Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. Pleased to be joined by Matt Malone and Chris Thome from Graham Corporation. Matt is the President and Chief Executive Officer. Chris is Vice President Finance, Chief Financial Officer, and Principal Accounting Officer. Matt, I know you have some slides, so I'll turn it over to you.
Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Today is actually the first day that we're going to unveil a new presentation on Graham, really highlighting the segmentation as though we've sort of changed the landscape of where we're headed. I'll say it's a very consistent strategy, just a new refreshed deck. Myself, Matt Malone, and Chris Thome will go through it. Chris will hit the financials. Let me tell you more. First, just a friendly reminder that today's presentation does contain forward-looking statements, and we encourage you to review the full safe harbor. Now let's begin with Graham at a glance. Graham is a global leader in mission-critical fluid, power, vacuum, and heat transfer solutions for undersea to deep space applications.
Envision the main condenser that sits on board the submarine or an aircraft carrier, or the pump system that actually provides the oxygen fan for astronauts. Graham is diversified with focus in three core end markets, including defense, energy, and process in space, with greater than $1 billion of installed product globally. It is a large install base. We are disrupting these core markets through a combination of proven heritage and introducing new modernized solutions to the existing markets through R&D. Graham was founded in 1936, so it has a long runway of performance and currently has 600 employees globally. Headquarters is in Batavia, with locations in Jupiter, Florida, and Colorado, and then a few remote locations globally in China and India. We currently have a $487 million market cap, with 21% CAGR since our strategy that we unveiled in 2021.
Next, you should invest in Graham because Graham's recent successes and continued momentum are built on a solid foundation with high future potential. First, we serve diversified end markets with solid tailwinds and some level of countercyclicality today. Second, our backlog has reached the point of $412 million and continues to grow, which enables long-term and strategic capital allocation. Third, we've been focused on deploying 20% ROIC or greater capital implementation, both organically and inorganically, which outpaces many of our peers. Lastly, our leadership team is growth-oriented with focus on the future and new product introduction, business development, continuous improvement, and M&A. With these foundations, we're on track to our guidance in fiscal year 2027 of 13%-15% adjusted EBITDA. Let me provide a brief introduction to who we are and what we do. Graham's portfolio is diversified across three core markets: defense, energy, process, and space.
We provide highly engineered mission-critical products to each of these segments, and we leverage each of these technologies across segments. We have protected IP that allows us to push boundaries and claim a competitive moat. An example of this is in our cryogenic pumps, which we use for radar cooling in defense, AI data center cooling in the energy and process space, and then rocket propellant and launch vehicles on the space sector. Our mission is to enhance system efficiency with these critical systems, and we're uniquely positioned through our differentiated technology, deep customer relationships, and proven track record. In the next slide, I'll tap further into the defense portfolio. Graham's defense portfolio is experiencing strong demand supported by, first of all, increased U.S. allocation of funds due to geopolitical tensions, and two, the acceleration in shipbuilding plans.
Approximately 80% of Graham's portfolio is sole sourced with high entries to barrier and is primarily linked to naval nuclear submarines and weapon systems. As you can see, over the last four years, we've experienced about 25% CAGR with continued growth expected. Thanks to decades of high quality and on-time performance, the defense portfolio is scaling within the existing U.S. Navy framework, as well as new opportunities in adjacent spaces. An example of where we're moving into is next-generation radar systems that require and provide 360 degrees of visibility on the battlefield. Graham is providing the main cooling pumps that have 50% less weight and 40% less size than the conventional legacy solution. What's interesting about that is we're actually adopting a lot of that technology from the space market because weight and size are paramount into ground-based defense.
Within the defense market, Graham is nimble and cost-effective, which positions us perfectly to duly serve one, the conventional big defense primes, and two, all these up-and-coming disruptors that you see coming. With that, let me dive deeper into the Navy nuclear side. The core of our defense business is focused around long-cycle U.S. Navy submarines, carriers, and torpedo programs. These programs not only are critical to national security, but they provide long visibility into revenue as well as profitability, with approximately $1.7 billion of long forecasted opportunity for these programs that are mentioned. It allows us to do a really nice job at future planning for capital allocation, as well as driving operational efficiency within the business. In recent news, we just announced a $136.5 million contract for a follow-on order for Virginia-class submarines.
We are actually finishing up a new facility in Batavia that allows for accelerated production, where our customer actually granted $13.5 million of funding for that facility. These two examples demonstrate the long-term importance of our offering to the Navy. Now a glimpse into the energy and process market. Our energy and process portfolio is comprised of both conventional and emerging applications. Conventional, including refining, petrochemical, power generation, and edible oils. Emerging, including small modular nuclear, geothermal, and cryogenics. This balance allows for maximum value extraction during cyclical upcycles, while ensuring we are well-positioned for emerging markets in the energy diversification. On the energy side, on the legacy side of the business, Graham has established itself as an industry leader since the 1930s, providing mission-critical vacuum and heat transfer solutions. Over that time frame, we have developed about a billion dollars of installed product globally.
On the emerging energy side, Graham is utilizing core vacuum technology used in the old petrochemical side to redefine emerging markets, such as hydrogen processing and lithium battery extraction. In addition, we're producing hydrogen pumps to minimize cryogenic boil-off, helium circulators for small modular nuclear, and cryogenic pumps for data AI cooling. The competitive moat is established through homegrown design tool sets, patented technology, and highly engineered manufacturing processes developed over the last 90 years. Lastly, the space portfolio. While the smallest segment at 7%, it is still a meaningful part of the portfolio for margin extraction. The space portfolio is steadily growing for two reasons. First, geopolitical tensions are transitioning and allowing for a space race within the world. Second, launch capacity is maturing, and therefore opportunities that are existing in space, like satellites, are maturing.
When Graham acquired Barber-Nichols in 2021, it enabled the entry into the space market, built on a long and successful heritage, supplying rocket engine hardware to the likes of NASA, SpaceX, and many more. Since, Graham has significantly grown the space portfolio into cryogenic and propellant management pumps, oxygen fans for astronaut life support, and satellite cooling pumps. Each space product requires analytical excellence combined with validation pedigree, which really locks the OEM into that final solution. Our diversified portfolio that I just reviewed across defense, energy, and process in space offers stability for our investors. Transitioning from the business overview, next I will provide a snapshot of where we are going centered around growth enablement. This is a very new piece of content that we're sort of sharing as an entry look into what the improved growth phase looked like for Graham.
In fiscal year 2022, Graham leadership, led by our now Executive Chairman, Dan Thoren, laid out a five-year strategic vision for investors to give insight on where we are headed. Over the past few years, we have completed the stabilized phase with focus on resetting the strategy with respect to people, processes, structure, and fundamentals, all wrapped around continuous improvement. We remain on track to our ambitious fiscal year 2027 targets. With the turnaround complete, now we can focus on the next phase, which is the improved growth phase, which is what we're going to start introducing today. We are in the early innings as depicted by the today marker. On the next few slides, I'll give insight into these phases: stabilize, improve, and growth. First, before we pivot forward, let's look back. The stabilized phase focused on resetting our strategy and positioning ourselves for the future.
We've consistently delivered results since fiscal year 2022 in line with expectations to the street. A few highlights as shown on this slide. The first, revenue more than doubled, and we balanced the portfolio between commercial and defense, which previously was 25% defense and most commercial. The second, we executed numerous organic capital projects, all exceeding our 20% ROIC hurdle rate, which we continue to fill opportunities. The third, backlog tripled from $138 million - $412 million, which gives us great visibility and allows for disciplined capital allocation. Fourth, adjusted EBITDA margins continue to improve with focus and a clear path towards our low to mid-teens EBITDA as presented. The stabilized phase is complete, and we're built on a solid foundation as we transition to the improving growth phase. Like crawl, walk, run for a little kid, we used an approach to sustainable long-term growth.
First, in the improved phase, we focused on realizing benefits from our already in process investments. As I mentioned, we've been deploying 20% ROIC projects for the last two years. The majority of those are coming online in the next six months, and we'll soon thereafter, after this calendar year, realize those benefits. Examples of those across our core markets. In the defense side, we've made the investment, as mentioned, of $17.5 million, $13.5 million of which was sponsored by a customer. That's for a 30,000 sq ft Navy facility that will provide some critical hardware to these long-term programs. It has optimized product flow, automated welders throughout, and state-of-the-art machining centers to accelerate throughput. Similarly, in the energy and process market, we are investing in the improved phase with facility expansion, new product introduction, and international expansion. An example is a next-gen nozzle.
On our current install base of $1 billion, we've actually upgraded the nozzle design to what is a state-of-the-art and best-in-class design. It allows for 10% steam savings for our customers and/or about 10% throughput enhancement to end users. If you think about a petrochemical facility, you can actually increase the performance and output of that facility by up to 10%. As you can imagine, a facility like that, the ROI is quite significant. Rather than just stimulating our install base with in-kind product, we're also bringing modernized solutions today. That particular opportunity has a multi-year revenue potential of up to $50 million. In addition to the market-specific initiatives, we're also focused on operational excellence at the corporate level.
An example of that is the $50 million credit facility that we've gotten in place with Wells Fargo, as well as a new ERP system that's coming online in our main factory in Batavia in October of this year. As a means to introduce the concept to growth, though, we're thinking forward. While we're in the improved phase and working through these project implementations, we're also thinking forward to the future. Today, I'll provide a little bit of a teaser. The growth phase is centered around expanding our product lifecycle. For simplicity, we've decomposed the product lifecycle into three phases, including value identification, value creation, and value extraction. To date, Graham has excelled at value creation. This phase is where you bring a highly engineered solution to a critical end user application.
We will continue to do this, and we will multiply our reach through value identification and extraction. What does that mean? First, we are looking to move to a more proactive business development nature. Dan Thoren, the Chairman of the Board, will be actually leading that activity. Rather than letting the phone ring, we will be studying our core markets, listening to our customers, and mapping out our solutions, how they solve their needs. An example of this is with our patented multi-channel diffuser that significantly increases pump efficiency. Our focus will be revolutionizing all 24/7 hour pumps that operate, water treatment, pool pumps, HVAC chillers. We are going to bring new technology to those markets that push the OEMs forward. Second is a go-to-market strategy for commercial scale. Over decades, we have developed an extensive product library.
The challenge is they've been a single solution for a single end use. We are going to focus on product-market fit assessments to further expand the reach of these products into new markets and new opportunities because they know they already we know that those products fit in new applications. Third is global expansion. We intend to use India for the rest of the world where price is critical and localized manufacturing is preferential. Today, we have sales, engineering, and local fabrication footprint across the world. We are doubling down on this commitment by expanding our team, centralizing our presence near customers, and developing extended manufacturing footprint. Lastly is digital transformation. I mentioned we have a billion-dollar install base.
We are going to bring artificial intelligence coupled with digitized business automation systems to turn a reactive aftermarket with high profitability today into a proactive aftermarket built around turnarounds for our install base. Once we figure it out on the commercial side of the business, we will deploy it to all of the other businesses within the Graham portfolio. Today, this is just a conceptual introduction into the growth phase, but the future is bright, momentum is building, and we are just getting started. Lastly, as part of the growth phase, we continue to explore opportunistic M&A deals with motivated engineered products aligned to our core markets. We will expand the M&A scope to include deals that accelerate our product lifecycle. We are in the early yet productive discussions with potential targets that are aligned with our outline criteria shown here. With that, Chris, financials?
Sure. Thanks, Matt.
Earlier this week, we released our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2025 results. We are on March 31st year-end, and showing another strong quarter with 21% revenue growth to $59.3 million, capping off a very strong year of 13% revenue growth to $209.9 million. This growth is being driven by our defense market, which is up 28% for the quarter and 23% for the full year. That growth is in existing programs through improved pricing as well as better execution. What's nice is that we're seeing growth across all our markets, not just defense. Although our aftermarket business was down 8% from the record levels in fiscal year 2024, it still remains very strong and being one of our highest margin businesses, and it was about $40 million for fiscal year 2025.
This chart shows how the higher revenue is leading to improved margins as we leverage our fixed overhead. Additionally, because of our better execution, because of the improvements and the investments we've made that Matt just talked about, as well as the improved pricing, for fiscal year 2025, we're able to increase our gross margin by 330 basis points to 25.2%. Seeing some very nice results from the investments that we've made. In turn, this improved margin is flowing through to the bottom line. For fiscal year 2025, we had a 97% increase in adjusted EPS to $1.24. Similarly, our adjusted EBITDA increased 69% to $22.4 million, which equates to a 10.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, which was up 350 basis points over the previous year.
I should point out that the last several years, our results have been impacted by a supplemental earn-out bonus that was put in place with the Barber-Nichols acquisition. That bonus program is set to expire after fiscal year 2026, the year we are in right now, and will add about 200 basis points to our margin that you see here on this slide. As you can see, we have made some nice improvements under our company-wide culture of continuous improvement, but we still have some work to do to get to the low to mid-teens EBITDA margins that we guided to for fiscal year 2027, which is less than a year away at this point. Despite the increase in revenue, backlog increased 5% for the year as our orders were $412 million, which was primarily being driven by our defense business.
Our book-to-bill ratio for fiscal year 2025 was 1.1 times and marks the fifth year in a row that we've been able to have a greater than one book-to-bill ratio. Seeing some very nice growth there. Orders for fiscal year 2025 included $50 million of the $136.5 million contract that Matt was talking about for the Virginia-class submarine. The remaining $86.5 million of that contract was recorded in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. We're off to a good start for the current year. I should point out that our orders can be very lumpy given the nature of our business and the size of our large defense contracts. If you look on an annualized basis, the orders are seeing some very nice growth.
Approximately 83% of our $412 million backlog is to the defense industry, which gives us tremendous visibility and stability, and it allows us to reinvest and make these investments back in our business. We currently expect about 45% of our backlog to convert to revenue in the next year, setting us up very well for fiscal year 2026. Despite the global uncertainty that is out there right now, our aftermarket business remains strong in the energy and process and defense markets as our orders for the aftermarket were $46.5 million for fiscal year 2025, which was an increase of 8%. If you look at our capital structure, we have a very strong capital position. As of the end of March, we had no debt outstanding.
We had $22 million of cash on hand, and we had access to our $50 million line of credit thanks to our friends at Wells Fargo here. We had very strong cash flow from operations of $24 million during fiscal year 2025, which we then in turn took back and invested into the business. In fiscal year 2025, we spent $19 million on CapEx, which Matt talked a little bit about. Just to repeat what Matt said, all of our major capital expenditure projects have over a 20% ROIC associated with them. We've guided that for the next several years, we are going to continue to spend 7-10% of revenue on CapEx as we're investing in all these organic growth opportunities that we have.
Additionally, we plan on gradually increasing our R&D spend to the 1%-2% of revenue level to continue to invest in our technology and be disruptive and innovative, but only if these projects have the proper return on investment. Our intention is to offset some of this R&D increase through process improvement and operational efficiencies. With the release of earnings, we provided our guidance for fiscal year 2026. We guided to revenue in the range of $225 million-$235 million, which represents a 10% increase at the midpoint of that guidance. We also guided to our adjusted EBITDA, increasing to $22 million-$28 million, which represents a 12% increase at the midpoint and equates to approximately an 11% adjusted EBITDA margin. Still seeing some nice improvement.
Although the situation is very fluid, going to be material to our business, we estimate that the impact of tariffs as we sit here today is approximately $2 million-$5 million, as approximately 80% of our revenue is to the U.S., and the remaining 20% of our revenue, a large portion of that is manufactured in-country. Not a lot of tariff exposure there. We are also very well protected. We have a lot of contract language and very favorable shipping terms that also protects us from the impact of tariffs. To summarize everything we've kind of talked about here today, when we laid out our strategic plan three years ago, we said we wanted to achieve 8%-10% organic revenue growth per year and get to the low to mid-teens EBITDA margins by 2027.
As Matt said, we are firmly on track to hit that. We've hit and even exceeded the 8-10% organic revenue growth each of the last three years. And as I mentioned, once the impact of the supplemental Barber-Nichols earn-out bonus goes away after this year, we'll immediately get a 200 basis point lift to our margins. So we're very proud of the accomplishments that we've had to date, but we still have a lot of opportunity to improve and grow, as Matt kind of laid out for you today. And based upon the investments we are making in our business, we feel very comfortable with our fiscal year 2027 targets, which, as I said, is less than one year away. So with that, we will open up the floor to any questions.
Okay. If no one has questions, excuse me, immediately, I'll ask the first one.
Could you give us an update on the progress and the potential opportunities for the cryogen facility that is in process in Florida?
Yeah. So we're investing in a large propellant and cryogenic test facility in Jupiter, Florida. It's two months away from opening, so it's very close. The reason why we went forward with this investment is because NASA, specifically Stennis, is the only facility in the U.S. that can carry out some of the testing that we're looking to be able to support, which means that the space products and transportation products on the energy and process side cannot be tested except in the final application. We were intending to utilize that facility for our own internal product testing, and what we're finding is the demand is so high that we will likely use it immediately for several key programs with our customers on large applications.
The inquiries are very high. One of the big reasons for that is it has on-site power. It has three-phase large-scale power, which is a key differentiator for that facility. Everything that we had envisioned as to what it could do is coming to life, and it is right on track to sort of commission in the July timeframe.
Great. Next one. You just completed a leadership transition earlier this week that you announced in February. Chris, maybe this is best for you, directed to you. How has that gone? What are your thoughts at this point? I know it is very early.
Yeah. No, it is very early, but it has been really a seamless transition. It has been great working with Matt as he has been moving into his new role. Dan Thoren is not going away.
He moved into the Executive Chairman role and will be actively pursuing some of our business development opportunities that Matt talked about. It really has been a seamless transition. I've worked with Matt here for the last three years. He was with Barber-Nichols ten years prior to the acquisition. He's led Barber-Nichols for the last four years while Dan took over as CEO. During that time, Barber-Nichols experienced a 10% CAGR during that time, double-digit CAGR. It's really been a joy. Matt brings a certain amount of energy and positivity and really is breathing new energy into the company. It's been great.
Yeah. From my perspective, there's such a stable foundation. The four leaders within the corporate team had set the strategy in 2022, so it's the same team. I'm just nurturing it forward, which is fun.
Dan worked through the stabilized phase, which is a great opportunity for him to lead from the front and opportunity for me to lead through the improvement growth phase, which is really where I look forward to false multiplying the vision that we have.
Great. Thank you. If there's.