Good morning, everyone. We're going to allow a few seconds for the room to populate. My name is John Franzreb. I'm a Senior Analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation of the day is Graham Corp, ticker GHM. For those of you not familiar with the company, simply put, Graham is a manufacturer of fluid, power, and heat transfer technologies. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO Dan Thoren and CFO Chris Thome. They will do a presentation, following which there'll be time for Q&A. Should you have a question at any time, please put it in the Q&A box and I'll present it to management. That said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. Chris and I are pretty excited to tell you about our companies. But before we begin, I wanted to point out that we may make some forward-looking statements during this presentation and in the following Q&A, and one-on-ones. As you know, those statements are covered under the safe harbor that is provided on this slide. We will also reference some non-GAAP financial metrics, and we have reconciled those metrics to GAAP metrics in the appendix of our presentation. Next slide. Graham designs and builds critical equipment for defense, space, energy, and process industries, and in doing so, gains a nice diversification for its business that you'll see here in the coming slides. Products are vacuum and heat transfer equipment, plus turbo machinery. Turbo machinery is pumps, turbines, compressors. As a corporate entity, our mission is to build better companies to deliver superior performance.
Our people are engaged and invested. Our culture is built on creativity, continuous improvement, and teamwork. Our structure provides deep strategic and operational support and shared services, and our process involves both organic and inorganic elements. The box there at the bottom shows Graham's stock specifics along with locations. We have engineering and manufacturing offices in New York, Colorado, and Florida, and we have sales and project management offices in India and China. We've had an amazing journey over the last three years. Historically, Graham served the refinery and petrochemical markets and suffered through those extreme cycles that come with energy. In the twenty-teens, Graham started to pursue defense to begin diversification. In fiscal 2021, a revenue pie on the left depicts what our revenue was. We were in the middle of COVID. Our defense work was low margin, with several first article jobs.
Our refinery and petrochem was very slow as the price of oil was low and demand was low during COVID. In June of 2021, Graham acquired Barber-Nichols to diversify revenue mix. Then, over the next three years, our revenue picture changed significantly. That's shown on the right-hand side, fiscal 2024. We almost doubled in revenue, and we shifted our revenue to a more stable mix, with the majority coming from defense with long-term contracts. Next slide. Slide five shows our strategic initiatives and how they should help us grow and improve our performance. The first bullet talks about full lifecycle mission-critical projects. It really starts with design, so we're always renewing ourselves. It goes through the manufacturing, and then it ends with aftermarket, so we have a high-profit revenue tail at the end of our projects.
The second pillar of our strategic initiatives are operational excellence. We're working pretty hard through continual improvement to improve performance and competitiveness. We'll continue to invest in our growth prudently to ensure good return on investment. And we think it's really important to engage both internally and externally to help us grow and get stronger. So we're big into community and customers and supplier relationships, obviously employee engagement and partners. The chart below the bullets shows the historical performance and our future modeled performance. You'll see that revenue is obviously increasing. The gross profit comes a little slower due to the need to invest and improve. All those initiatives and investments help us grow our gross profit line. EBITDA comes a little faster due to the leverage we get from the revenue growth.
The secret here really is controlled, steady growth with investments that make our business sustainable. Next slide. Slide 6 provides some detail on why we're excited about our Navy business. We gain visibility and recurring revenue with these long-term contracts, and then as we perform, customers notice, and they say, "Gosh, how can we help you?" And so they start to make strategic investments in us. There's high barriers to entry for competitors because we have to go through and get qualified product. And then, again, the aftermarket, which is new for us on the defense side, but it allows us to really start to get that tail, if you will. Next slide.
This slide shows U.S. Navy projects in total, and it gives you a sense as to why we feel that our business projections have credibility. These three programs are strategic Navy ship programs, and we're also involved in torpedo programs. So we see the CVN Ford class carrier on the top, then the Virginia submarine, then the Columbia submarine, and then Mark 48 torpedo program is the fourth one. The vertical columns give you a sense of what the build plan is and where we are in building on these multi-year programs. The middle column is the timeline, how many they're building per year, and then the third column is the revenue potential for each ship that is in that family of ships.
When we add all of that up, you can see that that the future revenue potential is over $1 billion over the next several decades. These programs run for decades and, you know, when we're sole source supplier on some of these projects, as long as we perform, we get to to continue to build the the the product for the Navy. Next slide. We got involved in the space market in the 1990s through a NASA contract, where we combined the turbines that we built at Barber-Nichols with cryogenic pumps, and we made rocket engine turbopumps. Following these initial forays into space, we got engagements with the new space companies. So today we provide pumps and turbines and compressors to multiple companies in the launch, satellite, and environmental control, and life support systems.
Last November, we announced the acquisition of P3 Technologies that deepens our reach with our strategic space customers. A little bit more on P3. So we acquired them in November, as I said, as a tuck-in for Barber-Nichols. They're very complementary to Barber-Nichols as they design specialty pumps and turbines. They have really strong people. There's just a few of them. When we acquired them, there were 11. But they have some patented technology also that we intend to bring to market, and we're gonna utilize Barber-Nichols' manufacturing capabilities to do that. They deepen our reach into the space market, as well as the new energy markets, and they provide an entry into the medical industry. In our fiscal 2024, they contributed $2.4 million in revenue, and they had $6 million in backlog that they brought with them.
Graham also serves the international refinery and petrochem markets with mission-critical heat transfer and vacuum equipment. We have an installed base of over $1 billion of equipment that has a very nice aftermarket and a growing service business with it. Our companies are also very active in the clean fuel and advanced energy space. We serve biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen market, small modular reactor, and solar. The next slide gives you a visual of our markets and how we see them relative to growth and profit. The size of the bubble indicates the relative size of the revenue stream. The X-axis is the margin potential profitability, and then the Y-axis is the growth either higher or lower growth potential. New energy and space are currently small markets but they have the highest growth potential, mostly because they're pretty small.
And then, DoD is our largest market and is moving towards higher differentiation and profitability. Everywhere we can, we're trying to move up and to the right. Energy and chemical is relatively slow growth. Profitability can improve if you have an energy upcycle. It can also improve if we can bring new product into the mix, but it's also subject to a strong international competition that can drag profitability down. So it's important to be able to understand where your different markets are and how you're going to address them. That's why we have sales and project management and subcontract in China and India. And then last but not least, the energy and chemical aftermarket, shown on the bottom right, is lower growth, but it's the highest profit product that we have.
As you might be able to tell as we walk through this, I like them all. Each has its own opportunities, and together they provide the diversity that makes our business more stable. With that, I'd like to introduce Chris Thome, our CFO, and he will present our remaining slides. Chris?
Thanks, Dan. For some reason, the numbers aren't coming across. Can you see the numbers on this slide?
No.
The slides are blank. That one works.
Well, apologize for the technical difficulty. Can you see it now?
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay. So I'll do it in this mode. I apologize. Not sure why it's not showing up in full screen mode, but anyway. Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Thome, CFO for Graham. Thank you very much for joining us today. This slide shows, depicts our revenue both on a quarterly and an annual basis. Our fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, which just ended in March, was very strong, with revenues of $49.1 million, which was up 14% over the prior year, and capped off a very strong year of revenue of $185.5 million, which was an 18% increase over the prior year. Both were records for the quarter and for the year.
This growth is primarily being driven by our defense business, which was up 43% for the quarter and 52% for the year. And that's really being driven by better execution, our increased direct labor, in the increased capacity that we put in place, as well as better pricing on some of these defense contracts. This growth is also being driven by the aftermarket business that Dan was just discussing, which was up 45% year-over-year and represents about $35 million-$40 million of sales for the year. The majority of that comes from the energy and chemical industries, as Dan just walked you through.
But more meaningfully, in fiscal year 2024, we started to have some aftermarket business with regards to our defense projects, as it is one of our strategic initiatives to become a full life cycle supplier to both defense industry as well as the energy and chemical companies. This growth also included $1.2 million of revenue from P3 Technologies in the fourth quarter and $2.2 million of revenue for the full year. However, organic growth is still very strong, of 11% for the quarter and 17% for the full year. This slide here shows how the revenue is translating to higher gross profit margins as we leverage our fixed overhead. For the year, our gross margin percentage was up 570 basis points to 21.9%.
This improved margin reflects the higher margin aftermarket business, as well as better pricing and execution on our defense business. It also reflects our strategic initiatives to improve both our processes and productivity. P3 also contributed to this margin expansion, given that the gross margin that it sees is higher than our legacy businesses. Over the long term, we expect our gross margin to get to the mid- to high-20%, in order to meet our low- to mid-teens EBITDA margin goals. Also significant this past year is that we did ship the last of our first article units, which was bid at a much leaner, more skinny margins. But those are now off our books, so we have a much higher margin backlog. This shows that the majority.
This slide here shows that the majority of our gross profit increase is falling to the bottom line, and it also shows the improvements that we've made are coming through and dropping through into significantly improved profitability. Not only are we seeing the higher gross profit, but our profitability is showing the benefits of our increased cost discipline. For fiscal year 2024, our adjusted net income was $6.8 million, or $0.63 per share, compared to $2.5 million and $0.24 per share for fiscal year 2023. This earnings per share growth equates to 163%. Along with our adjusted net income, we're also seeing improvements in our adjusted EBITDA.
For the year, adjusted EBITDA was $13.3 million, which was up 56% over the prior year. This equated to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 7.2%, which was up 180 basis points over the prior year. And we expect to see similar improvements over the next several year, and this firmly puts us on track to hit our low to mid-teen adjusted EBITDA margin goal for fiscal year 2027. This increased profitability has translated to increased cash flow from operations. The increased profitability, as well as our focus on financial discipline, helped us create $28.1 million of cash flow from operations for fiscal year 2024. This cash flow from operations also benefited from the restructuring the payment terms on some of our larger defense contracts, which significantly enhanced our cash flow.
This cash flow from operations was used to pay down $12.5 million of debt during the year that was left over from the Barber-Nichols acquisition in 2021, as well as to pay the $7 million cash purchase price for P3 Technologies. We also used this cash flow from operations to fund the $9 million of capital expenditures during the year, as we continue to invest in ourselves to increase capacity, as well as to improve our efficiencies through the purchase of things like automated welding equipment, as well as the implementation of a new ERP system in our Batavia facility. I should point out that we have all these projects that we've been venturing on for these large CapEx projects have an over 20% return on invested capital associated with them.
Also noteworthy is that during the year, we entered into a new five-year, fully, revolver credit facility with Wells Fargo Bank, which increases our flexibility, as well as reduced our borrowing costs, and we believe provides us, this, along with our profitability and cash flow generation, provides us adequate funding for both our organic growth, but inorganic growth as well, which is in our long-term objectives. This slide shows our orders for the year, which were also a record. Orders were $268.4 million for the year, which equated to a very strong 1.4 times book-to-bill ratio. 66% of these orders came from the defense industry and represented repeat orders for some of our large strategic Navy programs.
We believe that these repeat orders validates the investments we've made over the last several years, and also substantiates the fact that we are a strategic, critical supplier to the U.S. Navy, and shows the trust that our customers have in us. These record orders drove our backlog to nearly $400 million. Backlog at the end of March was $390.9 million, which was 30% over the prior year. 84% of the backlog represents defense, as our defense contracts are longer term in nature and can go anywhere from one to three years. What we like about the defense backlog is that it gives us significant stability and visibility to our business, so really it comes down to execution. Overall, we expect 35%-40% of our backlog to be recognized into revenue over the next 12 months.
This slide here shows our guidance for fiscal year 2025, that we just gave just a week ago. For fiscal year 2025, we expect revenue to be in the range of $200 million-$210 million, which represents an 11% increase at the midpoint. We also expect our margins to continue to improve, and expect a gross margin of 22%-23%. This equates to an adjusted EBITDA of $16.5 million-$19.5 million, which represents a 35% increase at the midpoint of that range, and would equate to a 9% EBITDA margin. This fiscal year 2025 guidance puts us on track for our fiscal year 2027 goals. Our long-term objectives that we announced two years ago calls for 8%-10% revenue growth and low to mid-teen EBITDA margin by fiscal year 2027.
Just doing the basic math off of our fiscal year 2025 guidance, that would put our fiscal year 2027 revenue in the $240 million-$250 million range. So in summary, we're very proud of the accomplishments that we've shown to date. We've successfully transformed our company to a diverse revenue business with stable revenues and stable outlook, much improved profitability, but we're not done yet. We still have a lot of work to do to get to our fiscal year 2027 goals, and that's gonna be just driven each year by slow and steady improvements as we continue to invest in ourselves and the organic opportunities that we have in front of us. So with that, Dan and I would be happy to take any of your questions.
Thank you, gentlemen, and Chris, nice pivot on the presentation. I'll start with. Gentlemen, you talk about adding more business in the defense side. How do you add business in that market when some of those contracts are already long-term fixed contracts that you're already part of?
Not sure I understood the question, John.
It sounds to me like you want to add more defense business to the mix.
Oh.
How do you add more defense business to the mix when you're already part of long-term contracts?
Yeah. So, you know, we like the diverse nature of our business, the different markets, the different products, and I don't see us.
You know, changing, you know, from a percentage standpoint significantly. I'd like defense at around half of our business. It is long-term business, and very predictable, and you can plan around it. You can build efficiencies into your operations to improve profitability. I think, you know, when we go after additional defense business as the entire revenue stream grows, what we'll be doing is going back to our existing customers. There's a lot more equipment on those, on the strategic programs that we don't have. And so the easiest way to build the defense business is with customers that know and love you, and so I would suspect that we'll go after some of that.
Now, that's you know, some of that will be first article, and we know the pain of first articles. The real secret is don't let first articles be too much of your business. But we like that renewing that you get with first article business.
I would also add to that, that we are adding capacity with regards to our defense business. You know, we're growing our workforce about 10% per year, and additionally, with the strategic investment that one of our large defense customers made with us this year, we're taking that investment, along with chipping in $4 million of ourselves, to build a new facility, which will also increase our capacity and to meet our large Navy customer what their defense build is. As everyone knows, the U.S. government and the Navy are trying to, you know, produce more faster, and this increased capacity and expansion will help us meet our customer needs.
Got it. Maybe I'll combine a couple audience questions here about pricing and capturing value for, for your work. Considering you haven't seen more gross margin growth despite the expansion of revenue, are you not effectively capturing pricing, or was the acquisition a lower-margin hindrance?
Yeah. Boy, there, there's a lot of moving parts in that question.
Yeah.
So if we start with pricing. And then you kind of look at the different elements of our business, probably the most restrictive side is some of our defense programs that where we've got sole source status. When you have sole source status under the Federal Acquisition Regulations, you have to have this basically open-book pricing, and so you're sharing with the government, you know, the overheads, the cost of the material, the cost of the labor, et cetera. And there's Federal Acquisition Regulations that define how much profit you can make. And so that's, you know, in a long run, you know, multi-award defense contract, that's probably the most restricted.
On the other end is really the aftermarket, and, you know, once you have your product installed and people are looking for spare parts, et cetera, you can charge quite a bit more. And, you know, it was interesting through COVID as the supply chain kinda got messed up, prices across the board were really starting to rise, and we were able to pass a lot of that through, as well as increase our profit margin on some of those. And then, you know, maybe in the middle, I would say, again, from a pricing perspective, you know, we, we've taken a couple of different steps with our commercial product. You know, some of it is getting very competitive with international manufacturers.
So we have offices in China and India that we've got low-cost manufacture there, because we were feeling a lot of pricing pressure, you know, from that competition, so making moves there. However, there's always customers that say, "You know, we want Western-built equipment," and then we can cherry-pick that, and when we cherry-pick, we're asking for higher prices than we've had in the past and trying to expand that. On the gross margin perspective, you know, that's best handled inside, and so we've got a lot of investments and a lot of initiatives that we're working to reduce our costs, get more efficient, get work done quicker.
You know, an example of that is some of the investments that we're making in automated welding, for instance, at Batavia, our Batavia facility. We've seen some amazing reductions in trials on some of that automated welding, and so we would expect to start to see those efficiency improvements. We're putting tools in that really help the flow of our product through our factory, like ERP systems that replacing 40-year-old ERP systems. So there's a bunch of things, a lot of moving parts, and w e are trying to maintain and improve profitability as we grow the business. So, you know, as we grow the business, we're getting some leverage there, too, and spreading some of our corporate costs across more revenue. That's helping, too.
Just on that, how much of your business is actually in the aftermarket?
Chris, you wanna take that one?
Yeah, so as I mentioned in my comments, about $35 million-$40 million of revenue relates to the aftermarket.
Okay.
So we're forecasting that that's gonna, you know, maintain, and as Dan showed on the one screen, that's gonna increase at the rate of growth of at least inflation going forward.
Okay, and maybe one more question. I have a slew of them here, but let's cherry-pick from the M&A pipeline. Can you talk a little bit about that, maybe the size and willingness to lever up, and the end markets or product lines you may be targeting?
Go ahead, Chris.
Yeah, so, I think, 'cause we're running short here on time, you know.
Yeah
We're looking mainly to stay in the markets that we're in. We like the markets that we're in. You know, I see P3 and Barber-Nichols as kind of the goalpost of what we would be looking for, so anywhere from the $10 million-$80 million range. But we do have a 3.5x max leverage ratio on our credit facility, but we really'd like to try to keep that under three. So going forward, we're gonna be very opportunistic with the acquisitions that we have, just because we have so many other organic growth opportunities in front of us, that we can afford to be more opportunistic on the M&A side. But M&A is still definitely part of our long-term plans here.
Okay. I apologize, there are a host of questions we didn't get to, but gentlemen, we are into overtime. Any closing comments?
Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity to present our company. As it probably comes across, we're pretty excited about it, what we're doing, the path in front of us, and appreciate the patience thus far that you've had with us. We're kinda steady Eddies, if you will. Just kinda like to remain under control, get better every day, and we're seeing the results of it, so thank you.
Okay. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Dan, thank you, Chris. Everybody, have a great day.