enterprise-level inference models for AI data centers, these are smaller systems where EnerSys has a real long legacy and experience, where we think we can deploy these systems as we're doing it in other markets very quickly, very elegantly. Then we have all of the service companies involved that can do the build right away, that can get things connected in and get them installed. Sometimes that's the long tent pole.
We're excited about it, that the power quality issue for us is very good, and we believe it's opening up some other applications where we've got a right to win.
That's awesome. Well, look, why don't we talk about signal risk then? How do you think about the lithium strategy here? You know, you guys talk about lead-acid, et cetera. How do you think about what this gigafactory ramp and roadmap looks like? You're talking about 28 here in South Carolina. How do you think about what that looks like? What does that do to, you know, maybe Andy, tag in here as well, talk about the financial side of it too, but, you know, where does this go? What does this look like over time? We'll go from there.
Yeah. Let me start with a bit of the strategy piece and what's gone on there, and then Andy can give you some of the modeling. You know, this factory, when we started, it was under the Biden administration. Everything at that time was around EV and a little bit different experience. When the Trump administration came in, you know, everything changed to foreign entity of concern, so the EV credits went away. You know, the original premise for our facility went away. Then by merit of our Bren-Tronics and Rebel acquisition and our position with the Department of Defense, we actually began to pivot those conversations to, could we face this entire facility towards helping the U.S. government with its domestication goals for the U.S. military?
Those are the types of discussions we've been having. I can tell you that they've been very positive. Right now, and we've said publicly, this is aspirational, you know, until we have a definitization with the government. But it's going very well. The premise would be there are some, let's call it 42 programs for soldier power or radios or things embedded on the soldier that all originate, the vast majority originate in China. So the number one pure threat in the world from a military perspective is your number one supplier of battery. It makes little sense for the government of the United States.
What they wanna do is consolidate those down to less than 10 programs, because a lot of these are very similar in size and scope, and have that come out of one facility. EnerSys believes we can help with that. The really nice thing about that, Julien, is that we have a customer. These are program sales, so we're not out in the open commercial market competing with the next drop in a lithium pack price based on electric vehicle. There's a lot of de-risking that goes into that equation for us. Now, in commercial markets, what I'd like for you to know, first of all, EnerSys makes nine chemistries of lithium today for different applications.
In areas where commercial markets won't pay a premium for a higher quality cell, they just need the base unit of the cell, we have no problem having a make and buy strategy, and we can buy those cells on the open market. Here's why. Because by the time we get done taking that cell, putting the power system around it, the BMS, the logic, the communications, making that system in the case of a forklift, communicate with the forklift or communicate with the telecommunications power system, all of the regulatory stuff, it's all different than EV. Everything we do from the battery forward is the rest of our value add. Again, our industry is, you know, bite of the elephant's a meal for us.
Our SAM and TAM is just not big enough to get the attention of Tesla or BYD or some of these other bigger guys and have them make all that investment for this size of a market. We really believe that our right to win is preserved. We don't mind having make and buy, and we, if we have our way, the gigafactory will be totally positioned for the U.S. government and military. Andy, do you wanna add any comments about the financial aspect?
Yeah, I'm probably gonna disappoint you a little bit, Julien, but I don't wanna get too far ahead of the DOE with our revised plans. We will be providing updated financials both when that is communicated as well at our investor day that we're gonna be holding on June eleventh at the New York Stock Exchange. The only two things that I think are worth mentioning is we have been given a $200 million grant through the Department of Energy, and that's what we're looking to reaffirm. It is a grant, not a loan. It's a cost-share program, so depending on the scope change, there may be adjustments there, and that's what we're waiting on, the finalization of that announcement.
The state of South Carolina also gave us about $200 million of incentives. Those are a little longer term in nature, but this is solving a critical need, and we're very excited about it.
That's awesome. Thank you both again. I appreciate it. I mean, when you think about milestones here, whether it's with DOE, Army, et cetera, on this sort of venture here, what would you be flagging or pointing out? Maybe you talk about this. You alluded to this earlier. If you think about tangible data points here, what are the next pieces to really watch for as far as it goes? Even if the financials per se, you know, we gotta hold out for June here, you know, or for coming, what would the critical milestones here be?
Yeah. It's, you know, everything is about when a battery factory is stood up, you know, we did a lot of pre-work on the environmentals, so we were able to do that. So we think we can expedite that. You know, construction cycles being equal, so you know, the building hasn't gone up yet until the environmentals get done. So you'll wanna keep an eye on that. You know, we will talk as we release more information, we'll talk about how we think we've been able to expedite time to first article where we're putting out minimal scrap rates and very high OEE. But that's the whole game in lithium, right? Achieving that scale and getting to that production level.
The good thing is we have a customer that wants us to do it yesterday. We believe we will take a technology position that will help us get there quickly. The big things I can tell you about now are, you know, look for what we release publicly about technology partners, how that'll expedite construction, but more importantly, how that'll expedite getting to the OEE we need to achieve that profitable scale for the government in the fastest amount of time.
Nice. Let me ask you just a quick elaboration here. So FEOC, you know, there's been some talk about FEOC being a little less, you know, being more workable for other parties here. How do you think about FEOC and where kind of initial guidance is playing it? I know that not everything's resolved here, but how do you think about that relative to the competitive landscape? How would you frame that out? What are we waiting for? How do you think about the overall supply demand of domestic and global battery alternatives in both the qualification and the context of FEOC, as well as how does that fit against your own efforts? Where obviously you're targeting such a niche player, right? Because at times people are focusing on all these headlines around the landscape and also focusing on what FEOC means specifically here.
I threw it all together. I figured it made sense. Take any piece you want there.
Yeah. No, it was a very elegant framing, actually. As I said, because we're going after niche markets, we have a customer that needs to move as quickly as possible because they're really exposed at the moment. Even before you start talking about domestic economic security, domestic security for the war fighter, I think, you know, we have very close relationships on the Hill. It's bipartisan, by the way, so it's great, you know, because the last thing we'd wanna do is build a plant and then have an administration change, and have somebody say this isn't a good idea. We get broad bipartisan support. The military is very mindful that the world went ahead and allowed 96% of the supply chain for all materials to get tied up in one country.
That's a reality. I think they're taking an eyes wide open approach right now. What we're seeing is they're going to phase the requirements of how deep they go in the supply chain over time to sort of slowly get to where they wanna be to have total domestication. If they did it today, it'd be impossible. They wouldn't get any material. Even some of the other Asian countries, like Korean manufacturers, are sourcing anode and cathode materials in China. Again, 96% is a big number. But for us, everything is around foreign entity of concern. Everything is geared towards starting the process to build to that eventuality where we can get everything domesticated. Now, there are resources that are available to us.
I will just give you a for instance, most of our nine chemistries of lithium that we're building today have predominantly domestic supply chains and domestic sources. The issue is some of these are so specialized, like our munitions weapons batteries. You know, we make standoff weapons and hypersonic weapons batteries. We're talking about much smaller quantities than the quantities we would produce in the gigafactory or quantities that you're seeing being produced in EV factories, even if they're being repurposed for energy storage. So the question is, how do you achieve scale in those quantities in rare earths, in cobalt, nickel, and these other things? That's what's gonna take a little more time.
As I told you, I think the you know, the folks within the apparatus, within the customer are being very mindful about how to pace that so that they don't overstir the sauce and leave themselves without the ability to source material on the front end, even if the goal on the back end is complete domestication.
Excellent. How do you think about the you know the scaling? I mean, this is a question that's come in from others out there, is how do you think about the confidence in getting the milestones? At times we've seen folks out there just face a protracted ramp of storage-related manufacturing. Again, I think you probably know what I'm getting at in some other cases here. How do you think about you know getting to a quality product and feeling confident about that you know where you are today?
Yeah, we feel very good about it. You know, I give you a lot of people have tried to go this alone, and they've tried to take novel approaches, and that usually doesn't go well. I don't know why they did, because Elon showed us all, you know, in spite of him, you know, with all the pictures of him sleeping in the middle of the factory with a sleeping bag and all that, the reality is he went to Japan and got one of the best partners on planet Earth that knew how to get the system up to OEE and knew how to spec the equipment and put it in.
He partnered with them from day one, and they brought in their electrodes, and they began stuffing cells as he began to, you know, to determine how he would do his own coding and some of the other parts of the process. That's the right model. We think that's the right model. We would purport to take a similar technology approach to where we're not going it alone. What that allows you to do, and I don't wanna give away too much of our secret sauce here, but what that allows you to do is to start building a product using help from a partner and content from the partner.
As you are developing some of the other high-tech foil competencies that usually result in high scrap and low OEE, it allows you to do them in tandem, so you can begin producing high-quality cells sooner. You'll see we'll be releasing more of this strategy over time. You'll see us taking an approach like this, where we're not going it alone, where we're not taking a, you know, a missionary stance in the marketplace, where we're gonna use a very tried and tested partner to help us out.
I'm sorry. Let me. Can I go back? I don't know how to think about. Try to answer this because it, someone's asking more from a higher level perspective. How do you think about how you kind of frame this military approach and specifically kind of a soldier approach? You know, how much content, if you think about it, like in content dollars, you know, how do you think about like a single soldier battery pack, right? And think about like what you're contributing from a content dollar perspective. Any thoughts or perspectives, heuristics even that you would use? I mean, I don't want to get ahead of your update here coming up, but how would you try to tackle that?
Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. Because of the fact that we've been sort of quietly, you know, assembling more and more parts of the supply chain and vertically integrated, you know, our content has increased dramatically. If you look at, you know, our Bren-Tronics acquisition that we made, you know, a little over 18 months ago, what that organization does and that outfit does is they assemble batteries into the end packs. They're assembling cells into the end packs that then power the various applications. They also make the charging systems that go along with it. These can be vehicle-mounted, soldier-mounted. There's a lot of optionality there.
What we're really reporting today, those are all purchases for us, when we purchase the cells and integrate them into the packs. After the plant's online, we'll just be basically solidifying the end-to-end piece of the supply chain, where we begin with the cell, end with the pack. That pack business for us is highly value add. Now we'll control the supply input of the battery cell itself, so it's really in this case of the battery, it's getting now moving towards 100% of the content. The other thing that we did by virtue of the Bren-Tronics acquisition is we bought a company called Rebel. Rebel uses Bren-Tronics batteries as its core energy storage device.
What Rebel is is a hybrid power system that is now, from the information we're receiving, is now the number one forward operating base hybrid powering system for rechargeable drones. Again, with the Bren-Tronics battery pack assembly, when the plant comes online, making the core element of the cell itself that are going into these packs and the Rebel system powering it will have end-to-end the entire supply chain for deploying energy and recharging it at the most forward edge of battle for the biggest growing application on the planet in drones for that space.
I mean, you talk about this massive growth, right? And certainly I would imagine even independent of a secular acceleration in adoption, probably militaries themselves are accelerating procurement given the backdrop today. People wanna know, how do you think about acceleration of that back to your core financials and business prospects? Again, I know we're knocking on the door here of what's coming up, but how do you kind of marry that up in your outlook? I mean, you guys had this pretty successful, meaningful acquisition earlier. You talk about being deeply entrenched here in the right places. I mean, being tied into drone tech and batteries is a pretty interesting, neat place to be. You say yourself, you use the word massive, but try to quantify that a little bit more.
Yeah, you know, if you follow any of the Substack stuff that comes out of the hill, you know, there was a great one over the last weekend from Bruce Mehlman, and it's the future is electric. You know, what's gone on in the Ukrainian conflict has demonstrated to the whole world the real, you know, future of warfare and what it's gonna look like, and it's drones. For us, it's a very large opportunity. In terms of how we're gonna approach it, you know, without giving you too much dimensionality around numbers, but how we're gonna approach it is this. A couple of things. One, we mentioned, or we may not have mentioned, we have a lot of dry powder.
We have a 1-2 leverage ratio. Most of our investors tell us they're comfortable with three and under. We have a lot of room. I mentioned our cash generation, and we wanna put that to work. We still think there are some really nice targets out there for us that we're looking at. The nice thing is we have a lot of sponsorship from the government customer to help us consolidate. They're actually in times past, you'd be worried about some of these deals getting blocked. Now we feel like a lot of support. The other thing is part of that Energize strategy I told you about is we launched centers of excellence.
What that means is, as you might imagine, you know, the asset-heavy operational structure and procurement structure that goes into managing lead acid is completely different from the asset-light manufacturing apparatus for power electronics and microprocessor supply chains, and which is entirely different from manufacturing a lithium battery, believe it or not, and advanced technology. We've now canonized that. We've made that official, where we have groups in our company that specialize in each of these cases. In the case of advanced power systems, we make advanced power systems for cable and broadband, for telecommunications, for a variety of our markets.
Now what we have the ability to do is when we have the government come in and say, "Hey, listen, we'd like a platform," could be, not specifically talking about the Rebel platform, but it could be. We can now pop that right into our operations in other places where we already have the ability to scale, react very quickly, all of the expertise is there, and we can deploy rapidly. Everything you hear out of the Pentagon with Hegseth and the whole crew is about how do we disrupt, you know, the centuries-long program sale, you know, big budget, over budget. How do we get people to think entrepreneurially, act like startups, even if they're big companies?
EnerSys has spent a lot of time over the first year of my tenure, sort of imbuing that entrepreneurial spirit, unbounding that ability to react and move quickly and execute. We feel pretty good about it.
That's awesome. Nice stuff. Just, do you wanna comment? I don't know if it's in any question or what have you, but do you wanna talk about the cash infusion, M&A? I mean, how do you think about, you know, use of cash and capital allocation here? Then, you know, again, Shawn, admittedly, someone else wants to ask. I mean, can you be a little more specific how you're thinking about this? I mean, I know you just spoke to it a little bit, but size, scale, et cetera. Both kind of go in the same direction.
I'll let Andy kick it off with the capital allocation piece.
I'll take a first crack there, Shawn. Thank you. Our first priority is always to invest internally, but fortunately, our lead-acid plants are, we've done all the necessary expansions that we need there. You're probably talking between $75 million-$100 million of CapEx on an ongoing basis before you get to the new lithium plant that we're looking at. Lower than our depreciation, which is certainly, you know, a nice position to be in. We have a dividend that grows with the earnings, excluding 45X. We didn't talk about 45X. We could talk about that more. After that, we are big on acquisitions. We've done over 36 acquisitions since we went public in 2004. It's certainly a big piece of our growth strategy.
Bren-Tronics acquisition, which Shawn just mentioned, was really an ideal type of acquisition for us. You know, that $100 million-$300 million range, we could easily absorb one to two of those a year with our current cash flow. Something that is in a growth market and is margin accretive. We're not looking for turnarounds. We're not looking for real startups. We want something that really makes sense, why EnerSys? The nice thing is we're in a lot of growth markets, so there's a lot of opportunities out there. Although we are disciplined to make sure that the valuation is appropriate. After that, we're buying back stock. Our board announced a $1 billion buyback program. We've been buying back pretty aggressively. We think our stock is a nice deal.
At 1.2x, we've got a lot of room to get to our 2-3x leverage. I always look at it excluding 45X because I don't wanna go too far out in my horizon. I wanna leave some dry powder to act quickly.
Yeah. That 45, do you wanna talk about the 45X recognition here and how that scales as well here?
Yeah.
You know, as far as like, go for it.
We get about $40 million a quarter of 45X benefits. It's treated as a reduction of cost of sales, not subject to tax. A lot of that we haven't yet monetized. When we look at our free cash flow conversion, there is some seasonality in our cash flows. We tend to look at it over, you know, a multi-year, quarter period. We're above 100% free cash flow conversion, historically, so our business does kick off a lot of cash. With the 45X, we right now are not paying federal income tax, because our credit is bigger than our federal tax liability. Then we've received our one refund last year, and we are due to receive our that $120 million as a refund, which should come in.
It's due this month, but if it's delayed, it would be received with interest. That's our 45X. We use the 45X as the incentive to invest in our internal capacity of qualifying batteries. We had closed our Monterrey plant and moved that production to Kentucky. We also have just announced a closure of our Tijuana plant, moving that production mostly to our Missouri facilities. We've expanded our capacity in Missouri. Then, of course, as you know, the lithium plant that we're looking to build as well.
Awesome. Yeah, I hear you on that front. I mean, what does your pro forma like footprint look like after you get these, the build out done, right? I mean, just to summarize there. You got a lot of moving pieces. Someone asked me earlier, it's probably the right time to throw it in here. Do you wanna speak to that real quickly? I mean, you wanna keep the mic there and we'll pivot back to Shawn in a second?
Sure. We have about 15 GW of capacity right now, so the plant would be incremental to that, if that's the question. Of course, right now, it's mostly on the lead acid side, and this additional lithium plant would be on lithium capacity.
You know, Julien, it might be just a good reminder to interject if any of the folks on the call didn't know. You know, we received initially a U.S. Department of Energy grant for this plant, which was on the order of magnitude approaching $200 million. It's a cost share model. Also, the state of South Carolina had another group of incentives up to another about $200 million in things like tax incentives and that.
You know, even though we're not gonna release the financials of the plant today, if you think about all that 45X money coming in on top of $400 million in cash to build this plant, you know, with a pretty solid roadmap of the types of equipment we need and being able to really keep that control, this is something that we, you know, we feel is going to be, when the plant's up and running, you know, really quickly accretive to shareholders and the model will look very good.
Awesome. Excellent. Actually, someone asked me earlier, Shawn, why don't you lay out in front of me. We talked about strategy a second ago. You know, you came into the business, and you laid out your own kind of turnaround, you know, aspirations a bit ago. Do you wanna talk about where you are against those targets you articulated a little bit ago, and how you think about kind of scaling on that, right? Does that make sense?
Yeah. Well, I'll give you an answer and tell me if it's on track. So I would tell you that everything we've set out to do has exceeded my expectations. I didn't, you know, we've been a little. I've been a little blushing a bit at the, you know, the increase in the stock price. That's been a real surprise, pleasant surprise. We knew with $1 billion in buybacks, taking out $80 million in costs, you know, operating more effectively, getting OEE up in our plants, we would have, you know, demonstrative shareholder benefit. All of those things are firing. All of those cylinders are firing. You know, with my internal team, we dimension these things in terms of what we can control.
If our transportation market's exposed to the great freight recession, we can get market share, but in the end, we can't increase the overall aggregate market until that turns around. If motive power's got pressure because of a variety of industry factors, those are non-controllables for us. What our controllables are is being mindful of our OPEX, placing the right bets on where we're putting capital and ROIC, and I can tell you those things are going extremely well. The other thing that's going extremely well to go from a year ago and say, we are going to deploy our own battery energy storage systems by the end of the year into these customers where our-
You know, as I said, it's niche market, so it's less than 4% of the open C&I market. We will go from zero to customer trials. We will also go from zero to customer trials with a lithium data center battery, and we would have the ability to monetize Internet of Things real-time monitoring of these systems. We are being successful in all of these areas. It shows you that the strategy's working, the operating environment's working. We socialized in our second quarter.
An order we were able to go after for 5G macro sites, the customer came to us and said, "Listen, if you could redesign the power cabinet, the power distribution, make some changes for us, give us a first article inspection within a couple of weeks, you'll get the order." You saw a big uplift in sales from us in Q2. That came from executing on that order. Before at EnerSys, that would have been an 18-month process. This time, we had that cabinet redesigned, we had the power distribution redesigned, we had those first articles to them in a couple of weeks. They placed the order, and we were able to execute in the quarter.
For me, all of the plumbing we've been building to give EnerSys the ability to execute is going extremely well. We need the markets to cooperate. Of course, I would share with our investors and prospective investors, you know, you gotta look at us over the course of a year or, you know, or an extended period, because every one of these markets, even data center that's going like gangbusters, there are build cycles. You'll have this sprint and this lag, this sprint and this lag. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, the comps get a little goofy in cyclical businesses. In the aggregate, I'm very pleased at where we are. We're ahead of where I thought we would be.
That's a credit to my team, not the CEO and the amazing people that we have working with us. Very bullish on the EnerSys future based on the execution I've seen so far in less than one year into my tenure.
That is awesome. I mean, that's a nice way to start to culminate the conversation. I mean, Just for those listening, what are the breadcrumbs? What do folks gotta listen for at this Analyst Day? How do you think about what vision you're looking to articulate here? You know, a year into it, what's the purpose for most of this Analyst Day, if that's another way to ask the question?
What was the last question? I'm sorry, Julien.
What's the purpose, if you will? Why are you doing it? I mean, I don't mean to be facetious about it. I mean it like how would you set expectations or thoughts around, you know, a year in? What kind of-
Yeah.
What kind of milestones do you wanna lay out for yourself?
Yeah. Our purpose is very clear. You know, I talked about these deep relationships. You know, they're so deep. Our customers, we make them members of the family and friends. Because these are high consequence environments, friends don't let friends down, our job with the world is shifting on them as much as it is anybody else, our job is to help them in novel ways solve for this energy security issue and help them do it with less people. When you are listening to our story, let me hopefully stitch it together. When you hear that we're deploying a data center battery, it isn't just deploying a data center battery.
When you hear that we are now, customers have ordered it and validated it, and we're taking first orders for that, you'll know that we're being successful in helping them do that. When you hear about battery energy storage systems working in tandem with a forklift fleet in a warehouse, 'cause if you're a warehouse operator, you're not Microsoft. You can't go restart Three Mile Island to get more power. You know, you have far less options. To solve for power famine, you need help. Our systems can help with that. When you hear us talk about, Hey, we've got a flagship customer, and they are deploying BESS in conjunction with forklift batteries to offset the power. You know EnerSys is being successful, that story is resonating. Even our cable and broadband business, you know, we've talked about that much.
If you look at cable and broadband, hybrid fiber-coaxial networks, we have 96% supply chain or market share in the United States for the powering systems for hybrid fiber coax. Well, they have to expand their data capabilities if they're gonna stay in the game, because right now, today, they're responsible for 80% of the backhaul of internet traffic from wireless traffic. Well, think about what we're talking about in data center. It's AI use cases. You and I, as the consumer, are not going to accept a world where we don't get that AI use case to our handset. That means those guys have got to provide more data, so they're concerned with things like DOCSIS 4.0, the data over the cable internet cable interface. Our systems are gonna enable that.
Here's the problem, DOCSIS 4.0, it's more power hungry, and the broadband company needs to save energy. You'll see our new systems. When you hear about our new systems reducing the power consumption or the actual total energy consumption or spend, even as we increase the bandwidth and capability, and you hear that trial being successful, and you hear about that customer and that success story, you'll know EnerSys is firing on that cylinder in that market to enable exactly our strategic premise. That's a big sail, to use a maritime analogy, out there in the wind for us and something to keep an eye out for.
Nice. All right. Well, we're basically at the top of the hour here. That was a nice way to call it. Anything else you guys want to add? I think that was a fine moment to end this thing on.
I was at another conference, Julien, very recently, and somebody said to me, "Listen, you guys are in battery. Tesla's in battery. CATL is in battery. How do you win against those guys?" We're in different games. I hope what came across is our application stacking in these niche markets that are you know, they're a meal to us, even though they're a bite of an elephant, but our total SAMs and TAMs are just not big enough and meaningful enough for those guys to put the investment in to come after our markets because the juice won't be worth the squeeze for them. It'll be very worth the squeeze for our shareholders, and I just want people to know, EnerSys is in a different ballgame than those guys.
We, at some point, if their cells cheap enough, we may buy it, but all of our value add comes after that, and we're gonna make a lot of our own cells too. That's what I would have people know about us. Totally different. It's apples and oranges, totally different applications that we're pursuing.
Thanks for clarifying that. I know that, you know, at the surface level, someone might conflate that, but your point is very well made on the niches and making it worth their while. Well, look, maybe with that, thank you know, Shawn, Andrea, Charlotte, thank you all for jumping on with Dushyant and I. And again, I gotta stress, thanks to everyone on the line for sending in your questions and reactions and comments through the whole conversation here. It was great. It was a pleasure, rather. Wish you guys best of luck both into and the preparation for this analyst day and frankly, beyond that.
Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure for us to join you. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Julien. Pleasure talking to you.
Absolutely.
Thanks.
Absolutely, guys. All the very best. Have a wonderful day. You guys take care.
Thank you.
Bye, Dushyant.
Bye.