Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Huntington Ingalls Industries Investor Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question during the presentation, please press star then one on your touch-tone phone, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. If you need further assistance, please signal conference specialists by pressing the star key followed by zero. I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. Dwayne Blake, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Blake, you may begin.
Thanks, Chuck. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on such short notice. With us today are Michael Petters, President and CEO, and Tom Stiehle, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Chris Kastner, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, will be joining us for the Q&A session. As a reminder, statements made in today's call that are not historical facts are considered forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law. Actual results may differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for descriptions of some of the factors that may cause actual results to vary materially from anticipated results. We will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures during the call. Definitions of these measures are included in the release and the presentation slides. We plan to address the posted presentation slides during the call to supplement our comments.
Please access our website at huntingtoningalls.com and click on the Investor Relations link to view the presentation as well as our release. With that, I'll turn the call over to our President and CEO, Mike Petters. Mike.
Thanks, Dwayne, and good morning, everyone. I am very excited to announce that Huntington Ingalls has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Alion from Veritas Capital for $1.65 billion. Consistent with our strategy of investing in high-growth markets that are complementary to our shipbuilding business, Alion is directly aligned with our Technical Solutions business and enhances our technical capabilities and customer access in high-growth national security markets, including C5ISR, military training and simulation, and next-generation technologies and solutions. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Alion provides high-end solutions that are critical to multi-domain distributed operations and is directly aligned with future U.S. Navy and Department of Defense priorities. Alion provides an unparalleled strategic fit and strong financial opportunities that support our M&A financial criteria. In addition, we are maintaining a disciplined capital deployment philosophy, which includes shareholder returns via dividends and share repurchases.
We believe that the addition of Alion to our business deepens our identity as a provider of a full suite of solutions to our customers' most complex national security challenges and enhances our ability to create long-term sustainable value that benefits all of our stakeholders. Turning to slide four, Alion is a 3,200-employee company that works side by side with the defense and intelligence communities to design and deliver advanced solutions that solve some of our nation's most complex national security challenges. They have significant positions in C5ISR, advanced training and simulation, and cyber and electronic warfare. They are a critical provider of advanced solutions to the Navy, their largest customer, as well as the Air Force, the Army, broader DoD, and other classified customers.
Looking at slide five, Alion adds over $3 billion of backlog with more than $5 billion in estimated contract value and is a complement to HII's unprecedented revenue visibility. Additionally, the transaction enhances HII's overall growth outlook and transforms the TS business to roughly 25% of HII. Our top-line growth outlook for the TS business increases from 4-5% to 7-9% through 2024. And finally, the transaction creates a strong financial outlook which supports our current capital allocation framework. Slide six illustrates the synergies resulting from the direct alignment of TSD's market focus with Alion's business segments, as well as the expanded capabilities and customer access provided by the transaction. These complementary capabilities and limited customer overlap create an opportunity to drive significant synergies through high-growth national security markets that are directly aligned with U.S. Navy and DoD priorities.
The strategic rationale for this transaction is very clear. The combination of Alion and our Technical Solutions business represents a logical and forward-looking value creation opportunity that enhances our capabilities and customer access and positions us in well-funded high-growth markets. Turning to slide seven, Alion is an investment in the future of naval warfare that links our platforms, both manned and unmanned, with the strategic initiatives of the Navy and the DoD to have a more agile, connected, integrated, and protected force. In closing, the experienced Alion team and the highly complementary nature of the solutions and products they provide are consistent with the strategic focus we have articulated for the Technical Solutions business, and we are enthusiastic about the significant growth potential this transaction provides. So now I will turn the call over to Tom for a financial overview of the transaction. Tom.
Thanks, Mike. I'll start with a brief overview of the details of the transaction as shown on slide eight. The all-cash transaction is valued at $1.65 billion and represents a multiple of 12.2 times 2022 Adjusted EBITDA. This acquisition is expected to be significantly accretive to the 2022 free cash flow and accretive to EPS in 2023, and will be funded through the combination of a term loan and incremental debt. We have already obtained a commitment for the necessary financing and expect our leverage ratio at closing to increase to roughly 3.3 times. The transaction has been approved by our board of directors and is subject to certain closing conditions, including receipt of regulatory approvals. We expect to close in the second half of 2021. Once the transaction is closed, Alion will begin integration with the Defense and Federal Solutions unit of the Technical Solutions business.
Slide nine summarizes the projected financial benefits of the transaction. The transaction accelerates TS's revenue growth and improves the projected CAGR from 4%-5% to now 7%-9% from 2021 to 2024. It also increases our overall 2020 to 2024 free cash flow guidance by approximately $200 million, and it is expected to approximately add $1.6 billion of annualized revenue with approximately $135 million of Adjusted EBITDA in 2022. I would also note that complementary capabilities and limited customer overlap drive revenue synergies. We expect approximately $25 million of one-time pre-tax transaction and financing-related expenses in 2021, and we also expect to incur approximately $55 million of additional pre-tax interest expense in 2022. Turning to slide ten, our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged.
Importantly, we expect to deploy an aggressive debt reduction approach in order to return to investment-grade credit metrics while continuing to return capital to shareholders via dividends and opportunistic share repurchases. Now I'll turn the call back to Dwayne for Q&A.
Thanks, Tom. As a reminder to everyone on the call, please limit yourself to one initial question and one follow-up so we can get as many people through the queue as possible. Chuck, I'll turn it over to you to manage the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two, and at this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from Carter Copeland with Melius Research. Please go ahead.
You got me, Mike?
Yeah, we hear you now, Carter.
Oh, great. Thanks. Sounds like somebody had a busy holiday weekend. Mike, a two-parter for you. One just on the timing, why now? I think Alion has been out there for a while, and obviously, the marketplace has been changing. So just maybe some thoughts on that, the timing and where they are in their progression, I guess I'd say. And then secondly, just in terms of senior leadership, people of significance with customer access or specific program access, how are you thinking about some of the talent that comes along and retaining some of that and what that means in terms of the importance to the overall business? Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Carter. First, on the timing, some of this we don't really control specifically. This is kind of a path that we've been on, and we talked about that about a year ago. I think it's Dwayne who pointed out at our investors' conference. We talked about the kinds of things that were going on and where we were going. Veritas had their own timeline, and so there was an intersection between the Veritas timeline and our maturation as a company with the understanding and wherewithal to be able to pull this off. And so I think we got a convergence there that matched up really well for both of us. As far as the senior management team, there's no question that they have built over the last several years.
Steve Schorer and the team there have built an incredible leadership team, and we are very excited to bring them on board with us, and we certainly think that this gives them more opportunity to expand their lines of focus and even more career opportunities for the folks that are in that business. It also gives the rest of HII now a critical mass for expanding career opportunities and to keep the business focused, and so I'm very excited about what they've got there, and I'm very excited about bringing those folks on board.
You have contractual retention things in place, I would assume?
We're working through that, Chris.
Of course. There'll be retention arrangements. They're customary in this sort of process. But the real attractiveness is the opportunity that Mike indicated relative to an opportunity to be a part of the growth profile for HII going forward.
Great. Thanks for the color, gentlemen.
Yeah.
The next question will come from Myles Walton with UBS. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning. Maybe you just pick up on that, Chris, or Mike, on the growth side. Obviously, you're implying that Alion has 9%-10% organic growth on its own over the next few years. What has it been in the last few years? Is that in the $3 billion backlog? Are there any big recompetes coming up? Just maybe touch on the growth part.
Yeah, sure, Myles. This is Chris. They've been growing in excess of 10% over the last few years and with a very strong book-to-bill of 2.0 over the last three years, actually, when you look at it on the aggregate. Strong win rates, better than industry averages. We don't publish them, but we can think in the 40% for new business and 90% for recompete. They're north of that, so very strong. An unfactored pipeline north of $30 billion. And when you think about 2022 revenue and the confidence in that, there's really only a 4% go get and a 10% go get on 2023. So really comfortable and confident in the revenue growth moving forward.
Okay. That's good color. And then, Mike, as you look at the two sides of the business, you know, hitting the target of 25% being in the technical services area and then 75% in the shipbuilding. What do you think about the rate structure, competitiveness of the business, of the two being combined? Obviously, historically, we go through pendulum swings where defense companies shave off low capital-required assets to become more competitive. You're obviously absorbing lower capital businesses. Does that in any way influence the competition or, sorry, the competitive standing of Alion and the overall technical services business going forward?
Yeah, Miles, thanks. We stay pretty focused. We've been very focused on the rate side of our services business and solutions business since we created the third division several years ago and have taken several significant steps to keep that rate structure competitive. We believe that as we combine these two, our Technical Solutions division with Alion, we're actually going to create opportunities to be competitive. And so there's a little bit of synergy that we think we're going to be able to take advantage of. But most importantly, as Chris points out, it's the focus and the growth opportunities that are in front of us that are really. It's a revenue strategy for us and a revenue growth strategy for us and a revenue synergy strategy for us. And that's how we're really pursuing it.
All right. Thanks, guys.
Sure.
The next question will come from Robert Spingarn with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning.
Morning, Robert.
You touched on capital, but any capital investments here that we might anticipate once you put these together?
No, it's not here. Good morning there, Robert. The capital at Alion is quite low. It's significantly lower than our ratio. It's less than 1% of capital on the revenue. So nothing in front of us that we see that's going to need an investment decision.
Okay. And then there are a fair amount of IDIQs here. I think it's about half. I think that's in the deck somewhere in terms of the backlog. Are these typically EAC vehicles? And then with the backlog, how do we think about dividing that up, the $3 billion in which business areas?
Yeah, we don't have that in front of us right now, but we can follow up with you on a subsequent call if we need to. We report to you too.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question will come from Ron Epstein with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hey, yeah. Good morning, guys. So let's rewind a little bit. So I just want to get my head around a couple of things. So do you guys see yourself as a shipbuilder or a services company? And ultimately, how much of your revenue do you see as services? And the thing I worry about is if you're going to be focusing on something out of what many consider your core, does that weaken you on your core? I mean, another way to phrase that is if Booz Allen started to build ships, we'd probably worry about that. So I just want to understand why you think this is a good idea.
Well, thanks, Ron. And we see ourselves as a security company that we have a big platform business that's been our core for 10 years and, frankly, for 130 years. What we see happening in the big platform business is that the platforms are the base for enhancing a future Navy that's going to rely not just on the platforms, but it's going to rely on unmanned, it's going to rely on distributed operations, and it's going to look for asymmetric solutions. What we've already seen in the year that we've had Hydroid is that having the unmanned team interact with the platform business actually creates more focus in the platform business to providing solutions for the future Navy and not for the past Navy.
And so from my standpoint, we are looking to go to where the puck is going to be because we're trying to build a company that's going to be intimate with the future of security for the country as opposed to being kind of stuck in the past of security for the company. We've seen that already on a smaller scale with our acquisition of Hydroid and what that's doing for our unmanned operations and what that means, what the impact that's having on our platform business. We think this is going to accelerate that.
So maybe just as a follow-on to that, if you look out five years from now, how should we expect Huntington Ingalls to look between building platforms and doing other things?
That's an interesting question. We'll have to see how this evolves. Let's go back to the unmanned business, Ron. Where we are in the unmanned business is it's a fairly small part of our business. If you look at what the country's going to spend on unmanned business over the next five years, we expect that to grow three to five times. I think Chris talked about what the growth in these spaces are that Alion is in, and we expect that to happen too. So do we expect this side of our business to continue to grow? Absolutely. And we think this side of our business will grow faster than our platform business, which we've been talking about for quite a while as being kind of a 3% growth business. So we expect to be a growth platform here going forward.
Got it. All right. Thanks. Thanks too.
Yeah.
The next question will come from Seth Seifman with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, and good morning. Just wanted to follow up with a question on the growth. Are there particular programs you would point to or contract vehicles or activities that drive that visible approaching double-digit organic top line at Alion through 2024?
Yes. This is Chris. The good news is we already have them in place, right? So we have a couple of significant ISR contracts or Alion has a couple of significant ISR contracts already in place. When you think about GSETI and some COCOM contracts, there's a couple of training contracts for the Navy that are franchise contracts, one of which has been in place for a long time. The new one, which is the Navy Integrated Training Environment or NITE, has been put in place, which facilitates some of that growth. So it's not reliant on new recompetes. This is taking advantage of the contracts we already have in place.
Okay. Great. Yeah. No, understood that part. Just wondering specifically what those contracts were for. And then, Mike, maybe to follow up, when you think about kind of the strategy for the not-platform part of the business, and totally understood why that's appealing and in some ways kind of necessary. But in order to kind of make that part of the business relevant, I guess, how do you think about the scale that it needs to be and the technologies that you need to have? Because kind of agility and connectivity and mission systems are areas where everyone seems to be focused right now. And so is it that there are certain things that you guys need to do that will enable your platform business and it can be kind of relatively small scale with sort of acquisitions from time to time?
Or is it something where you guys see yourself playing a bigger and bigger role over time and kind of will need to be consistently upgrading technology and going out and looking for stuff?
Yeah. That's a great question, and that's a good follow-up to Ron's question. And frankly, we had a lot of discussion about this over the course of this acquisition. Where we came down on this was over time, we've come to focus on while we were trying to do a lot of things in our Technical Solutions side of our business, we've come to focus on a few key areas. Unmanned was something that we really felt like we needed to get out in front of, and we did that last year. We've created a pretty significant for us footprint in C5ISR training and simulation and this next-generation technology and solutions kind of footprint. But they were all a footprint that gave us an understanding of the business, but they weren't at scale.
When we took a look at this opportunity, what we saw is we saw scale in those lines of effort, which actually complements exactly the way we've been thinking about this for a couple of years now. So in some sense, this is a bit of a puzzle piece that fits right into what we've been strategically trying to do over the last couple of years. And that's why we're so excited about it.
Great. Thanks. Thanks very much.
Bye.
The next question will come from George Shapiro with Shapiro Research. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning.
Morning.
I wanted to ask that the history of defense diversification has kind of been unblemished by success, to quote a former CEO. You didn't have very much success with your diversification into oil. Shipbuilding, to me, seems like it's still a pretty attractive area, especially since China is growing their number of ships. You're obviously well-positioned in that. So why even bother doing this as opposed to, say, buying back stock, which would have been maybe 15% accretive to your earnings?
As you said, George, the future of the Navy is going to be platforms plus. We need to be engaged in the plus side of this to make it successful. That will help our platform business, and we think that that helps us overall. I can just tell you what we've seen is that by investing in the unmanned business, what we've done is we've created a synergy between the unmanned business and the rest of our platforms that's creating focus on both sides. The last thing we need to do is to continue to try to build the Navy in the past. I just want to emphasize that we've got to be out in front of this. The industry in total has to be out in front of this so the Navy has a chance to be successful.
Our objective here as a principal partner with the Navy is to help the Navy be successful. We think this is our best chance to do that.
But Mike, I mean, unmanned, I can understand. That's clearly where the Navy is going to some extent, obviously, in the area that you're in. This looks like it's pretty strategically different. It's a short-cycle business. You're generally shipbuilding is probably the longest-cycle business out there. So it's a very different business. I guess you haven't convinced me why it makes sense to try this, especially given the history with the oil diversification.
Okay, George. I don't think this is anything like the oil diversification. I think this is if you look at their business, over 30% of their business is direct to the Navy, and it's focused in on training and education, C5ISR, and next-generation capabilities. Those are exactly the areas that we have felt like we need to bring to our platforms to make our platforms more capable. So I guess I resist the notion that this is actually a diversification. I'm going to suggest that this is not a diversification. This is actually an extension of our main product line.
Okay. I guess we'll see how it shapes up.
Yeah. We'll see how it goes.
Okay. Thanks. Good luck.
Thanks, George.
The next question will come from Robert Stallard with Vertical Research. Please go ahead.
Thanks so much. Good morning.
Morning, Robert.
Maybe just a couple of technical questions here. You've had quite a few strategic ones already. First of all, is there anything in this portfolio that you would view as sort of non-core or lacking in scale and you might be looking to sell?
Not at this time, no.
Okay. And then just on the numbers side of things, have you got a number for what the annual amortization expense could be on the P&L, and are there any cost synergies expected?
So on the amortization side, obviously, we're going to come through accounting close, and we'll work ourselves through that. From a purchase intangibles perspective, you can model that to be about 30% of the sale price, and we'd be amortizing that over probably a 10 or 11-year time frame with the majority of that amortization happening in the first five years. All right?
Okay.
What was the other part of that?
If there's any cost synergies?
Yeah. We have a conservative estimate of what goes into it. About 85% of the contracts here with Alion are cost-type contracts. So that would pass through from that perspective. It doesn't go to the bottom line. We have kind of factored that in there, but we have not other than combining accounting, IT, process, and the leadership teams, we don't have a big bet here on the cost synergy side of the equation.
Okay. That's great. Thank you very much.
The next question will come from Gautam Khanna with Cowen. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Just wanted to ask about M&A interests now outside of Technical Solutions. Do you feel like you have capacity if an unmanned vessel acquisition or technology acquisition presented itself? If you could talk about what the cash deployment priorities are from here. Is it just going to be debt paydown and supporting the dividend, as you guys talked about in the investor day a year ago?
Yeah. Hey, Gautam. It's Tom here. Yeah, sure. So obviously, strategy is intact, and we're going to consistently going forward with what we pitched as far back as February of 2020. Obviously, with the acquisition here, we'll modulate strategic opportunities. But going forward, we still believe that we're going to be consistent. We'll be feeding the beast of sustaining capital. We'll be moderately adjusting the dividend. We still will be doing share buybacks going forward, and remaining cash there between the share buybacks. We'll be looking for opportunities for additional acquisitions here. So I think we've been pretty clear kind of going forward. We had the buying power for a deal like this size. And even with this, we'll work down the debt fairly quickly here, and we'll still be in the hunt on those four lanes.
I would say the last piece of it that I just modulate a little bit is, as we said, we value being investment-grade. So as I mentioned in my comments, that we'll hustle up and make sure we get our metrics back aligned to be investment-grade going forward. That's probably the only tweak of the playbook that we've outlined from a capital deployment perspective. But everything we've talked about is in play. We'll modulate accordingly as we work back the debt over the next couple of years.
Okay. And just one last one. I imagine it was an option. Could you talk a little bit about how you came across the asset and how long you've actually been looking at it and the likes?
Yeah. Gautam, this is Chris. Nice to speak to you this morning. Alion has been an interesting asset to us for a long time. We know them very well. This is not an asset that just showed up. Now, an interesting part about it is we were prohibited from doing a deal or approaching anything with Alion because they had some Navy work, some Navy SETA work that had OCI issues that prohibited us engaging in any sort of transaction like that. Now, they divested that business a couple of years ago, and right when they did, it jumped to the top of our list, and then we just had to wait. We know their management team well. We know their businesses well, and it fits very nicely into the markets that we're focused on.
Thank you very much, Chris.
Sure.
The next question will come from Doug Harned with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. Alion, if you're doing $1.6 billion in revenues next year, I mean, that's significantly larger than the existing Technical Solutions business. When you put that together, how do you think about the organization of this business? Clearly, TS has some things such as unmanned undersea and the nuclear environmental work that are, I think, pretty different from what is in here. What does this new business look like? Do you put the headquarters in McLean where the mass of the business is? What happens here?
Yeah. So out of the gate, Doug, I think what we'll be doing is actually taking the Defense and Federal Solutions business that we have and moving it into their business instead of trying to do it the other way because, as you point out, because of the scale. After that, we'll have to see how the best way to shake out the organization of TS. But I don't expect us to make any dramatic change right out of the gate on that. I think it's just the piece of TS that works in this space is going to roll right into this business. We don't expect to move their headquarters or anything like that. We'll just merge ourselves into them.
And then when you think of this acquisition as it relates to the rest of the things that you do outside of the Defense and Federal Solutions portion, does it add value to what you're doing in shipbuilding? How can it link up with the other work you're doing for your Navy customer?
I'll give one example, and then Chris wants to add. But I'm just going to go to training and simulation. We've been doing modeling and simulation inside the shipbuilding business for over a decade. If you go back to the Gerald R. Ford design criteria and the KPIs for that program to get the sortie generation rate up, we had to model the flight deck and show how you could do damage control on the flight deck and get all the sortie generation stuff and all that stuff. So we have a very extensive modeling and simulation business inside of shipbuilding, which we have then parlayed into a pretty extensive training effort in the TS business that has been doing okay.
And now we're going to bring basically the center of Navy training and education that uses simulation, does the constructive training effort that the Navy is really a fan of. We can now train crews that are working here to help us build ships. I mean, it's such a natural fit that it makes great sense for us to do that. So yeah, there's a lot of focus there.
Okay. Great.
Just one area, Doug. I mean, you go across all of those lines of effort. One last thing I would say is that as Chris talked about the history of Alion, I have to give them a lot of credit. If you go back five or six years, they were kind of trying to be all things to all people, and they did kind of what we did. We had seven or eight businesses in TS, and we had to kind of pick through them and see what made sense for us. They did the same thing, and they focused themselves down on a handful of significant lines of effort that are directly aligned with where the Department of Defense wants to go and where the Navy wants to go, and since the Navy is a third of their business, that makes a great complement to what we're doing.
Then if I can follow up on that, when you link this to your Navy business, things like training and simulation, the advantages that this gives you, what does that do for your shipbuilding business? Does that position you better for future competitions? Is this a necessary step to be successful in future competitions? How should we think about it affecting, say, revenues in shipbuilding?
I mean, I think that's probably a second or third-order effect. We're using simulation right now as a way to bring digital manufacturing into the shipyards, which are going to make us more cost competitive. You've seen some of that already, Doug. And that's just kind of one piece of it. So do we need to be more competitive? Sure. I believe that the Navy. I think I've said this before. I think the Navy is moving to a future where there's going to be more platforms. There are going to be fewer people involved in more platforms. There are going to be faster ships, and there are going to be smaller ships, and there are going to be more affordable ships. And so this, we believe, gets us in a strategic direction that aligns with that.
Okay. Thank you.
Good.
The next question will come from Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hey. Good morning, everyone.
Good morning, Noah.
Hey, Mike. I know you've had a number of strategic questions here, but just staying on that last point you made there, how does the business (you've referenced Hydroid and unmanned a few times) and the comment you just made there of building smaller, faster, more agile, more cost-effective ships? How does this acquisition help you build smaller, faster, more cost-effective, more agile ships?
Noah, I think you have to start from the perspective that none of this is binary. A lot of the discussion that we have is, and frankly, the questions I get around the unmanned, why are you guys thinking about unmanned because you do these platforms? The unmanned part of our business amplifies the platform business that we have. We have a backlog in the platform business that extends out into the next decade. This is going to be a, I believe, going to be a transition that the Navy goes through over the next 10 to 20 years where they're going to be bringing more enhanced capabilities to the platforms. They're going to be tailoring platforms around capabilities.
And it's incumbent upon us to understand what those capabilities are, how they work, how to integrate them into the ship, how to design around them, what are the pitfalls of trying to do this at sea in the harsh environment that's out there. And so from our standpoint, this is the way that we get in front of this and think about what the Navy of the future is. Do I know what the destroyer of 2040 looks like? No, I don't. And do I know how much of what Alion is doing to make that happen? I don't. But I can also say that we have really good visibility on what's going to happen between now and 2025.
Yeah. I guess that's sort of where I was thinking. It's unclear, I guess, how much this adds content to the ships you make versus these are just fast-growing defense electronics and technology areas that you want exposure to.
Well, on the platforms that we have under, I'm not sure I understand the question. I mean, we're trying to figure out how to integrate additive manufacturing into the platforms now, whether it's in the manufacturing process that we have or in the provisioning of parts for ships that are at sea. So this is an incredibly dynamic space right now for us. And like I said, we could just go about our business and do what we've always done. And the fact is we'll get left behind if we do that.
Could you speak to the profitability of it, the EBITDA and revenue numbers you've provided? It's a little bit lower margin than I would have guessed based on what the products are. And how should we think about, you've provided medium- to long-term targets for total Technical Solutions. How should we think about where that goes now?
Yeah. Sure. So Tom, so prior to this acquisition, we told you from a TSD perspective, they were in the 7-9% EBITDA, and we had guided to 8-10% by 2024. You can see right here now this will be the pattern of what the event is now with the acquisition. And they're already sitting at an 8.4% year in 2022 expectation returns there. So it accelerates where we were and adds scale and volume to the revenue that we have. And it expedites our 8-10% range that we said that we would be at. Additionally, as we said, the growth from 4-5% is much higher now across the TSD platform. So I think it's a win across the financial spectrum of TSD.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question will come from Joseph DeNardi with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Chuck. Good morning. Mike, I think a couple of years ago at the Investor Day, when you talked about maybe looking at more M&A, I think nuclear services was an area of focus. You had a map where you showed kind of where you had exposure and maybe where you wanted exposure. Is that still an area of interest for you all from an M&A standpoint?
Yes. And I'll put a capital yes on that. I mean, it's a business that lines up with what we do and with our workforce. In that market space, we bring best in the world relative to the training of people and the ability to create an experienced workforce to go solve those problems that the Department of Energy is working. And that's unique that we can do that from our nuclear shipbuilding business to kind of drive that personnel side of our business. So we remain very interested in that space. As you might know, that space is very fragmented. And so a lot of times, we end up doing teaming agreements or form LLCs to go and operate at specific sites and specific opportunities.
We're primed for the Department of Energy, and we are continuing to look at the ways that we can expand our capability in that space and expand our footprint.
Okay. That's helpful. And then you mentioned or referenced the OCI issues that Alion had a few years ago. Can you just talk more generally about the challenge, if any, that exists with you all being the sole provider or one of two providers on many of your platforms and then also trying to tie in a closer relationship on the services side? Is there anything that needs to be defected? Is that a challenge for you all going forward? Could you just talk about that more generally? Thank you.
Yeah, and I'll start, and I'll let Chris follow on that. As a platform provider for the Navy, and especially when we are the only provider of that platform for the Navy, we have a very unique situation and position of trust with our customer where we require ourselves to be the honest broker for any sort of technology insertion or adoption by the platform. And what that means is that sometimes the technology that somewhere else in the company may be brought to bear may not be the right answer. And so our platform business has to remain agnostic so that we can get the best opportunity out there.
It's ancient history, but when we were part of Northrop Grumman, that was one of the challenges that we had was there were a lot of offerings from Northrop Grumman, but as the honest broker inside of Northrop Grumman, we had to continue to remain independent relative to picking solutions. Having said that, in order to be the honest broker, you got to be smart enough to understand what you're looking at. And so from our standpoint, that gives us the opportunity to understand these technologies better, incorporate in them better, work with our folks to actually aim the technology trajectory path so that it goes to become something that we can actually provide. Relative to the SETA conflict of interest, I would just say that's been a long-standing issue that we knew about that business for a long time.
And when they divested it, as Chris said, they popped right to the top of our list. And we don't expect there to be much of anything else like that at this point.
Yeah. Joe, this is Chris. We did a thorough analysis of the business. We're pretty comfortable where we're at. We obviously have to come through regulatory approvals, but I think we're in a pretty good place.
Okay. Thank you.
Sure.
Thank you. I am not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Petters for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. And as you can tell, we are extremely excited about the unparalleled strategic and strong financial opportunities that this transaction creates for us. Alion adds a cutting-edge global research footprint, innovative technologies, and talent which will elevate HII's competitive position in well-funded high-growth markets that are crucial to satisfying evolving customer priorities. We are also excited about the benefits for all of our key stakeholders. For our shareholders, the transaction delivers on our commitment to create higher revenue and earnings growth in C5ISR, advanced training and simulation, and next-generation IT, which includes cyber and electronic warfare, and improves our long-term competitive position by adding capabilities and customer access to effectively compete in these markets. For our customers, it strengthens our ability to provide a full suite of solutions to their most complex national security challenges.
Finally, for our collective employees, it offers increased career development opportunities and challenging yet rewarding work assignments that fall right in line with our motto of hard stuff done right. We look forward to welcoming the Alion team to Huntington Ingalls Industries when the deal closes. Thank you for joining us on such short notice, and we look forward to speaking again with you soon.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.