Hey, hey, everyone. Marc Bianchi here again from the TD Cowen Energy Team. We're excited to be joined by Chart Industries and Chart's CEO, Jill Evanko, for this session here, so thanks, thanks, Jill, so much for joining us. Maybe to kick us off, I'm gonna ask you to give a short answer to what's probably a long response. But just can you, for people that might not be familiar, introduce Chart. What do you do? You know, what's the sort of high-level strategy? You did a large acquisition, Howden. Sort of, how did that change things? Just to sort of get everybody up to some high level of speed, if you could.
Absolutely, and thanks for having us today, Marc. You know, for those who are less familiar with Chart, we are a design engineering manufacturing firm for full solutions for industrial gas, energy, and a variety of different end markets. What that means is that we have all mission-critical manufacturing of the key pieces of equipment that go into solutions, whether that's LNG liquefaction, hydrogen, carbon capture, water treatment, which we call the Nexus of Clean : clean power, clean water, clean food, clean industrials. And we also have about 30% of our business in aftermarket service repair, so kind of however you think of this full solution, whether it's new build and aftermarket, or whether it's process technology and key equipment, that's what we offer into a variety of end markets.
As you point out, last year, early last year, we did a transformative acquisition, which was of Howden, and that brought what we viewed as the remaining kind of missing mission-critical manufacturing in-house for compression, blowers, and complementary products to the Chart legacy stationary equipment. So, you know, one of the great aspects of our business is that we are able to serve such a variety of end markets without having to change our manufacturing capability or capacity or lines. Because a lot of our products are used in a variety of different end markets, and we don't have to switch our capabilities in order to serve those markets. So I'll pause there. I think we're gonna go into a lot of different directions today, but that's a quick overview.
Yeah, that's great. Well, maybe, drilling down a little bit, at least in the way you guys report, so there's four segments. There's a Heat Transfer segment, Specialty segment, Repair, Service and Leasing , and then the Cryo Tank Solutions. You outlined some growth rates for those for 2024, where HTS and specialty are growing at sort of, like, this 40%-50% pace, which is really, really impressive. And then the other segments are growing at slower rates, but still double digits. Maybe you could talk about what's driving that growth this year, and then how we should think about each of those segments, you know, in 2025 and beyond.
I'm not saying, like, "Give us 2025 guidance," but just talk to us about what sort of a mid-cycle growth rate ought to look like for your different segments.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we're sitting in a very good spot with, extremely strong backlog, and we've had that now for a couple of years of continuing demand across our end markets. The key drivers of... You know, if you look at HTS, it's a variety of different LNG. We think of LNG in four categories: the big LNG, small scale, infrastructure, and then the aftermarket piece. And, the backlog is exceptionally strong for, all of those applications, and we see that, the kind of demand across LNG in a variety of different geographies, continuing in the future here. Specialty is, what I would consider a mixed bag of end markets, albeit the products being similar that go into them.
You have really key driver here being the hydrogen helium market, and we do play across the hydrogen and helium value chain from providing process technology equipment to those who produce the molecule, keeping in mind that we don't actually produce our own molecule, to storage and transport to end use. We're starting to see a pickup in the commercial side of end use, so mobile refuelers, heavy-duty transport, and that type of thing. Then also, the first quarter was our highest ever carbon capture quarter, so we're seeing and a pickup in that. It'll take a little bit longer, I think, you know, in at least our backlog to get started on carbon capture, but that's also in the Specialty market.
And then you have end markets such as space exploration, where we're really well-positioned, and our additional capacity that we added in our Theodore, Alabama, number two facility serves not only the marine market but also the industrial gas, traditional end market, and the space exploration market. And then the last one I'd touch on in Specialty that kind of continues to see broad-based demand from some of the macro market drivers is the water treatment business. Fairly small base is what we're working off of, but really high growth in that particular market. And then, as you pointed out in your question, you got the two other segments, RSL and CTS.
CTS is what I would consider, like, our consistent and kind of leading indicator business, and that's primarily with your industrial gas end users, for storage tanks and trailers and that type of thing. That business typically grows kind of in the 4%-5%, and, you know, we've got it growing more meaningfully this year, but that's also a function of the strength that we saw in the first quarter. And we'll continue to expect to see that grow kind of in the mid-single digits in the medium term. And then from an RSL standpoint, just love this segment. I mean, you know, you know I go on and on about it, but it's really nice margin, tons of growth opportunities, tons of additional synergies from the combination of bringing Howden into the Chart business.
So while we have it growing double digits, as you point out, it's been growing about 15%+, at least in 2023, compared to 2022. So lots of great opportunity ahead. Looking at the medium term, as you point out, you know, we continue to see high teens in terms of the top-line CAGR, and targeting toward the mid-thirties% on gross margin as a % of sales. So those are kind of the metrics there. And what I would see is, you know, consistency in the HTS business, specialty continuing to be a strong growth vector for us, RSL continuing at double digits or more, and then the CTS being, you know, the consistent steady eddy, as we just described.
On the RSL side, so you mentioned sort of the synergy opportunity there. Can you just describe that a little bit more? Like, how far along are you in realizing those synergies? You've announced, like, a lot of revenue synergies on the order side, but I don't know if that tells the whole story about sort of what the opportunity is there. So maybe you could describe that a bit more. And then, you know, if capitalizing on the synergy opportunities maybe that gives you some certain basis points of growth above market, and then once you've sort of done that, like, what's sort of the steady state growth rate for that business over time?
Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right that, you know, this is something that there's so many different avenues to describe the synergy opportunities that we could go on and on about it. So there's, there's more than just, as you said, the commercial synergies that we've announced around the opportunity set that that sits here in RSL. And I think that double digit is far longer than the medium term, for the fact that we're in really early innings on the multiple opportunities of synergy activity. And, you know, whether we call it synergy or just taking, taking the capabilities across a larger geographic footprint is the key part of that.
So, for example, you know, Chart Legacy, pre a year ago, we didn't have a footprint for service, aftermarket service repair, outside of heavily United States, a few pockets in Europe, but certainly not in Asia Pac. And now we have these 50+ service centers around the world, which gives us the ability to serve customers that have our products, Howden's products in their install base, and being close enough to it is where we've started to see the commercial wins. And so being able to say yes to a customer that bought a new build station, that wants a service contract, but requires us to have service people within a few hours of their locations. And that's been probably the biggest traction we've gotten so far.
And then you have multiple LTSAs and framework agreements that are multi-year, that we're now able to sell upfront when we sell a full solution to the customers. And that's something that, again, we're seeing increases in the number of those LTSAs, as well as in the content within those LTSAs. So I think that has a lot more a lot more future potential there, in particular because of the fact that we just started on that journey. And then you get into kind of the toolkits and the ways that we're able to access our install base. We...
Howden brought with it a team of digital folks that work on aftermarket, and what this is, is an internal tool that our salespeople are able to access to say, "I'm with customer A, and customer A has this set of installed base of our products or our competitor's products that we're able to service." We're seeing more and more of our new build users that have gone to a competitor in the past, and now they've come to us for service and repair. Then that, in turn, gives us an opportunity on the new build as well. Then my last piece here that I would be remiss not to talk about is the digital uptime and the Ventsim offering that we have, and that's the preventive maintenance monitoring of the equipment itself for digital uptime.
And then Ventsim has been gaining a lot of traction because of the focus of decarbonization, in particular on the mining industry. As you get, you know, more need for lithium, et cetera, deeper and hotter mines, the need for CO2 monitoring is very real, and that's the focus of the Ventsim offering. Plenty of different avenues, which is what gives me confidence that we can continue to drive this as a double-digit growth consistently, not just kind of because we have some low-hanging fruit here in the next few years.
That's great. And I, I wanna go back to Specialty for a sec, too, because you, you sort of rattled off the, the, the opportunities there, where, where, like, some of the recent growth drivers have been hydrogen, helium, CCS, space, water. But, like, when I... I, I don't know how much of that segment is driven by those four things. Is it, like, over 50%, or could you help size, like, how relevant those are? And then, what is everything else? I know it would be a long thing to describe, but just, like, give us a sense of what drives it.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, so yes, the short answer is those, those four would comprise more than 50% of that segment. With hydrogen, helium, we kind of lump them together because it's a molecule thing. But that is, that's the leader in that group of four in terms of driving the growth. But altogether, they would comprise more than 50% of the segment. 50% of the segment's every metric. I can't think of an exception to that statement. And then, though what makes everything else up. And then I would also say, you know, CCUS and water are kind of gaining traction, right? We're gonna start talking ahead here, probably at the end of the second quarter, where we'll share more specificity of what that means size-wise and how that growth profile looks.
Because it's now starting to get, those two end markets are starting to get tangible enough and real enough that, it kind of sizes things for people to understand what that addressable market looks more like. So, more to come, more to follow on that one. Then, the rest of the segment, you have things like general industrial applications that would go to LNG vehicle tanks. You know, over time, that's a jumping-off point also for our liquid hydrogen vehicle tanks, so that's why it's in the specialty segment. That particular business has been depressed the last couple of years. We saw records in 2021. In 2021, we saw a record, incredible amount of demand, and then you had a real slowdown in particular for LNG.
We started to see a little bit of increases as the year started this year, not enough to bake anything further in, but so that's fairly small right now as a % of the total. Would've been a different answer two years ago. Gas by rail is an interesting one, that's also kind of what else makes that segment up. And gas by rail is something that, you know, is. We're very uniquely positioned in being able to offer, whether that's argon rail cars or LNG tender cars, that type of application. And last year we saw a pretty big increase in demand in that, and we would anticipate that this year is fairly consistent with 2023.
Some of that's a little bit around a cycle for industrial gas guys, and some of that's just, you know, the heavy-duty transport decarbonization interest, and as that starts to get going, we expect to see more around rail for hydrogen or other cleaner applications. So those are the primary ones that go in there. And then maybe the last one worth noting is food and beverage. So this would be where food and beverage applications could take our CO2 tanks, our dosers, which dose a molecule into packaging, so your bottle of water holds its firmness but requires less PET. That's attributable in part to our doser. So those would be smaller markets, and those are, you know, more book and ship style products than the full solutions that you would talk about for hydrogen CCUS water.
Okay, that's a great overview, Jill. The one other thing on kind of end market exposures that's coming up a lot lately is on sort of AI and data centers, and I haven't heard you guys say a whole lot about it. But, you know, things are moving fast, so maybe you could just sort of update us on where your exposure and opportunities are there.
Yeah, great question, and what I would say is this kind of what goes back to the first question you asked, which was, "Tell us about, you know, the business." And one of the things I would point to is we're able to serve such a variety of end markets without having to change what products we make and how we make them, and that's exactly the case for data centers and AI. And I'm gonna answer it two different ways, 'cause I think there's two important distinctions on how we play here. We haven't talked a lot about it. You're right, we haven't talked a lot about it. I think we do have a data center slide in a presentation that's on our website that we put out on Monday. So if anybody's interested, they can go there. And we'll continue to talk about it more.
As you said, it's moving fast. Lots of customer interest in this, and, it's, it's extremely unique and really closely tied to that whole energy intensity, energy demand that, that everybody is, is talking about. So we play in that with our equipment. That can be anywhere from air coolers and fans, as an example, to, anything on the compression side. There's a lot of different ways, to play here, and that's, you know, that's CCUS, if, if data center's gonna use gas, that's backup power, that's cooling, these types of applications. So, a variety of ways that we can kind of play, from an equipment perspective for these guys.
The other thing, the other way we play, so number two, is if you even go, like, all the way upstream, right, where we play in, in the mining side and also in the decarb side for, we talked about, touched on the lithium, et cetera, mining for critical mineral, electrification, metals, and in infrastructure around, all of the kind of energy plays here, even, even nuclear, when you get in, down into it. So, we're really well-positioned on this. As you said, moving fast, so it's early opportunities and plenty of customer conversations happening now. Really hard to size because we kinda gotta see what... You know, are these guys gonna wanna own their own equipment? Are they gonna use a third party? How much carbon capture are they gonna use?
So, difficult to size the opportunity, but sure as heck, we're really well-positioned to be a key supplier into this particular end market.
Okay, great. Well, thanks for the overview. Yeah, I got the slide up here. It's got a lot of good information on it, for folks if they wanna check it out. Maybe switch over to LNG for a sec, 'cause, you know, LNG is... I think it's a good business for you, but it's, it's not as big as it used to be prior to Howden. So maybe you could just sort of describe for everybody how big the business is, how you define it. You've got big LNG, which is sort of more cyclical, I think, and then there's, you know, the other opportunities you have. Just sort of level set us on how important that business is.
Yeah. Lots of different kind of facets to this particular answer, which I'm pleased with, because we don't have that heavy reliance that we had six or seven years ago on kind of one big LNG project making or breaking a period of time's results. That was really our goal, was we want to continue to play in the LNG market, and we're really well-positioned to do so, yet we didn't want to have to continue to live in what is a project, one project makes or breaks the company's annual results. That's how we sort of got into further thinking about diversification, but still, LNG is gonna be around for a while, is our belief.
And, when we think about it, we talk Big LNG, so these are the larger projects that, that I think many people are well aware of. The second being small scale and floating, which has really accelerated quite nicely over the last three years or so with meeting more projects, more international work around that, and, and also going very modular, by definition, a nd then there's LNG infrastructure. So when we talk about that category, that would be, things like ISO containers, LNG fueling stations, over-the-road vehicle tanks, those types of things that, really play on the on-land infrastructure, or the bunkering for marine.
And then the last piece being aftermarket service repair, which we kind of split out not that long ago to talk about when we talk about LNG, primarily because we started to see brownfield projects, in particular, in U.S. Gulf Coast and in the Middle East, that we're now looking at optimization and upgrading their existing facilities. And even more so this year with the U.S. LNG pause moratorium, where existing folks that have their capacity can optimize potentially and get more gas out of their existing facilities. So those are kind of the four main ones. And, and as you point out, you know, Big LNG isn't always consistent exactly every quarter or every year.
The nice part is that when we talk about our medium targets, our medium-term targets that we referred to earlier, we set those at the end of last year, and we used September 30th, 2023, Big LNG backlog and said, "If it's not in backlog at that point in time, we're not including anything new that comes in, in this medium-term outlook." So that's kind of upside to what we talk about. And the other part being that we do have good line of sight to projects that we know we will use our technology and our equipment, but aren't yet in backlog, and, you know, that's kind of across the coming few years. So we do expect Big LNG to continue to play a part, but we don't need it in order to hit the targets that we set out.
And then the last part of your question, this is kind of an approximation, 'cause sometimes, you know, if you have an LNG vehicle tank, it's in Specialty versus falling in a category in the segmentation. So about 25% of our business is somehow related to those four categories of LNG.
Great. Great, thanks for that. That's helpful. I guess just, just one more on the LNG side of just any, any comment on the, the export permitting stuff? Like, is this... I, I think when, when it first came out, you know, we thought, "Okay, once the election's over, it's all gonna go away." But then more recently I've heard some sort of chatter from petrochemical industry saying, you know, "Well, you know, this hurts us. We, we want low natural gas to export cheap petrochemicals." But I don't know, just any, any change in sort of what your, your thought is around how this plays out?
I don't really have a change in my thought on it, meaning, like, I still think it plays out that the pause is behind us by the end of the year type of timeframe f or lots of different reasons, right? Like, we spend time with the DOE, and we also know these other players in it. But I think, regardless of administration, I think it kind of plays itself out. There may be other requirements that come as a result of the reviews, which would, you know, potentially narrow the types of, the amount of operators that are going to build or expand in the future in U.S. Gulf Coast, but that's kind of to be determined.
I think what I'd point to, though, is, regardless of that, whether I'm right or wrong, or everybody else, you know, is that we're seeing just an increase in the international side of our LNG commercial pipeline.
So that US Gulf Coast had a fairly finite set of projects that we felt were really viable. And now you're seeing international activity pick up, not always in the big LNG side, but more in the small scale as well as the big. And we got. You know, we had planned and intended that IPSMR would start to get some uptake internationally outside of US Gulf Coast, and it has been. So that also helps us in terms of expanding the content size of our opportunities that are non-US Gulf Coast. But you know, to really kind of put a fine point on it, I think I'm still in the camp that this thing is behind us here by the end of 2024.
Okay, great. Well, can you talk about your order outlook for a minute? And, you know, I think at the first quarter, you commented that the orders are really diversified, and that was, you know, a big change for you. So maybe just talk about how you see the order outlook progressing, and I think at the time you also said there was some good visibility on some hydrogen stuff in the second quarter.
Yes, you are spot on. What I would say is we've kind of calibrated to a book-to-bill of one or more, is kind of what we look for consistently. That doesn't mean that there's not a quarter here, a quarter there, that it's either much higher or much or somewhat lower than that, just because of some of the project nature of the fuller solution projects. But consistently, we've seen that across the last seven or eight quarters, and that's, as you point out, what I'm appreciative of is the fact that we are seeing a broader set of diversification of how those orders are coming in from an end market standpoint. So I like that, variety.
Also, like the consistency in the aftermarket order book, so that's been, that's been consistent across the four quarters, that we've reported since we owned Howden. Well, I did comment that we had good line of sight for hydrogen, potential hydrogen orders in the second quarter, and that's something that, you know, we, as we've developed the pipeline, I like the fact that it's not heavily production or heavily storage and transport. It's kind of across that hydrogen value chain and across geographies. So that's something that, we've really worked at, to have our hydrogen business not be heavily reliant on the US alone or the EU alone. And we've seen that traction come with, you know, we've- I think we've talked about-...
orders in South and Central America, orders in Canada, orders in the EU, and so on. And that's where we get that line of sight. Also, I think there's a trend now, as the hydrogen ecosystem is getting more into now, "Okay, we know the supply side is gonna be fine, but what about the demand side, and who's using this, and how is it being used?" And now we're starting to see these very pragmatic conversations happen, for the right applications, in my opinion, of heavy-duty transport, like marine and, you know, aerospace. You saw our announcement last week on Goliad, that require liquid. So we love being a part of gaseous and liquid, value chain for hydrogen, and, b ut liquid gives us a lot larger opportunity on the production piece with liquefaction.
Now we're seeing many more discussions on liquefaction in Europe than we ever had had before. Europe was primarily gaseous, and that's a good sign in the market. The other good sign in the market is the scaling. So where we've always talked really 15 tons per day when we're talking liquefaction, maybe 30s, now we have potential customers and customers talking to us about, "How do we get to 300 tons per day?" And so there's an immense amount of, I would say, interest and more pragmatism around these conversations. It's not so, like, dreamy as it was a few years back. That's all very good, and it's nice to have good line of sight of what could close kind of in the near term, which was my comment back on the first quarter earnings call.
Okay, great. Well, we just got a couple minutes left. I wanted to ask on cash flow. So the second quarter's guided to a nice improvement, and you kept the guidance for the year, which suggests a pretty strong back half as well. But there's just been, like, a lot of noise with cash over the past, call it, you know, six quarters or so. And it looks like even here in the back half of the year, you'll have some good guys that are unusual, that are sort of helping cash flow. When do we get to a point where, you know, we're gonna sort of see the steady state cash generation level for Chart? Is that something that really takes to 2025 to kind of get that consistency, or, or, or how are you thinking about how that plays out?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think the question is extremely valid with our focus as we've described. You know, every time we have the chance to say it, we're hyper-focused on debt paydown and getting to our target net leverage ratio range of 2-2.5. What I would say is that, you know, this is now extremely important in terms of our cash culture and all the things that we're driving on the working capital side. We have had, as you point out, I mean, there's no denying we've had noise in between quarters and, we're really working to articulate, okay, Q1 and Q3 have the senior unsecured note payment in terms of interest. And so those two quarters have that, whereas Q2 and Q4 don't, and that type of thing.
Those will continue, right? That'll be more steady state. What I think the biggest thing that we have seen and are really learning around timing on cash is the fact that we're now 70% of our business is full solution providing, in some way, shape, or form on projects, whereas three years ago, it was maybe 25% like that. And so the timing of the payments for milestones associated with those projects, for which we have cash and, you know, we've already gotten the working capital and so on, is a key driver to, like you said, the sequential Q1 to Q2 step-up. So all in all, it is a really strong focus for us to continuously and drive and deliver the free cash target that we've put out.
The quarter-to-quarter changes, definitely, you know, are going to exist in... But for a full year is kind of the way to think about our free cash cycle. So to directly answer your question, just given what we're trying to do and how we've laid it out, you know, I think you'll see the second half of this year be more what we would expect in the future.
Yeah, and that's, I think if I worked it out before, it was like a 20% conversion of revenue, which, you know, is pretty, pretty good. And I think you've talked about maybe normal being in the mid-teens conversion,
Yes, that's what we've said.
So-
You got it.
Cool. Well, maybe the only other one that I had was just on the leverage target. So you've mentioned the two-2.5. Why is that the magic number, and how are you thinking about, you know, what you could or would do around future M&A, as it relates to the leverage? Just talk to us about the strategy there.
Yeah, so, you know, I think we've always said in, in our world, in our business, we've always said we're comfortable in that 2-2.5, kind of as a steady state style operating, because we do reinvest for growth, organically and inorganically. What I would say is that, you know, those investing for growth, while those opportunities continue to exist the way that they have for us, definitely is a priority when we get into that range. We definitely have continued to, you know, assess and make sure that we don't miss opportunities, and we're not falling behind on, capacity or innovation. So that's not happening. We're staying up to speed on that. But are we comfortable at any point in time?
Clearly, we have been to go higher on that leverage ratio if there's something that we see as necessary or optimizing our portfolio, yes. And then, are we comfortable going lower if we generate cash and there aren't those opportunities? Yes, but we would also look at other ways to provide shareholder return. But right now, we are just focused on executing and getting there, and you know, and that, that'll be a good problem to have at that point in time.
Great. Well, right on time, so thanks a lot, Jill.
Thanks, Marc. Appreciate you.
Yeah, great having you. Thanks.
Thank you.