Good morning, everyone. My name is Jack Greenberg with the Midwest IDEAS Conference, hosted by Three Part Advisors. Next up is Graham Corp, traded under the symbol GHM. Here on behalf of the company today is Chris Thome, their CFO, and Dan Thoren, their CEO. And, with that, I'll hand it over to Dan. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. So before we begin, I want 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 the slide. We'll also reference some non-GAAP financial metrics, and we've reconciled those metrics to GAAP metrics in the appendix of the presentation. Now to the good stuff.
So Graham is a critical equipment supplier for Navy process types of applications, which ends up being energy and chemical, and then space. Think about this as heat exchangers, vacuum systems, pumps, turbines, compressors, those kind of critical component pieces that go into fluid systems and power systems.
At a corporate level, our mission really is to build better companies to deliver superior performance. We're on the way to that, and you'll see, as we kind of talk through where we've been and where we're going. When we think about our people, we think about engaged people. We spend a lot of time making sure that our people know what is expected of them, they've got the right tools to do their work, et cetera. What we get out of that is people that are engaged, always looking to improve. So the continuous improvement kind of teamwork is the basis of our culture.
Structure at a corporate level, what we're doing is allowing business units to run themselves, and then we're providing shared services and guidance for them. We're in engineered products, we're in manufacturing. The folks at corporate really do know that, they live that, and can provide the guidance to the business units to do that. Our process is both organic growth and inorganic growth. Chris will talk about our growth metrics here, as we go, but, we're trying to grow 8%-10% per year, on an organic basis.
The stock specifics are shown in the table below. We've got facilities in Western New York, Batavia, New York, Arvada, Colorado, which is a suburb of Denver. We've got another engineering manufacturing facility in Florida. And then we've got sales and project management offices in India and China. Those international offices obviously aren't doing defense-related work. It's more on the commercial side. In 2021, the small pie chart on the bottom left shows what our revenue was.
In June of 2021, Graham acquired Barber-Nichols and started this path to a much more diversified company, a much more stable company. Before the acquisition, Graham was pretty heavily into chemical, petrochemical refining, and they followed that cycle, and it was a brutal cycle. And they started to get into defense, but the defense programs that they had gotten into had to kind of buy into, so they were low-margin jobs.
So it was a stroke of really good planning to get into defense, but then to acquire Barber-Nichols to really diversify this business. Over the next three years then, you see how or four years, how our revenue picture has changed. We've doubled in revenue, really got a much more diverse group of revenues coming through. This slide shows some of the strategic initiatives that we've got, as well as our results to date and where we're going. When we think about strategy, we think a lot about full lifecycle business.
So we like designing the things upfront, working with customers to define the requirements, develop it, develop the equipment, manufacture it, and then service the equipment. So that full lifecycle of business is really what we want to do. And a lot of the work that we're doing have those opportunities.
Another big thing that we work pretty hard on is operational excellence. We want to build margins, so that we're a stronger company and drive some competitive positioning. When we think about investing, and we are investing quite a bit, to grow this business, we're really looking at both capital and R&D programs. We think it's really important to reinvent yourself, to continue to improve your product, to maintain your advantage over competition. We've got an amazing list of initiatives that we're trying to invest in.
All of them have greater than 20% ROIs. Then we are pretty out there as far as engaging with community, engaging with customers, really trying to understand, you know, how we can work together to strengthen our team and strengthen our business. So the chart on the bottom shows the historical performance, starting in 2021 at about $100 million in revenue and an EBITDA around 5%.
Chris and I put in a strategic plan in June 2022 that said, "By 2027, here's where we're gonna be." And so we've been able to march through that for results in both FY 2023 and FY 2024, and then you see FY 2025. So we're making this incremental improvement. We're growing our business. We're also improving profitability. We're reinvesting that profit back into the company to enable this long-term success. One of the things that we really like about the US Navy, well, there's several things about the US Navy, but one of the things that we really like are these long-term contracts.
In a commercial energy business, you can see six months, maybe nine months out. In the defense business, you can see years out if you're on the right programs. So it really drives visibility. It allows us to make the right investments at the right time, and then it gives us this recurring revenue. You also have to perform. And so, you know, our Navy customers were not happy with us right at the acquisition.
We've really stepped it up and have been performing very well, to the point that now they're investing in us, so you see a $13.5 million investment, that's basically buying this equipment so that we can execute faster on their programs, as well as a $2.1 million grant that they're helping us train welders to enable us to go faster. In this DoD business, you can get sole supplier status, and we're sole supplier on quite a few different programs, which is a really high barrier to entry.
And then, as we're able to reinvest in our company, improve our processes, improve our tools, we're able to improve our margins, and we're seeing that, and you will continue to see it, as we go in the future. What we see as opportunities on the DoD side, the Navy side, is additional aftermarket revenue that we really haven't had in the past, as well as new design opportunities, new platforms, strategic platforms, that are coming.
The programs that we're on right now are the most strategic programs in the U.S. Navy: the Ford class carrier, the Virginia class submarine, and the Columbia class submarine, and then what's not depicted on here in pictures is the Mark 48 torpedo program. The first column shows build plan, where we are as far as building out the Navy's ship fleet, the build timeline, both quantity and how far out the program goes, and then the third program or the third column is the program revenue potential.
So we add all of that up here over the next 20-25 years, and we see $1.2-$1.4 billion in revenue potential from these programs. Again, long term, really can plan on this stuff, make the right investments, and build a very strategic business. We do like our diversification, and so we see opportunities in space. We're involved in launch vehicles, satellites, backpack applications.
Again, space is it can be a waste of time, or it can be a very nice business to get into: highly engineered products, products that have to go through some very significant validation testing, and then you're kinda locked in. We pick and choose those pretty carefully to make sure that we're not getting on programs that really don't have any future. We acquired a company in November called P3 Technologies, and that acquisition actually deepened our reach into some of the strategic space customers, and so we're pretty excited about that.
On the energy side, Graham has been serving refinery and petrochem for many, many decades, has an installed base of about $1 billion of equipment around the world, which provides a really nice aftermarket that goes with it. We are also pretty active in the new energy space, so heat exchangers and pumps that can move liquid hydrogen, for instance, some of the advanced power systems, supercritical CO2 kind of power systems.
We get into the biodiesel refinery transitions that are happening in the United States. So we're sustainable aviation fluid, small modular reactor, some of the concentrated solar stuff. So again, that can be a real time suck, a real resource suck, so you have to be really careful about which horse you try to get on in the race. And I can't guarantee we're on the right horses, but I think that we're on some good ones. So we'll see where that goes.
Just continuing to look into the future and understand, you know, where our future business is gonna come from. This is a slide that kinda shows a visual of the markets and the way that we see them relative to growth and profit. So the y-axis is the growth index. If you're up higher on that, it's higher growth, and then the x-axis really is margin potential profitability. The key is we try to move everything up and to the right, higher growth, higher profitability, but this is where we are today.
The aftermarket that you see kinda down there in the low growth but high margin is something that we find very, very nice to have 'cause it funds a lot of the other programs, you know, and the other initiatives that you wanna go after, with its high profitability, but we don't see a ton of growth there. The defense continues to be a high growth area for us in both Graham and Barber-Nichols, and you're seeing that relative to a lot of the investment that Navy's making in the supplier industrial base.
And with that, I will turn it over to Mr. Chris Thome, our CFO, and he can talk you through some of the financials.
Thanks, Dan, and thank you, everyone, for taking time today to learn more about Graham. I'm just gonna review a summary of our first quarter results that ended in June. We are a March thirty-first year-end, so it's the first quarter of our fiscal year 2025 that we're in right now. So Q1 was a good start to the year. Revenue and profitability was in line with expectations. We had $50 million of revenue, which was up 5% over the prior year.
It was a record level of revenue for us, but as I said, it was as expected. It was really being driven by a 28% increase in our defense business, as well as P3 Technologies that Dan mentioned, that we acquired last November, added about $1.6 million to our revenue for the quarter. The growth in defense is really being driven by an increase in direct labor. We are a direct labor business, so as our direct labor goes, so goes our revenue.
And our HR teams have really done a nice job increasing our labor over the last two years, increasing it 10% a year for the last two years. Additionally, we are getting into some of our better priced defense projects as we get into the second, third, fourth articles of some of the programs that we're on, so with that comes higher pricing and higher profitability as we get more efficient, and get better execution.
Although we did see a 28% decrease in our aftermarket business versus the record levels of the prior year quarter, it still remains really strong. It was about $8 million for us, for the quarter. So along with our revenue growth, we also saw an increase in gross profit and gross margin. For the quarter, our gross margin improved 170 basis points to 24.8%. That's being driven by, you know, a better mix of higher margin jobs, better execution, that all goes along with the more profitable defense projects that we're working on.
I should point out that the first quarter of fiscal year 2025 benefited by about $480,000 from a grant that we received from Blue Forge Alliance to pay for our training programs. We have put in place a welder training programs that we've partnered with some of our local trade schools, and Blue Forge Alliance has agreed to pay for those adjusted for those costs for the next year, so that went into our margin, and it was an improvement there.
Additionally, with the P3 acquisition, they also brought with it not only the revenue, but a much higher margin profitability business than the normal legacy business, so with the improved revenue and gross margin, we've also seen significant improvement in our earnings. Adjusted EPS for the quarter was $0.33 a share, which was up 18% over the prior year.
And although our quarters tend to be very lumpy, depending on the number of direct labor hours that quarter, as well as the projects and the mix that we're working on, you can see when you look back over a trailing twelve-month business and over the last several years, the improvements that we've made. But, you know, with that improvement, we're not done. We still have a long way to go. Dan and I like to refer to it, we set out a five-year strategic plan two years ago. We'd like to say that, you know, we're only in the third inning of that plan.
We're very pleased with the results to date, but we still have a lot of hard work in front of us, and slow and steady progress each year is what our goal is. Similar to our earnings, our adjusted EBITDA has also seen a similar improvement. Adjusted EBITDA was $5.1 million for the quarter, which was 10.3% of revenue, and this compares to only 7% of revenue for fiscal year 2024 and 5% in fiscal year 2023.
So as you can see, just slow, steady improvement. Partially offsetting the improvements in revenue and gross margin was increased SG&A levels, as we continue to invest in our operations, on our employees, and our technology. We are putting in an ERP system in our Batavia facility, so that's going into some of our SG&A costs.
We also are investing a higher level of R&D to promote and further our technology for down the road. Additionally, with the acquisition of Barber-Nichols in 2021, there was an earn-out agreement that was signed with the shareholders of Barber-Nichols. Shortly after the acquisition, the shareholders of Barber-Nichols approached us and asked us to convert that earn-out agreement to a supplemental employee bonus program.
So the increased level of SG&A includes this supplemental earn-out agreement, which covers fiscal year 2024, 2025, and 2026. So that program will cease after fiscal year 2026, and that program is roughly about two hundred basis points detriment to our margin at this point in time. This slide shows our very much improved balance sheet and cash flows.
As we've seen an improvement in our profitability, we've also seen an improvement in our balance sheet, and we have definitely shored up our balance sheet, which will be able to enable and support our future growth, both organically and inorganically. As of the end of June, we had no debt on our balance sheet, and we had $22 million of cash, and we had access to a $50 million line of credit.
We've guided that our CapEx spend for this year is gonna be $10-$15 million, and as we invest in some of the things that Dan talked about, so building expansion, capacity expansion, machining centers, automated welding equipment, and testing facilities. But as Dan mentioned, all of these opportunities have a greater than 20% ROI associated with them. We expect for the next several years that our CapEx spend is gonna be 5%-7% of sales in order to enable us to achieve that 8%-10% organic revenue growth that Dan was talking about.
This slide summarizes our orders for the current quarter. As I mentioned, given the size of some of the defense contracts that we're dealing with, our orders tend to be very lumpy. For the quarter, we had $55.8 million of orders, which equated to a 1.1 times book-to-bill ratio, and that's even after we experienced a 1.4 book-to-bill ratio for fiscal year 2024. The current quarter orders included a large chemical, petrochemical facility, as well as a follow-on order for the Mark 48, the alternators and regulators for our Mark 48 program.
This increase in orders really shows the confidence that our defense customers have with us, as well as the fact that we've become a very strategic supplier for the U.S. Navy. This slide here summarizes some of the orders. A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we received $65 million in orders.
One of the programs in that $65 million amount was the follow-on order for the Mark 48 torpedo, which, as I just mentioned, was in the first quarter. However, the other two orders that we disclosed, the air turbine pump for the Columbia-class submarine, as well as a large, cryogenic circulation pump order from one of our larger space customers, those are gonna fall into the second quarter.
As you can see, these are longer-term contracts going out through calendar year 2027 and calendar year 2032. The significance of the air turbine pump order is that it was a competitively bid order that we won from a competitor. So it's a nice addition to our business, and it was also at good margins. So this order growth has driven backlog to increase to nearly $400 million at the end of June. 83% of our backlog is to the defense industry, and the $400 million of backlog is a 23% increase over the same time last year.
We expect about 35%-45% of our backlog to turn into revenue over the next year, and another 25%-30% of revenue to convert to revenue in the year after that. So this really just illustrates the long-term nature and the stability and visibility of our backlog that we have and that the defense business brings to us. And then finally, this slide summarizes our guidance for fiscal year twenty-five, which ends in March.
We're guiding to $200-$210 million of revenue, which would represent 11% growth over the prior year. We're also guiding to $16.5-$19.5 million of adjusted EBITDA, which would represent a 35% increase over the prior year and a 9% EBITDA margin. And as I mentioned before, this includes the impact of that supplemental earn-out bonus for Barber-Nichols, which is about 200 basis points. So without that, it would be closer to an 11% margin.
This guidance puts us on track for our long-term fiscal year twenty twenty-seven goals of 8%-10% organic revenue growth, as well as low- to mid-teen EBITDA margins. So in summary, you know, we're really proud of the accomplishments to date and the improvements that we've made. However, we have a long way to go to get to these twenty twenty-seven goals.
You know, we've successfully transformed the company to a diversified business with a very strong core defense business associated with it. We are in a lot of different markets, which are all very attractive at this point in time. And again, we're looking for that slow and steady improvement every year as we march towards those twenty twenty-seven goals. And we're very confident that we have the team and the strategic plan to do that and to execute on it.
So with that, Dan and I would be happy to take any of your questions.
Yep.
Can you talk a little bit about the legacy brand businesses, mining, and chemical industries? Because we're seriously depressed for a while. Customers weren't spending any money and turnarounds and focus on receiving. Has that changed materially in the last, you know, years?
Yeah. So the question is, what is status of Graham's legacy energy and chemical business? It is continuing to change, continuing to morph. For this year, 2024, our customers are telling us that, you know, 70% of their spend in the plants is gonna be maintenance, and then 30% is more on the CapEx. 10 years ago, it was swapped, right? So domestically, we're definitely moving towards more of a maintenance, kind of a, mode.
And the US just continues to run its refineries hard, and we don't see that really changing that much in the future. Continued heavy maintenance, and then less on the CapEx side. Where the CapEx really is growing right now is in India and Middle East. So we're getting lots of opportunities in both of those places. In some cases, specifically India, we're building in India to be competitive there. And in the Middle East, it kind of depends.
The world is opening up to more and more non-U.S. manufactured product. And so depending upon, you know, what the customer wants, if they're looking at it more as a short-term kind of an installation, then they'll go with lowest price, which, you know, thankfully, we've got the ability to serve that from India. And in other cases, they're saying, "If you're not on the approved vendor list, then you can't play." And in those cases, we can build in Batavia.
The world continues to change. What we're seeing in China is really, really slow. We're just not seeing the recovery out of the COVID shutdown that we expected to see. So, China's relatively slow right now. Yep.
Two, two questions. First of all, relative to your longer term margin goal and the backlog that you have, particularly on the defense side, how is the pricing within that backlog relative to what you need to accomplish that long-term margin goal? And, and then secondarily, the aftermarket business is, is what? 15-ish% of revenue, somewhere in that ballpark neighborhood?
Yeah.
About $30-$35 million a year.
Generally speaking, I think sitting on this side of the table, we all think of aftermarket as being a reasonably steady business, irrespective of the industry. How did yours end up down 28% in the quarter?
Yeah. So the first question is, what does the margin profile look like on the defense side, and how does that play into our projections? So we have very good visibility of all of our defense orders. They're multi-year. Pricing has improved each time that we bid those, and so as we look out into the future, we see better-priced contracts and better margins, you know, going forward. And so that is all built into our projections.
So we feel very confident about our projections because a ton of the backlog, a ton, a ton of that work is really kind of locked in. Now, we haven't won every contract that's needed to provide all of that defense business out for the next four years, two, three years. We've got a lot of it in place. Very confident with Navy pricing and how that backlog rolls out into the future. On the aftermarket, I'll let Chris talk.
Sure. So, the question with regards to how can we see a 28% decrease in aftermarket, and really it's attributable to the record levels that we saw last year. Aftermarket continues to be stable with both regards to revenue and orders. We had $8 million of revenue this current quarter, but it was down from, you know, which is a $32 million run rate, so very stable. But we had record levels in the first quarter and second quarter of last year.
And those are only two to three, you know, two- to three-month life cycle from order to ship. So it, it does have a little bit of volatility with it, but we were just coming from a very peak level at the end of last year, but it continues to remain strong. The book-to-bill on our aftermarket remains at one or above, as we go here, so nice, steady revenue stream for us, but it can have some volatility from quarter to quarter as it is a short cycle business.
So as a follow-on to that, last year, that Q1 and Q2, was there some catch-up maintenance that your customers were doing that led to that increase in aftermarket business? Or why was it inflated a year ago?
Yeah. So the question is with regards to aftermarket last year, was it some catch-up on the part of our customers? And I would say yes. I would also say that currently, you know, a lot of our customers, too, are taking kind of a wait and see approach with the current election year going on. So we would think that after the election, you know, and there's a little bit more visibility to the future policies that, you know, the orders will pick back up again. But again, they still remain strong at either one or above on the book-to-bill ratio for aftermarket.
Thank you. And that is primarily declining, correct?
Correct. So, about 90% of it is to the oil and gas and refining and petrochemical business, but we have just most recently, our defense aftermarket business has started to pick up a little bit as well, and it's an area that we're trying to expand and get more into. So it is kinda just starting to grow and become more significant, but it's about 10% of our aftermarket sales.
Hi, thanks for coming out. In the defense, is it only the Navy as far as, you know, there in defense, there's no Army, there's no only Navy?
So just 'cause I'm standing here, I'll take it. It is primarily the question is, with regards to defense, is it just to the Navy? And I would say it's primarily Navy, but we do have other programs with the other branches of the armed forces as well. Some of our thermal management systems go into radar systems, and things like that. So we do have other opportunities with other within the other branches.
Is there any opportunity to expand to the other branches, or is that not a focus?
Do you want to take that one or?
So the question is, is there opportunity to expand to the other branches? I kind of look at Navy as our sweet spot because it's long term, it's at the quantities that we like. Army ends up being almost automotive. The quantities are so high that it really doesn't fit the production style that we've got going. And then Air Force would fit, but we just haven't gotten too deep into the Air Force at this point in time. So I would say, you know, going forward, any expansion would probably be more on the Air Force side than the Army side.
On the defense side, you had a lot of exposure to submarine projects here, that and from my understanding, they've always been delayed or slowed down, and I'm trying to understand how much does that impact you and your ability to kind of manage your workforce and margins and revenue?
Yeah. So the question is for Navy delays, does that impact us or not? The answer is no. So you hear a lot in the press about that the Navy is not happy, that we're not up to two Virginia class deliveries per year, and we're behind on Columbia class. What our customers, who are the shipbuilders, the Newport News and Electric Boat, are saying, "We're getting so much pressure from the Navy to build these things faster.
Build as fast as you can, ship it to us, and we'll store them. And by the way, do you have more capacity that you could actually pick up from these other suppliers that are slow?" You know, and so we're, you know, as much as we can take on, they'll feed us. And so that kind of speaks to the investments that they're making in us, basically buying us tools to be able to have more capacity, and they're giving us more opportunities to bid on. So no, it actually is asking us to go faster. Yep.
On the space business, is it just the U.S. government, or are you also SpaceX, anything international?
Yeah, so the question is, what is our space business made up of relative to customers? The majority of it, I would say, is commercial space right now. We do a little bit of work with NASA, but most of it is the commercial space folks that are putting up telecommunication satellites, you know, launch services, et cetera, that are more on the commercial side. There is a little bit relative to NASA's-