Good morning, and welcome to the Howmet Aerospace 2026 Technology and Markets Day. I'm P.T. Luther, Vice President of Investor Relations. After today's presentation by our executive leadership team, we'll take some questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations. You can find factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these projections listed in today's presentation and in our most recent SEC filings. In today's presentation, references to EBITDA, operating income, and EPS mean Adjusted EBITDA excluding special items, adjusted operating income excluding special items, adjusted EPS excluding special items. These measures are among the non-GAAP financial measures that we've included in our discussion. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our most recent SEC filings.
with that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to John C. Plant, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Howmet Technology and Markets Day. We hope to make it interesting for you. The objectives are, I say, multifold. I had originally expected that the members of the management team will be sitting up here with me, but they said could they stay in the audience for just a little while longer, because they're not used to being the movie stars that they truly are. Hopefully you'll get some clear impression of their knowledge of the business and the confidence with which they lead each of their relative business unit segments. Hopefully you got the opportunity to talk with them last night.
The next part of it is really to try to give you an outline of the business in a little bit more detail than you saw in our previous Technology Day, and also to talk to the things which have, I'll say, transpired and developed and how we've moved on since then. Patrick will do a sort of wind up with the financial data that he wants to show. I know many of you are thinking that we're gonna sort of give you the three-year guidance numbers. That's really in a paper that we're gonna hand to you as you walk out of the room.
That was a joke for those people who are now recording and videoing the session and for those people who are. I think we're trying to get it webcast live, but there's a technical glitch, but they'll be keyed in hopefully shortly as we go through. Finally, before I leave the stage and hand across to, first of all, Merrick for the engine business, I'll talk to you a little bit about so what are you gonna see today and what it is that I think should be exciting and to key in the things that really for you to really major and focus on as you do the plant tour at Whitehall.
You're gonna hopefully see that our latest and greatest plant is yet another generation of technology beyond that which we displayed, say, just maybe 2.5 years ago. Then at the end it'll be Q&A and I'll do my best not to answer every question, 'cause I know you really would like to hear from the other people. Let's get started and put the first slide up and just make sure that it's there. There's nothing particularly revealing in my slides. You can say, "Well, have you seen this one before?" The answer is, you know, absolutely yes. I think that strategy for any business is one of a continuum, maybe a little bit refined here and there.
Essentially, what do we do? We really focus on differentiating ourselves and growing the business above the rates that we see in the marketplace, so growing above market is critical to us. We also differentiate clearly and allocate resources of engineering and capital to where we see the best potential returns. It is not smearing of resources and smearing of money, it really is allocated to the areas of highest return and the highest areas of potential growth. We also underpin that with financial and operational discipline. We're very clear, we talk about it both on a monthly basis and in particular on a quarterly basis, how we're going to do that allocation and focus and keep that operational discipline and financial discipline in place.
Then finally, and also in terms of allocation, we have a clear-eyed view of the way we allocate our capital allocation strategy and which essentially comes down to how we're gonna return say all the money to our shareholders. Moving to the next slide, you are familiar with how we look at the business in terms of providing ourselves with these differentiated products, tending towards lightweighting, fuel efficiency, and the things which you'd expect for any business operating in the aerospace and land-based turbine business and say defense aerospace. It's all about trying to achieve higher performance using less and less input say requirements to them.
Then also, as you saw in our fastener business last night, also the ability to offer reduced and improved assembly costs to the airframe manufacturers as well, and giving them also the ability to have throughput and labor efficiency also combined with robotics, which again Vagner will talk to. Then finally, with that, you know, also providing the option for increased safety at every point as well. Next up is the usual, I say end markets and our manufacturing footprint and where do we operate. Well, essentially, everywhere in the world that's appropriate for us, again, centered in the U.S. and Europe, but also having operations, for example, in Japan and China, and so that we're able to cover all of our customers on a global basis.
Turning now to the end markets, so what are we looking for and how do we see them going forward? Well, first of all, commercial aerospace. The backlog numbers that we have for both wide-body and narrow-body aircraft are quite extraordinary, the highest they've ever been, and it should lead us to have hopefully uninterrupted growth absent some form of geopolitical event for the next few years. In fact, the backlogs are so great that without an increase in build that is necessary then to order and to receive a new aircraft now, whether it's a new narrow-body looking into the early 2030s or for wide-body is more like in a decade from now.
Clearly that is unsustainable and everybody's trying to increase the build rates and therefore the underlying volume is supportive of our revenue growth, independent of us trying to obviously, again, grow above those markets by increased share and adding content. Moving now to talk about our data center business and land-based gas turbines, and I just thought I'd put this slide in in terms of trying to demonstrate that, while we talk gas turbines for many different end markets, essentially it's down to the generation of electricity and one of the fundamental drivers of quite an extraordinary growth is the build-out of these data centers.
I've put a map of the U.S. which seemed to be current about three or four months ago, but every three or four months that we look at it, that map changes with additional permitting and planned build-out over the next few years. The requirement for increased power to drive the, I'll say drive those data center racks, the chips, not only for making them work, but also cooling them and driving, you can see at the, on the top right, the requirement for that increase in power. I've just expressed it as an increase in percentages from the, say a 2025 baseline to show the growth coming from that segment of the market.
That segment of the market is producing strains which you've also, well, you know, read about for total electricity demand and driving, say, energy rates, for us. It's become a particularly exciting part of the market for us to address. The way we address it is through both the large gas turbines, which previously we only sold really to utilities or to our customers that serve the utilities. But increasingly, the requirements for a stable power source for the build-out of these data centers is putting even the larger gas turbines in certain data center clusters to provide that generation capability. You can see on the slide the mid-range turbines, which I've also showed, for example, the one produced by Solar or aeroderivatives by GE Vernova.
You can see the customer set that we operate with in each of those areas. For this market, which you'll probably be less familiar for Howmet, is that again, we're the largest manufacturer and the highest market share for gas turbine blades in the world. In terms of our defense markets, again, we saw, you know, again, very good growth last year, some 20%+, and you can see their demand not just for the latest fighter generation, which is the F-35, but also for the previous generations of F-15 and F-16, which have now extended lives.
In fact, significant new orders both from the U.S. Department of War and also, for example, for Saudi Arabia, for the F-15 Strike Eagle, where they placed an order for 200 new aircraft, and each of those has two engines on them, as you're probably aware. Beyond the fighter jet that everybody's familiar with, we also serve other areas of the defense market. On the right-hand side, some of the parts that go into howitzers that we provide and also for tank turbines.
One part which is increasingly notable for us is the build-out of missiles and the replenishment of the missile stocks for the U.S., in particular, but also demand emanating from Europe where it's quite extraordinary both for the structural parts, but increasingly now for the new opportunity we see for the production of parts for the smaller turbines which are required for the collaborative combat aircraft and also the larger cruise missiles. These are turbines which may say, I mean, in the case of a missile, of course, they don't come back. In the case of a collaborative aircraft, they may come back, they may not, depending upon the particular missions you know, specifics that they have.
It's going to be smaller turbines, much smaller thrust in that 5,000 pounds to 8,000 to 10,000 pounds of thrust. Very different to the other end of the turbines that we do, for example, for a GE9X, which is over 100,000 pounds of thrust for that new 777X, which we expect to be launched in 2027. All of those markets are exciting. We position ourselves for anything that's coming. Whether it is the next generation engines which may be required for the F-47 or maybe the Navy fighter which is being considered at the moment, we try to ensure that whichever is the engine selection for any of the markets is that we're well-positioned for it.
Finally, our wheels business, which for some of you who took quite an interest in the aluminum wheels, and you can see that is a fundamentally strong business that Randall was able to talk to many of you about last night, and why we see it as maintaining and driving, again, both market share growth of the revenue line, and also very healthy profitability and cash flow, and the characteristics of that and why it is that then Randall's going to describe to you. With that, I'll stop for my slides. I just wanted to now key in on what are you gonna see for the rest of the morning.
First of all, besides the fact that it's a new plant with a next generation of technology that anybody's seen previously, it's also the very first time that anybody of the invited guests in this room will have had the chance to see how we start or the early stages of our manufacturing process. Previously you've seen how we, let's say assemble and nest parts through wax into casting, but you've never seen us show you anything to do with how we provide the cores for a turbine blade.
The reason why this is so important is that this is providing the passageways for air inside the turbine blades, and these are made, first of all, with proprietary technology in terms of compounding, so the chemical compositions of them is, you know, highly protected. They go through multiple sort of manufacturing steps from being pressed and laid to rest and then fired to produce a, let's say in this case, a ceramic part. Also you saw some of the ones last night, which are very, very small and providing, you know, very fine webs of passageways for air in terms of the movement of them.
When we produce one of these, what the most important thing that you'll hear about during the course of the morning is what we're calling our digital thread, which is our desire to try to measure these parts at every stage of the manufacturing process. We may pick out, I don't know, 300 data points for measurement of these. We will know exactly the chemical compounding. We'll know the temperature at which they were produced, the humidity in the environment. We'll know the pressure that was in the press. We'll know exactly how they were laid on the set at which we're going to a heat treatment, the controls for the heat treatment.
We were producing, let's say 500 data points of information about that, as we produce it. All of that knowledge for this part is then moved to our wax department in the same way. You'll see data points collected for all of that before it's then encapsulated in a shell, which is, again, proprietary technology in terms of the chemical compositions of the slurries and how we measure viscosity and again, I would say, you know, the composition at each stage of that part of the manufacturing before we move it into then where we may decide to insulate it in certain parts, where we're providing insulation wraps, which are precisely measured in places where we don't measure, such that we can then prepare it for casting.
Along the way, we'll be measuring, for example, the frequency of the ram, which is then moving the part into the casting furnace, so we can detect, you know, the fractional vibrations. By the time you're finished, let's say through 40 or 50 manufacturing processes, depending upon the part, we'll have picked up millions of data points. With the volumes we're producing, it's trying to understand those data points.
As the parts become increasingly complex, as the airways become smaller and smaller, and the ability to hold air on the surface of the turbine blades so that we're able to cool, provide cooling where it's needed, and well inside the turbine blade as the air goes through the holes in the roots that you see here on the very large one, we're providing places where we'll accelerate the air and decelerate it. Everything that we're doing in terms of complexity and next generation is trying to, you know, sort of goes against improving our yields.
It's with this digital thread that we have through the business and this new manufacturing plant, it's where we're able to gather that data and provide, in the first instance, well, with computers to analyze it. Then pointing as to where we need to go to make adjustment to the process to hold or to improve our yields. Then at some stage in the future, the our concept is that we'll use those those, I'll say, learnings that we have from the data, and obviously use then our our AI-based, I'll say, knowledge to actually automatically adjust the conditions of manufacturing.
When we pass the air through, then on a large one, you can see here, if I can just draw it to your attention, you know, the very fine air holes that we have here to allow the air to come out, and you'll see increasing levels of complexity from big ones, which you've seen for, say, a land-based large gas turbine, you know, 3-4 feet in length, to the very smallest of blades, which are now producing, I'll say, air holes and shaped air holes, which Merrick will talk to hold the air on the surface, and they are smaller than the equivalent of two human hairs. There's a lot going on in the business.
It's driving technology, trying to differentiate ourselves by also the ability to solve the problems that our customers may have, and while maintaining a very protected level of IP inside the company so that we're able to do things that truly nobody else in the world is able to do. With that, I'll hand across to Merrick, 'cause he's gonna describe to you in a little bit more detail. What I want to do is sort of base those concepts in your minds before you hear Merrick, and then you'll hear it again as we go now around the hall. Merrick, over to yourself. I will sit.
All right. Well, good morning, everybody. I'm not sure we're gonna need the tour now, John, after that explanation, I mean. Yeah. Well, listen, we've got, I think we've got a very exciting day planned for you today. For those that are gonna be visiting us for the first time, we're gonna be showing you elements of our business that frankly we don't show very often. If you have had the chance to visit us, then I promise you it's not gonna be the same old tour, 'cause as John mentioned, we're gonna get to take you to the beginning where it all starts for us, and that's with our core manufacturing that we just completed an expansion up in Whitehall. So we're very excited to get you up there.
I know the team's very excited to get you up there. They don't get to show off very often, so it should be fun. Look, anytime I get to talk about my business, I always have to start by saying I think we have something very, very special with the engines business, and for a lot of reasons, and we're gonna talk about many of them today. It starts with us helping our customers win in the marketplace. I think that battlefront continues to be helping them increase fuel efficiency, reduce emissions, and ultimately improve time on wing. In the turbine section of the engine is where those elements are either enabled or constrained. If you're going to increase fuel efficiency, you need hotter temperatures. If you need hotter temperatures, then you need better materials and more complex cooling schemes.
In order for that to happen, you need more advanced manufacturing systems and processes. That's the cascade that we operate in today, and it's what it's helping our customers solve those elements that I think help them win in the marketplace. That typically culminates in us supplying strong, lightweight investment castings with complex serpentine passages and coatings. Those parts have to withstand the harshest environments known to man. Let's talk about that for a second 'cause I think it's important. I'm guessing that most of you probably flew here yesterday, and while you may not know the technical aspects of flight, I'm pretty sure you've probably memorized every movement, sound, feeling that happens during that process, right? Let's talk about it, 'cause I think it's important as it relates to the engine.
If you look at that diagram for a second, and if you can think about taxiing out to the runway, right? Those engines are in a low thrust mode at that point. Temperatures are probably 800-1,000 degrees, so pretty stable environment. Pilot pulls out on the runway, begins to rev up those engines. You begin to feel those vibrations. He releases the brake, and you start rolling down the runway, right? There's a lot of things happening inside that engine at that point. Air's being sucked in through the fan blades. The majority of that air will bypass the core and be pushed out for propulsion. Then the remaining air will be sucked into the core, and as it is, it'll be compressed and squeezed. Temperatures will rise, pressures will rise.
It'll go through the combustion chamber, fuel will get mixed in, there'll be a controlled explosion, and that airstream will get pushed through the turbine section, which turns the shaft, which turns the fan blade, right? The remaining air is pushed through the remaining stages of the turbine out the back for additional thrust. All that's happening while you're picking up speed going down the runway in a very simplistic model, right? Now, there's a point on the runway that pilots refer to as the V1 point, or the point of no return. Once that plane crosses that point, those pilots in that plane are gonna take off no matter what. That plane crosses that point, you feel the nose of the plane lift off the runway, eventually the wheels.
You can feel those G-forces kind of push you back in your seat, right? At that point, those engines are operating their hardest. They're at maximum thrust or takeoff power. It's also at that point that our blades and vanes in that, in that red section have to survive an environment that would instantly destroy just about any other man-made object. I like to say you have three impossibilities happening at that point. The first impossibility are the temperatures, 'cause those temperatures are now reaching or exceeding 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 800 degrees beyond the melting point of the alloys that we use. That's what we call the inferno. The second impossibility is that now those blades are rotating at probably 12,000-15,000 RPMs, putting significant force on the integrity of those blades. That's what we call the stretch.
A blade that at rest would only weigh a few ounces now weighs the equivalence of a fully loaded semi-tractor trailer. The third impossibility is that while that airstream is moving through that engine at significant temperatures, it's also moving through at incredible force and pressure. That's what we call the hurricane. Those ratios, pressure ratios, are probably now 40 to 1, or the equivalence of being 1,500 feet below the surface of the ocean. You have the perfect storm of physics happening. Here's the point. Our parts have to withstand incredibly harsh conditions, and what we do is hard and complex and requires multiple layers of technology to make it all happen. It's also those parts that ultimately determine the capability, the efficiency, the durability, and I would argue the economics of that engine.
To be successful, we have to not only provide parts, we have to provide a system, a system that allows our OEM customers to open up their operating envelope and ultimately get everyone home safely. I can promise you that's something that we never take for granted. I can also promise you that it's something that very, very few can replicate. How do we make the impossible possible or what I call routine on a daily basis? For me, it always comes down to three things, how we manage airflow, what it takes to manage airflow in terms of the materials we use, our core technology, our material sciences, all that.
Scale and producibility, which means we often talk about the theory of one, which is that it's easier to make one or a handful of our parts, but to do it at the scale, yields, and volumes that we do it at, I don't think there's anybody that can compete with us. The third thing is the power of vertical integration, controlling every element of that value chain, from developing our own core compounds to building and designing all of our own tooling, building and designing all of our own equipment, automation, furnaces, providing all of our own alloys, doing all of our own in-house testing, all the way through the process to even machining and coating our own products, and in many cases, all of our competitors' products too. I think that's what anchors our market-leading position in just about every segment that we participate in.
I don't think that's just marketing language. That's backed by decades of qualification barriers we've had to overcome, deep collaboration with our customers, and earning their trust and confidence that we can deliver the volume and quality of products that they need. Look, delivery is absolutely what our customers need right now. I don't think I have to explain to this audience the perfect storm of demand that we're experiencing right now, whether it's commercial aerospace, defense, gas turbines, or new and developing markets like space, missiles, and drones. Everybody wants more. That's not just theoretical or cyclical demand.
That's backed by aerospace backlogs that go out 12-15 years, defense spending that's increasing around the world, and electrification demand that frankly we've never seen before, driven by an aging grid that needs to modernize and expand, in significant demand that we're seeing from data center and AI build-outs around the world. The question I often get is, can we scale to meet that demand? My answer is always yes, and we're already doing it. It starts with our global manufacturing footprint, 30 locations located around the world, all aligned by product lines. That allows us to maximize our capacity utilization across like sites, best practice share across those sites, so we can quickly implement yield improvement programs, reduce scrap, and increase our capacity.
Now, we're also making investments strategically across our business in areas that typically become bottlenecks, like tooling and core manufacturing and castings and coatings. It's that execution, those investments that are already paying off in what I would consider to be some pretty impressive financial results. That's not just cyclical recovery either. That's operating leverage from higher volumes, better yields, more automation, a mixed shift to more technologically advanced parts, workforce maturation, a laser focus on commercial discipline, and a disciplined capital allocation strategy. Look, I like to tell my team that when you can combine technological differentiation with disciplined scaling, I think margin expansion can be meaningful. Let's step back for a second and take a look at the journey that's brought us here because I think it's a good perspective to have.
If you go back to the 1950s to those first turbojets, and if you were to look at those blades, you would find a simple metal blade, really no technology to speak of. They would often stretch and crack and fail due to the overheating of engines. It was at that point in time that Howmet really invested to learn how to shape, cast, and control metal. Those learnings would pay off for decades to come. Now, what's remained true, it seems over the years, is that every decade the industry asks for better fuel efficiency, reduced emissions, and better time on wing, right? As you get into the 1960s, cooling becomes a strategy. Engineers are not yet asking, can we make the metal stronger? They're asking, how do we keep it cooler? Howmet launches their first simple single-plane core technology.
Now, it's also at that point that Howmet realizes that core technology is going to be the future. We start investing significant R&D dollars to understand core materials and core process technology. Now jump to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I think that's really where the industry goes through the transformation and Howmet goes through a transformation. Think about what's happening in the 1970s, right? You have a fuel crisis. Regulations are tightening across the OEMs and the airlines. Engines have to run hotter and burn more efficiently just so the airlines can survive. Engineers start tuning alloys at an atomic level.
It starts with the progression from equiaxed to directionally solidified, where engineers realize if they can align grains in perfect linear columns, they can create a path where thermal stress will pass through that blade, no transverse boundaries, increasing the life and allowing operating temperatures to increase a couple hundred degrees. Now the inflection point comes when engineers realize they can grow a blade from a single grain, a single crystal. No internal boundaries, no weak points. Again, life of the blade increases, operating temperatures increase a few hundred degrees. Now it's at this point that Howmet not only learns how to grow single crystal blades, but to do it with an orientation that the OEMs need to match the centrifugal force of the blades. not only that, but to do it at scale, yields, and volumes that make it economically feasible.
This is where Howmet's moat really starts to get deep and wide. On top of that, our core technology is advancing rapidly. We're now launching multi-wall complex serpentine core technology. If you think about it, engine OEMs to certify an engine, it now spans years to get done. They have to lock in on suppliers they can trust to meet their requirements. Switching costs become operationally dangerous at this point. As you get into the 2000s, it's not just new metals that are going to allow OEMs to climb the heat ladder. They need a system, a system of single crystal structures, complex cooling schemes, and thermal barrier coatings. Howmet is the only supplier that can provide all three. I really think at this point, we're not so much competing on price as we are who the OEM trusts not to fail.
For Howmet, we don't simply win by selling more parts. We win by being harder to replace. We invest significant engineering resources into just about every development program. In fact, we're gonna launch more NPI programs this year than we probably ever have in our existence. We always have an eye towards the future. Whether that's the RISE, a ducted version, or the new sixth-generation fighters, our engineers are working on the flat platforms and solutions of the future today. Look, if you're gonna be harder to replace, then you have to constantly be pushing the limits, redefining the boundaries on what was once thought to be impossible.
That's what today is all about, and what we're gonna try to show you this afternoon, the next frontier in core casting and coating technology, and how we leverage those to not only resist heat, but control it. Look, it starts with our 3D multi-wall, fine feature core technology, enabled through additive manufacturing techniques. We're gonna show you that this afternoon. In addition to our cast-in film cooling technology, where we can cast in film cooling holes on locations of the blade previously unreachable by OEM's laser drilling and EDM techniques. Not only can we cast in those film cooling holes in strategic locations, as John mentioned, we can shape the exit holes, maximizing film cooling across the surface of that blade, more importantly, directing that film cooling exactly where the OEMs need it.
We can apply complex multilayer coatings with deep IP on how we coat the internal and external surfaces of those blades. We'll show you our latest advancements and investments this afternoon. Now, none of this would be possible without disciplined process control that requires near-perfect precision in maintaining core dimensional stability. What that means is how well we can balance that core through multiple operations, wax, shell, cast, post-cast, where just microns of movement result in failure and significant scrap rates that we can't afford and our customers can't afford. We're on our third generation of core distortion technology, limiting core distortion, which we feel gives us a significant competitive advantage over our competition. We'll talk more about that this afternoon. Look, John talked about the 2D digital thread.
That process control, that disciplined process control, that precision is driven by 70+ years of failing fast and decades of capturing data across every major operation. Now with that digital thread technology, as John mentioned, not only can we capture literally hundreds more key input variables. With that deep data warehouse, we can now apply data analytics, machine learning, and AI to improve yields, improve velocity through our operations, and ultimately provide better supply to our customers. Look, I truly believe you cannot control or improve yield through inspection. It has to be through data. 'Cause if you're waiting until CT to determine if that part is good or bad, not only do you lose the value of the part, you lose the capacity with it. We follow a simple process. You measure early, you measure continuously, and you correlate everything.
That simply would not be effective if it wasn't for our 2D digital thread technology. We're gonna show you real-world use cases of how we use that daily this afternoon. Look, I can't emphasize enough that the fabric of our success is our vertical integration, controlling every element of that value chain, because our process knowledge compounds itself across each operation. Having that vertical control allows us to address variation in the process with clock speed, and that speed of iteration equals speed to market. Look, when part of your differentiated technology is your process, are your factories, having that vertical integration helps protect the moat. That's why we develop all of our own core compounds, we build all of our own equipment, all of our own tooling, much different than our competition.
While they may have levels of vertical integration, nobody has the end-to-end control of their process like Howmet does, which is why we're probably coating a lot of their products too. Look, what we're gonna show you this afternoon is really focused on our airfoil segment and products. Know that we've transferred all of our process control, our technology, even our most advanced 3D core technology to our IGT customers and products.
Now, those products bring new challenges and complexities 'cause you're now measuring parts in terms of feet instead of inches, and you still have to maintain that same disciplined, core dimensional stability, that precision across very large parts, and that is not easy to do. The good news is that we're able to leverage our global manufacturing footprint, so we've got dedicated locations and assets focused on this product line, not to compete with our airfoils capacity outside of some of our mid-level turbine and aeroderivative products. That's a necessity today given the increased demand that we're seeing from that segment, coupled with the fact that our market-leading share position continues to grow. You've heard John talk about how we're positioning ourselves to grow and expand in that market in what we believe to be a long market cycle driven by electrification.
Look, we're clearly in the middle of a super cycle of growth, and that growth has a ferocious appetite for capital. You've heard John talk about the fact that Howmet's gonna have to increase our capital spend over the next couple years. A lot of those funds are directed at my business. The good news is that with my returns, it's more than enough to get John's attention on the capital. You've also heard John talk about the fact that all these investments are backed by strong commercial agreements that protect the ROI on each project.
We have a lot of work to do, but the good news is that we have a long track record of delivering large capital projects on time and on budget and being able to scale those quickly, and you'll see that firsthand this afternoon. Look, we're gonna throw a lot of information at you this afternoon, and I'm gonna apologize for that up front. It's gonna be a little overwhelming. If nothing else, I hope you take away these three things. We're in the middle of a super cycle of growth. No matter what market segment you're talking about, everybody wants more.
How it's leading with their technology, speed, and scale to market to not only capture that demand, but to grow faster than the market, expand our margins, and deliver the cash flows needed to support that growth and deliver the returns that our shareholders expect. It's those investments that we're making today and we will make in the future that will further solidify our market-leading positions. Thank you very much. I look forward to answering any questions that you have and seeing everybody this afternoon in the Whitehall.
To you Vagner .
Morning, everybody. Tough act to follow. I want your attention for the next 20 minutes or so to get focused on our Fastener business. I'd like to start by saying that if you follow Howmet and you know that in the last 2-3 years we've made some remarkable progress in the Fastener business. We've been posting sequential improvements of revenue, EBITDA, free cash flow. We also enjoy a position of leadership in the markets we operate, both aerospace and industrial. I didn't come here to talk about the past. I would like your attention for the next 20 minutes or so to talk about the future and how we intend to continue to build upon the foundation we built in the last 2 or 3 years, continue to expand our margins, penetrate markets, grow above market conditions.
Perhaps at the end of my presentation, you share the same confidence that I have that our best days are ahead of us. Please give me your full attention for the next 15 minutes or so. Okay, an overview of the business. We are nose to tail in every commercial airframe in the market, as well as engines in the aerospace side. We also have solutions for industrial markets that benefit from the types of products we make, particularly commercial transportation and renewable energy. Our products deliver superior performance to our customers by delivering solutions that are needed these days, such as lightweight materials, single-sided applications, as well as composite airframes, dissipation of lightning strikes, just to name a few.
On the industrial side, our products have remarkable solutions to manufacturing problems, such as welded assemblies being replaced by fasteners, as well as products that are friendly to be installed in situations like solar farms and wind farms. This chart is very important because it's a unique advantage of Howmet Fasteners. There's no other manufacturer of fasteners in the world that has a truly global footprint. We are present in every region of the world, which allows us to offer solutions of onshore, offshore manufacturing, as well as best cost country. In addition to that, it enables the growth of our distribution business, which I'm sure you've seen has been growing rapidly.
Peeling the onion a little bit more, our aerospace business is about 80% of our revenue, and we have the broadest portfolio of products and customers, and we offer all types of fastening solutions that are needed by this industry, starting from traditional threaded fasteners, both internally threaded and externally threaded, and non-threaded products such as blind products, pin and collars, all the way to sophisticated latch systems. On the non-aerospace business, we benefit from similar technologies developed for the aerospace customers, delivering value to commercial transportation, particularly replacing welds. On the renewable energy, these products are typically installed in harsh environments such as wind farms and solar farms. These products need to be easy to install and not require maintenance throughout their lives, and that's exactly what our products do.
For that reason, we enjoy a position of leadership on both markets, both industrial and aerospace. I'd also like to highlight, there is a significant portion of our revenue that is protected or under intellectual property. On the aerospace side, about 30%, and on the industrial side, about 40% of what we make has intellectual property of Howmet. This is the most important chart I have. At this point, I would like your full attention because this business is a mature business, but has several themes of growth that we believe are going to continue to drive our growth above market rates, and I'll expand on each of them. Starting with innovation, delivering value to our customers based upon their current needs.
I'll have a couple of additional slides on this, but it's basically lightweight materials, composite applications, single-sided applications, and automation. Capacity and capability, mostly driven by supply chain constraints, where Howmet, partially driven by the global footprint and our ability to invest, we are constantly looking for additional capabilities and looking for additional qualifications. Market penetration, there's twofold there. Some portions of the market, we still have the opportunity to penetrate and increase our share. I'll name a few: business jets, MRO, industrial gas turbines, which is a focus of our business at the moment. I would like to pause just to talk about distribution for a minute, which is within the markets we're penetrating. In the last five years, our business has grown from approximately $50 million-$300 million in distribution services.
We intend to continue to grow that distribution business driven by our portfolio, driven by our global footprint, and driven by our technology. Finally, inorganic. The fastener industry, there is a level of fragmentation in this industry that allows for additional inorganic activity. I'll expand more in the coming slides. I'm sure you know we recently announced two acquisitions. These acquisitions are aimed to expand our portfolio, add certain capabilities, and penetrate the markets I described earlier. I'll talk a little bit about innovation. A long history of purposeful innovation. Very successful history. We have two R&D centers with focused product development that's very driven by what the customer needs.
These days, composites are growing. Key platforms such as 787, 777, and even A350 are using composites, and these require better solutions for productivity, for rate increase, ease of installation, single-sided applications, which I'll expand in a minute. As you would imagine, coordinating two different employees, one on the inside of the aircraft, one on the outside of the aircraft to install a fastener is a significant issue when you need to increase rate. Lightning strike applications as well. What that does, as you can see, we compared to our main competitors, our number of patents is significantly superior as well as number of trademarks. I do wanna talk a little bit about this particular product. I did spend some time yesterday with some of you, talking about the Ergo-Tech family of products.
This is a disruptive technology. This product basically brings it all together to what customers need to automate their assembly lines to get the rate that they need and reduce installation time. This product is, again, single-sided, so you only need one person or a robot on the outside of the aircraft, and that replaces the coordination of two individuals. If you think about, for example, an A350, one circle around the fuselage takes about 3,000 of these guys. There's several circles of that in the aircraft. Imagine cutting the labor needs in half. This product is absolutely phenomenal. We see between 30%-40% reduced assembly times, and the total cost of installation, as a consequence, is significantly lower. More importantly, enables rate increases which are needed.
Now we have a whole host of Ergo-Tech solutions for metallic applications and non-metallic applications such as composites. A little bit on our inorganic theme. I'm sure you've heard or seen the announcements. Obviously, CAM still under regulatory approvals. What that does to us, it expands our portfolio to non-traditional fasteners. There's a business of fluid fittings, couplings, heat shields, additional latches which would expand our reach and expand our portfolio of offerings. In addition to that, there is a fastener business, a smaller fastener business that would bring efficiencies and supply chain opportunities to improve competitiveness. The Brunner acquisition, while smaller in size, is actually quite interesting.
This acquisition brings capabilities of bigger fasteners, both from diameter and length, which traditionally not a focus of our typical airframe products. That opens up some potential markets for us, particularly industrial gas turbines, where these size fasteners are needed. In addition to that, Brunner has a remarkable asset base, quite impressive, and that brings additional capacity, almost immediately, for our current business. In summary, yes, we have made a lot of progress in the last three years. We are confident that these five themes of growth that I've expanded a while back, again, innovation, capabilities, market share penetration, distribution business, and inorganic will continue to drive Howmet to achieve growth above markets. I am very confident that our best days are ahead of us. Thank you for your attention. With that-
John Wall.
Roger, please take your seat at the front here.
Thank you.
Good morning, and welcome to the Engineered Structures segment of this morning's presentations. It was great meeting many of you last night and going through some of our products, and going through some of these details. Today, we'll take a bit of time to add a bit more color and more depth to not only what it is we do in the structures group, but how we do it. What do we got here? Oh, the first technical difficulty. What did I do here? Resilient business. Here we go.
Again.
Yeah, got it. All right. Well, with that, we'll begin with our journey because I think it's important to talk about how we've achieved what we've achieved in the last couple of years, and it really started with business rationalization. You know, here we look to shed some of our businesses that weren't well-aligned with our core capabilities. We also looked in cases to optimize our footprint where we had redundancy. What this also brought was more focus to our management, allowing us to direct our resources to those areas where we can create greater value, focusing on those truly exceptional assets and capabilities that we house. As we step from the business rationalization, we move into product mix. Where business rationalization is done with a cleaver, product mix, we start to look at with a scalpel.
Here we start to look for those parts we've accumulated over time that were either highly commoditized, differentiated only with price, or those products that just never proved to be a good fit for our processes and capabilities. As we exit those, we begin to focus on what it is that we do well. With that, we can then really start to leverage and work into operational excellence, driving in our business, of course, yield, level loading the production through our factories. This in turn brings labor productivity, lower indirect spends. Last on the page, but certainly not least, is our margin management. You know, you heard, commercial discipline spoken earlier, and this is where we really start to focus ourselves to those differentiated products.
We have that discipline where we're looking at each business unit and each product family inside that business unit to determine where it is that we may not be meeting our expectations or the expectations of our shareholders. From there, we start to look at the asset base and capabilities we have, a truly unique and differentiated set of assets, exceptional in cases. Here we really look at the four segments of our business unit, starting with the titanium products. What I would say is special in this case is the breadth of our capabilities. We're able to offer all levels of conversion and services that only a small handful in North America would be able to. In our forgings business, this is where we have the famous monuments, the 50,000-ton press to name one, but supported by many others.
These are truly assets the industry depends on, assets that are of national interest based on the programs they support. As you step across and you look at extrusions, machinings, and assembly, these are often sectors of the market that are considered more commoditized, highly competitive. Even here, we found ways to differentiate ourselves in three things, the size in which we operate, larger cross-sections in extrusions, greater machining envelopes. We also favor hard metal. Last, we really look to do products that are geometrically challenging, technically difficult, like some of the products that you saw last night in our display. This creates barriers to entry that other sectors of this market may not have. As we start to move forward, we see this cohesive strategy form that aligns closely to the market needs.
This has been mentioned, the need for lighter, more fuel-efficient aircrafts. Fighter jets with ever-increasing performance needs, in turn requiring product geometries and complexity that have not been met in past generations. Our heavy capabilities in titanium lend themselves in favor of this market, a market where wide-body has a composite fuselage and wing, where we see that in future aircrafts. We take those key drivers, those exceptional and extraordinary assets, and we begin to convert it into products that enter the market at several different tiers, all the way from highly controlled titanium. We have our form products, near-net shapes that allow us to take weight out of traditional manufacturing processes in closed die forgings and extrusions, and then those final machine products and assemblies.
As we move into the products that those assets and capabilities provide with this optimal footprint, with a better-fitted portfolio of parts, we see a well-balanced set of products for the aerospace and defense industry. As I'm sure you all know, our products lend themselves towards wide-body, the 787, A350, 777X. Naturally, the content of titanium on these aircraft are greater than single-aisle. We balance that with other products that we would have actually seen over here on the left, our aluminum-lithium blades for Pratt & Whitney, that engine the A320. Our aircraft wheels and brakes that service the entire industry, but obviously, when you look at single-aisle and the demand on that product, it's tremendous. It creates this balance.
While we move over to defense, it's well-known we have a very strong content on the F-35, starting with our bulkheads, but also all of our titanium products. This serves as, I would say, the table stakes of our defense business, but it is backstopped by hundreds and hundreds of other applications on legacy fighter jet programs, helicopters, munitions and missiles, and also radar systems. For those of you that I didn't have a chance to walk through some of our displays yesterday, Vagner had his favorite slide. I also have my favorite slide and this is it. That's really when we start putting it all together, where we're able to add greater value for our shareholders through synergy.
Here we have our 787 seat tracks, which were displayed over here on the left, and then to the right, we have the bulkhead, which is at the back. Now, this is an aluminum bulkhead. We brought that just because it weighs a little less, and that's what we had available. We also make the titanium variants, which are even more extraordinary. In the case of the 787 seat tracks, what appears to be a relatively straightforward machine component, that's only one segment of a 35-foot part that we have all of the value add, all the way from melt to billet to extrusion, to weld, to machine, to assembly. We kit that and deliver it to our customers on time, every time around the world.
On the bulkheads, I'd like to say that it's one of the enablers of that aircraft, one of many, but a key enabler to the geometry and performance of that aircraft. It changed the way a fighter jet was put together from a stick frame construction to these large monolithic core forgings. It actually enabled Lockheed to reduce a similar structure's complexity from greater than 150 components that would be fastened and adhered to. Sorry, Vagner, that worked against you there. A few less fasteners on the monolithic component. But it allowed them to take a product that would require thousands of man-hours to assemble in the substructure level, would produce lesser strength and meet lesser dimensional tolerances.
It's this capability that we work together hand in hand with our customers to really be a part of that program, and it's something we're all very proud of. As we look at what we've been trying to achieve in the last couple of years, really, it's a disciplined approach to a dynamic market. A market where wide-body has lots of stops and starts. We've had geopolitical events that have blocked out Russian-made titanium. Through all of this, you know, we've been cautious about investment while some of our competitors have rushed out to add titanium capacity. We've been more inwardly focused, staying commercially disciplined. As you look at the backdrop, we're ready and well-positioned for that wide-body ramp that is going to be upon us. We have this strong content on the F-35.
We see the green shoots of a lot of the new programs, next-generation fighter jet, the F-47, our satellite and our radar systems. The Golden Dome is putting a lot of pressure on our radar capabilities, to mention a few. To close, I think what's important is I've shared with you our journey. I've showcased our exceptional and extraordinary assets that are critical to the industry, how they align with market needs, and how we've been able to bring those together to bring returns to the Howmet shareholders that they've grown accustomed to. With that, thank you.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everybody. That's a fantastic video. I'm Randall Scheps. I'm gonna give you an introduction to the forged wheel business, a business that I've had the privilege to run for the last six years. What we do in forged wheels, as the name would suggest, we supply forged aluminum wheels into the global heavy truck, bus, and trailer market under the Alcoa Wheels brand name. You've seen the financials of this business. Their financials are quite strong. This is a business that you'll notice as we go through has got some common threads with the other parts of Howmet that you've heard about today, sort of alloy expertise, precision metal processing, surface coatings, and surface treatments.
You'll see as we go through this presentation that this business is really quite unlike some traditional truck parts business that you might be familiar with or that you might have run across. The Howmet advantage really falls into four. There are four main pillars to the Howmet advantage, and these all work together to create quite a powerful moat around this business. The first advantage is we are the number one global truck wheel brand in the world. We're instantly recognizable within the trucking industry. Everyone knows what an Alcoa Wheel is. In fact, you'll run across fleet operators who will refer to the wheels on their trucks as Alcoas, not as aluminum wheels, but as Alcoas. We compete with steel wheels around the world.
These are typically uncommoditized steel wheels, and we also have a handful of regional forged aluminum wheel competitors that we compete with, also unbranded. A little fun fact about the power of this brand within the trucking industry, we have 150,000 Facebook followers to the Alcoa Wheels brand around the world. At our various sites around the world, we sum it all up, 150,000. That's this brand really resonates in the industry. The second point here is we have full design control over our product. We control our destiny from the alloy through the forging through the machining through the surface treatment. We control how that technology rolls out.
We control where it goes in the world, and what that does for us is it allows us to limit complexity. We can rationalize SKUs and make the same part in 3 different flow paths around the world, which unlocks economies of scale in this business. The third is precision assets. I've got an asset, a really enviable asset base of production equipment around the world. What these assets allow is I produce at single-digit part per million quality levels, so single-digit PPM. Just for reference, in the industry that we're in, 50 PPM is generally deemed acceptable and good enough. I operate at single-digit PPMs, which is a point below 0.01% defect rate. That's part of our brand promise.
If you go back to element one here, part of our brand promise is quality and durability. We deliver on that through single-digit PPM. Finally, scale. I'm four times the size of the next largest competitor in the forged wheel business, and that unlocks all kinds of opportunities for automation, which I'm just noticing watching this video, there were no humans in that video, so that's a little bit of a preview of what I'll tell you in a couple minutes about automation. Heavy investment in automation and vertical integration. An example of how vertical integration helps me when we take a forging and machine it into a wheel, generate a lot of machine chips, aluminum machine chips come off in that forging process.
Because I have the scale to afford to build my own cast house, I can take those chips as they come off the machining centers, they go right back into my cast house. I can cast those into new forging billet really almost immediately. Think about the cost and the working capital advantages that that brings to this business, that level of integration. None of my smaller competitors can touch that. You can't afford that level of investment when you're small. What is it that makes this market so attractive? In a nutshell, and we'll go into a little more detail on this, but in a nutshell, truck fleets are converting from steel wheels to aluminum wheels more every year. There are two main forcing functions for that.
Regulations are increasing, this sort of drumbeat of every year there's more regulation that adds complexity and adds weight to trucks. The truck fleets are looking to offset that. The other forcing function megatrend is economic. Fleets are under enormous pressure to improve efficiency, and I'll take you through the details of how we can improve efficiency for the fleets. You have those two big forcing functions that are moving fleets from steel to aluminum. It's a safety-critical part. We love that because a fleet is not gonna take a risk on an unbranded, unproven, untested product with no reputation. They're just not gonna do that to save money. That helps us. It's a very large addressable market.
About 75%, depending on the region that you're in, around 75% of all the freight moves on trucks. Obviously, wheels are an important part of how those trucks operate. 18 million truck wheels are sold every year in the markets that we target. About 30% of those are forged aluminum today, and we make most of those. The other 70% are these commoditized, unbranded steel wheels. That is our mission in forged wheels, is to take that 70% remaining steel wheels and convert those to aluminum. That's what we work on. That's what we work on every day. 70% of that market is open and untapped. The really exciting thing about this is that that 70% moves down every year.
We're making progress around the world, region by region, and moving that steel percentage down because of these megatrends. We're really well-positioned to win. We've got this number one brand. We've got strong financials, as you've seen. We've got the asset base to win. A little bit about the regions. That's just at very high level. The market dynamics in these different regions are a little bit different, but you'll see there's a common theme on here, which is that we are number one in all these regions. North America is our most mature market. The aluminum adoption is quite high, but our product is also well understood by fleets.
Growth in North America will come from us enriching mix with some of our proprietary surface treatments, and also the growth of new energy vehicles, which will allow us to drive additional volume in North America. Europe's very exciting for us now. You see that we have strong share. We have 90% share of the aluminum market in Europe, but that's not even the best part about the European market. The best part is that adoption is only 30% in Europe. You think about we have a 70% runway in the European market to convert from steel. It moves forward every year. That 70% gets lower and lower every year, thanks to our efforts. Europe is also a huge taker of some of our premium surface products.
Europe is a very exciting market for us. Other regions and then this is Brazil and Australia and Japan, lot of runway for growth, and premium surface treatments there as well. There's a very large untapped market in those other regions. I wanna add one point here, maybe somewhat unique to this business. Aluminum prices have been very volatile. I had a lot of questions last night about aluminum prices, a lot of questions about tariffs. What we do, and a testament to the commercial power that we have in this business, we've got agreements in place with all of our customers, and we pass all that through. Aluminum goes up, aluminum goes down, we pass that through. Tariffs, same story, we pass that through.
That takes the noise, that aluminum and the tariff noise out of our business, out of our results. A little bit more about the megatrends, the regulatory megatrend. You got this constant drumbeat of new regulations that are adding complexity and more importantly, adding weight to trucks. You have fleets' strong desire to offset that weight and make the trucks lighter so that they can haul more. We, in fact, have a new regulation that's coming on January 1, 2027, a new emissions regulation. Another example that's gonna add complexity, it'll add weight to the trucks. It just increases that desire by the fleets to pull weight out of the trucks. Then the second is economic.
Running a fleet is a challenging business. They are getting pushed all the time by inflation. They give insurance rates, labor rates, fuel costs. They're constantly battling inflation. What we can do when we come with a lightweight solution for their wheels, we can save them money. We always get an audience when we come in and say, "Hey, we can save you money," because they're fighting these elements of inflation. The really exciting part about this segment is the chart on the far right here, and that's the adoption of aluminum around the world. This year we're gonna be right around 30% adoption globally in the markets that we target. Look at where we've come from. 16 years ago was single-digit, so it just continues to march upward.
That's driven by these two forcing functions that we talked about, regulations and economics. You can see a little bit different profile, the white in these round charts, that's the untapped opportunity. That's the steel wheels that we're going after to convert. What is it that the fleets really need? We talked about fleets, you know, running a fleet, being a challenging business. They have a lot of things, a lot of market dynamics. Their margins are low sometimes. What they really want from us is they need lower operating costs. You know, they need lower maintenance costs. They need to be able to haul more freight.
They need ease of maintenance because this is a, you know, maintenance is a big expense, and they don't want to have trucks that are down by the side of the road, not running. That's what they need from us. The last element on here is appearance. That one may surprise you a little bit if you have kind of a notion about the trucking industry. Appearance actually is important. In many cases, these trucks are an extension of a consumer brand. Think about Amazon, think about Walmart, think about Pepsi, think about Target. The truck is a rolling billboard. It's an extension of a consumer brand. They actually do want, and they will pay for good-looking wheels. Here's what we deliver.
We deliver all five of those elements for fleets with our product. We can deliver up to 5% of fuel economy improvement, and you think a typical fleet could be paying up to $50,000 a year per truck just in fuel. If you come in with a fuel savings, absolutely, you get their attention. We can add payload up to 1,400 pounds more payload. What that means for the fleets, they can if they can add 1,000 or 1,400 pounds of payload, that's more revenue with 100% drop through to margin. They absolutely love that. The best part about the revenue and the payload is that the business case that we offer typically has less than a two-year payback. Absolutely motivational for the fleets.
World-class quality, we talked about PPMs. That's part of our brand promise. Million-mile durability. I had a lot of questions last night. Typically, the wheel will outlast the truck. We don't have a big spares business, unfortunately, or fortunately, as you may look at it, but these wheels have got million-mile durability. We're so confident in these wheels that every wheel we sell has got a 5-year unlimited mileage warranty. The icing on the cake for our value proposition is that oftentimes, because our brand is so strong and so well-recognized, that when it comes time for them to trade the truck in after 3, 4, or 5 years, in many cases, they will get most of the upfront expense of speccing our wheels.
Most of that upfront expense will come back to them when they trade the truck in after 2, 3 or 4 or 3, 4 or 5 years. That's really the icing on the cake. Scale and asset positioning is really where Howmet shines in this market. Scale brings us a couple of advantages. It brings us advantages on the commercial side, brings us advantages on the operations side. On the commercial side, I've got connections with every major truck, trailer, and bus OEM around the world. We talked about fleets sort of being very important to us.
I've got 50,000 fleet relationships and the way those relationships work is I've got a sales team in that as fleets are speccing new trucks, I'm educating them about my product and asking them to check that box on the new truck order form and spec our wheels. Some of my competitors actually don't even talk to fleets at all. This network that I have of OEM relationships, the network that I have of distributors, the network that I have of fleet relationships has taken decades for us to create and would be nearly impossible for a competitor to match in any kind of reasonable amount of time. It's very, very powerful. Pays benefits every day. New trucks are being ordered every day.
We've got those fleet relationships to get so that we get specced on those new trucks. A couple of other elements that scale unlocks. Obviously, I've got full value chain control all the way from alloy to ingot, to forging, to machining, to proprietary surface treatment. All kinds of proprietary know-how and patented technology in that chain allows me to invest where my competitors can't, because I have that scale. Then finally, automation. The scale that I have allows me to invest in automation. We decided about five years ago we were gonna really lean into automation in this business and have reached a point now where I've got close to 500 robots in this business, which to put that in perspective, I've got one robot for every two employees, every two humans working on the production floor.
One robot for every two humans. We are well set up to generate that next level of advantage from machine learning and AI because this is just so highly automated. A little bit about our technology. You see from the hardware in the back here, we've got some interesting surface finishes that fleets really value. We've got 150 patents and trade secrets that are protecting our technologies. I'm gonna just highlight two of the technologies here. There are many more. These are the two that really are drivers for us. Number one is Dura-Bright, and this is a proprietary surface treatment. What it does is it locks in that shiny feature, that shiny image of a new wheel and then maintains it for the life of the wheel.
The wheel looks shiny coming out of the factory, five years later, still looks shiny. The fleet doesn't have to maintain it other than run it through a truck wash, and it maintains that great look, and it's also corrosion resistant. This is a very high value product for us. Fleets love it, especially in Europe. This is a nice upsell for us. The second element here is, it's really a suite of technologies, the foundation of it being our MagnaForce alloy, which is a patented alloy that we developed specifically for truck wheels. Our competitors don't have access to this. When we combine it with our design know-how and our process know-how, we can create a wheel that's 17% lighter than anyone else can.
We're the only ones that have this alloy. Competitors don't have it. Just to sum up, we got a fantastic business. You've seen the margins. You've seen the working capital profile. Well-positioned with a nice moat around it, in an attractive and growing segment. The number one brand in the world. Nobody can even touch it. Instantly recognizable, within the trucking industry. We've got full design control, which allows us to manage complexity, keep the SKU count down so we can get those economies of scale. Fantastic assets, vertically integrated, so we control every step, with those proprietary processes. And then finally, this scale of being 4x our competitors, which unlocks all kinds of opportunities around automation. There's a tremendous amount of pride in this product.
I hope you can feel it, and I really enjoyed taking everybody's questions last night. I love to talk about truck wheels. Tremendous amount of pride in this product, so what I would invite you to do is the next time you're stopped in traffic next to a big rig, take a glance over at the wheels on that truck and take a look for that logo. Then think about Alcoa Wheels when you see it. Thank you.
Almost, I had to pull Randall off the stage, otherwise he'd be talking about wheels for-
Yes
two hours.
Yes.
You probably gathered by that. Patrick?
I'm Patrick Winterlich, and I'm now honored to be the CFO of Howmet. I joined about three months ago, and I have the pleasure this morning of kind of wrapping up before the Q&A with some numbers to let you know how the company has progressed over the last several years, and that's been a fantastic progression. I'm honored to do that. As you can see on this chart, a 9% revenue CAGR, a very solid growth, and that has led to a 17% Adjusted EBITDA CAGR and an 870 basis point climb in the percentage margin, and that's top decile performance, which wouldn't surprise you. That has then in turn led to a 37% adjusted EPS CAGR, even more impressive.
We've seen a 50% reduction in our interest expense, and I'll come back to our sort of capital asset deployment and improvement in the balance sheet later, and a 640 basis point in our operational tax rate. All of that, you can see 9% leveraging 17%, leveraging 37%. That is a great progression, and that's what we need to maintain. All of that has then led to $4.5 billion of cumulative free cash flow over that period. Over that period, we have averaged over 100% free cash flow conversion against net income. Fantastic platform from what you've seen the presidents present. What have we done with that?
We have deployed all that cash in various ways, and the first way is we have strengthened our balance sheet dramatically over that period, 2020 to 2025. We've reduced gross debt from $5.1 billion to $3.1 billion, so down by $2 billion. That has improved and helped to improve our net debt to EBITDA leverage. Our debt comes down, our EBITDA has grown. That leverage has improved significantly from 3x to 1x, where we finished 2025. Our pension and OPEB liabilities, the gross liability, you can see the small chart there on the bottom corner. We've gone from $2.9 billion to $1.4 billion. As you all know, pension liabilities are not what you want on a balance sheet.
Reducing that gross liability by 50% is a tremendous step forward, and we continue to look and work on that. $2.4 billion on share repurchases, that's about 33 million shares. I think we finished the year at about 404 million. That's 33 million shares fewer than we had in 2020. $430 million on dividends. You will have seen us move from $0.02 to now where we are $0.12, and that equated to about $180 million in 2025. This is a busy chart, and I'm not gonna walk through all these numbers, but it's really the shape. If you look at the four businesses, you can see 2023, 2024, 2025, all those margins are climbing.
Tremendous performance across engines, fasteners, structures, and wheels. You can even see compared to 2019, three of the businesses are now at a much higher level than we were in that peak year. The only reason wheels isn't is because of the dilution of the aluminum cost running through that business. The underlying performance, the conversion margin, if you exclude the metal cost, is much better. All four businesses have done tremendously well. There's no outlier. Everything is strong is my message here, and that's led to the bottom line where you can see Howmet finished at 29.3% or 720 basis points higher than we were in 2020. A consistent solid performance moving upwards. What is all that built on? Well, it's all built on what the four presidents talked about.
On the left side here, you've got technology and solutions. Howmet is a leader in the technology it has. The material science, the process technology, and the capability to do that at scale and to deliver the quality at that scale. That is an incredible asset. We do that to meet the solutions and provide the technology, and solve the problems for our customers. As you've heard about this morning, addressing the higher temperature, higher pressure requirements in modern jet engines. That's crucial. Very few people in the world can do it, and Howmet does it fantastically. Howmet is well-positioned with the titanium and the fasteners to meet the growing composite adoption in the world on modern aircraft. Lowering maintenance costs through the structures and the materials we provide and the equipment we provide with them.
Perhaps very relevant today, fuel economy with oil touching $100 a barrel. You've just heard the narrative from Randall about the fantastic Alcoa brand of wheels that Howmet brings to the space. What do we bring? We bring products and commercial strategy, an exceptional product offering, operational excellence through innovation, automation, and the footprint, which I think almost all the presidents alluded to, that you can see across the globe. Howmet has a fantastic presence to meet the markets and to satisfy the customer demand we have. You have the commercial strategy, the commercial excellence. Some of you will have spoken to Mike Chanatry last night, who leads a lot of that along with other people. Mike is front and center of that for Howmet.
We have long-term, deep commercial relationships with many partners around the world. We capture price, and believe me, Mr. Plant knows how to capture price, and share through LTAs. Again, as you've heard some of the presidents talk about, our contracts allow us to pass through materials inflation and tariff impact, which really help protect and boost Howmet's margins. The cost competitiveness through the scale, through that global footprint, through the technology, is hopefully there for everyone to see. Now looking forward beyond 2025 a little bit, and I'm really just referencing the midpoint of the 2026 guidance that we provided in February. You can see, on this chart, we're growing to $9.1 billion of revenue, at the guidance midpoint in 2026 or 70% increase in revenue over 2020.
We're moving to 30.3% EBITDA margin, up 970 points, and that translates into an EPS increase of 475% if we hit the $4.45 that again our midpoint guidance calls out in 2026. That platform is there and is gonna deliver more growth in 2026. That revenue, those margins translate into more cash. You can see between 2020 and 2025, we grew over $1 billion of free cash flow from under $400 million to over $1.4 billion, a 30% CAGR, and we're now guiding to $1.6 billion at the midpoint in 2026.
All the while, free cash flow conversion has averaged more than 90%, which is the target we've talked to, well over 90%, between 2020 and 2025. We've done that while we've invested in the capital requirements, over $1.5 billion in that period, 2020 to 2025. Another way to look at cash generation, sometimes known as free cash flow margin or free cash flow as a percentage of revenue, you can see, really, really. If any of you look at these statistics, these are very strong numbers, especially for a heavy manufacturing company. 10.3% in 2023, and now we're guiding to a very healthy 17.6% at the midpoint in 2026. We're gonna push beyond that as we go forward.
We see the opportunity to grow that even further. What is all that built on? Again, you've heard the presidents talk to it, but just to go over it, a strong operating playbook. Growth above market, the differentiated products, the technology we have just provides a really fantastic foundation to keep that going. We've got this very strong potential to increase margins across our entire platform, productivity, automation, the adoption of AI. You're gonna see some of that this morning when we go to Whitehall. The foundation is fantastic for continued growth. We focus very, and John and the team and the presidents are very focused on allocating capital to where we're gonna get the best growth and the best returns.
Now, 70% of our capital, about $450 million, 70% of that $450 million in 2025 went towards engines. That business is growing very strongly. The other businesses also get invested in, but we're gonna be very selective and very targeted on where we get the best returns. Cash flow, we continue to aim at the same target, 90%, cash flow conversion against net income. We're developing that fortress balance sheet that you've heard us talk about before. That fortress balance sheet gives us optionality when it comes to capital deployment.
Just to talk about that capital deployment as I wrap up here, you can see 2020 to 2025, we've deployed over $2 billion, $2.1 billion to reducing debt, gross debt, share repurchases of $2.4 billion. We paid $400 million of dividends. While doing all that, we've invested $1.5 billion in capital expenditure. A fantastic history of deployment. Now we look forward. Where do we now go? As we look at the 2026 priorities, we continue to be very disciplined and look for growth and returns, and we've guided to $470 million of CapEx at the midpoint.
We're now working to complete our investment, our M&A, our acquisition of CAM for $1.8 billion, which is gonna further strengthen and enhance our fasteners business. We're also gonna remain in a disciplined way, in a focused way, vigilant for further M&A opportunities. We're gonna be generating the cash, generating the capital to have that opportunity, but we're gonna be very selective. We do not want to dilute what we want today. We want to continue to strengthen. We expect our share buyback in 2026 will be above 2025. While doing all that, we remain very, very focused and disciplined in terms of our overall strategy. Our leverage ratio, we expect to be around one at the end of 2026.
We can only do that because of the performances that you've heard about this morning. To wrap up, we're working hard to build the financial muscle to do it all. Thank you for all listening this morning. With that, I'm gonna hand it back to John.
Thanks, Patrick. I think my two colleagues are gonna rejoin. I was getting a bit concerned at one point. I assumed it was a bathroom break, but, you know, they might have feared your questions. I think we have about half an hour that we can. If you have any questions, that is.
Yeah. Do me a favor. We have mic runners in the room. Wait till you get a mic, and then please give your name and affiliation. Why don't we start with Peter here in the front. Go ahead.
Hey, thanks. Peter Arment with Baird. Thanks, John, and the rest of the team, giving us great details. Maybe a big picture question. We've heard comments from SpaceX talking about the way they cast components for their Raptor engines, and they've done it in a rapid scale. We've seen 3D printing for solid rocket motors for other companies. We're just wondering, like, I'm thinking about Merrick's business or the fasteners with Vagner, like, any impact when we think about 3D printing and why we aren't seeing more in the businesses that you're involved in? Thanks.
Let me have the first go, and then, if Merrick wants to supplement. We use 3D printing, but we're also very selective where we use it. In some of the inserts that you're gonna see as you go through the plant today, some of the things that go into making these parts, because of the complexity of them, and they don't, you know, at the stage of manufacturing, they don't have some of the shear forces that we have to make from the metal parts. We do use it to produce extremely complex shapes. We are familiar with it. We have experimented with 3D metal printing as well. Obviously, that's composite plastic and composite types.
Metal printing, essentially everything that we looked at was never able to withstand the sort of forces that Merrick was talking about. If you imagine the sheer forces, the centrifugal force, and both the stretch and compression, then when you've gone to a single crystal structure, that provides a level of integrity which is not possible with the current generations of, let's say, additive printing. I'm also been quite leery about when we have. We printed, like, latches for Airbus as an example. We both came to the conclusion that it wasn't worthwhile. I won't say it won't be wanted in future, but it didn't achieve anything. The costs were actually higher. You know, so what.
Like, what was the point of doing it when you're gonna produce a higher cost part? Now, is it possible in certain aftermarket applications where, you know, the volume variety is very different to what we're trying to do that it has applicability? Maybe. Then the question is: Where do you capture value? Where's the profit pool in, say, metal additive printing? You know, I think you can see the benefits of the people who design the different alloys and the atomization of those metallic particles that go into it, so whether it's in a powder or a wire form, so that's a profit pool.
The person who, let's say, adds together 15 components and can produce them in one, I think that's a big benefit for the recipient of that, and let's call it maybe more the end customer. I think the middle ground is the person who has to invest in all of the machinery to do additive printing gets squeezed between those two. I don't judge the profit pool is of sufficient interest for us to spend a lot of time at it, nor is it very applicable to any of the parts that we do. Having said that, it's not something that we're majorly bothered. Anybody else would like to add any points seen from fasteners, engine, or anything else?
Yeah. I would just maybe add that, again, you'll see where we're using additive and 3D printing this afternoon and, where we think it makes sense in our business. It comes down to that, you know. I talk about the three things, scale and producibility, right? We're not there yet on the metal side of it. You can see it in space because of the low volume of parts, but it wouldn't fit in right now with our operating business.
Solid rocket motors have a different. I'll say stress factor, you know, from the nozzles, you know, the force is in one direction, not in multiple directions.
I would add a comment for fasteners. Well, we always need to be vigilant to new technologies and their adoption. Fasteners is probably one of the last in the order of priorities that technology like this will eventually get to. You don't really get a lot of metal benefits of savings 'cause of the shapes of fasteners are typically cylindrical, so you don't get a lot of benefits of the 3D and also the risks associated with a joint that may not pass compared to technologies that have been established for a long, long time. I will not discard, but I'll say to you, unlikely at the moment.
Okay. John?
Hey, John Godyn here at Citigroup. Thank you for the presentation. John, I wanted to follow up on IGT and the outlook. You had a great slide that had a number of charts where you showed demand through 2030 and then 2035. A lot of those charts seem to suggest that the growth rate between 2025 and 2030 was a lot more than the kind of $1 billion-$2 billion doubling in revenue that you're forecasting. You know, I'm just kinda curious, upside risk to that $2 billion, maybe you could just elaborate on the outlook.
Yeah
for IGT.
I did point out that I'd only covered that segment of the market. It made it look better. I did wanna make sure that I say it again, because you're looking at this slice of the market, therefore the percentage growth is higher. If you look at the, let's say, total electricity demand, then obviously it's much lower percentage because of the base load for, let's say, other industries, homes, you know, et cetera, et cetera. The pure data center element of driving our growth is higher than. It would lend you to that conclusion, except for you need to take account of what's the electricity demand, which is what we're trying to serve for the whole of the load, throughout the, let's say, whether it's the US or the globe.
I only showed U.S. graphs there, not for the world, again. We are truly serving every market. Whether it's, let's say, any of them, whether it's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Siemens Energy, GE Vernova in terms of the Ansaldo Energia for the large gas turbines, then you have to look to all of their end markets and all the aggregation of that demand. They also see that. In my discussions with them and trying to get comfortable with us deploying the amount of capital we are is, you know, what is the data center underpin? What does it look like through 2030? What does it look like beyond 2030?
you know, the themes of what's gonna be the electricity demand and use and power sources in Europe beyond 2030. Some of the energy markets, I think, are already disrupted by what we've seen recently. For example, in the US, we also have to consider is if the demand for, from data centers is so big, how much comes from the grid? How much comes from individual, I'll say independent power generation. What's left for, you know, we talk about the consumer, we talk about data centers, we don't talk about other industrial requirements.
I think we're gonna see a lot of mini and micro grids established whereby we'll see the continued rise of the mid-sized gas turbines throughout the 2030s as well, being installed to support you know manufacturing plants around the world, including in the US to achieve that. I'm interested in what does the demand look like 3 years, 5 years, 2032, 2035, and throughout.
You know, cause it forms a view of how much capital that we're willing to deploy to those markets and how we pass between them, between existing technologies, the newer ones, because all the things that I'm holding here go into the new generations of some of these type of turbine blades and, you know, at very different rates between different customers, and so there's a tremendous amount going on in that market. I just wanna say that was a segment. There's always danger in showing a segment rather than the whole, you know, electricity demand.
It does seem like the upside or the bias is to the upside on that $2 billion though, based on everything you just said.
Well, it also requires turbine manufacturers to be able to manufacture the turbines and all the things we've experienced in commercial aerospace over the last few years, their supply chains and ability to put them together. I think we're gonna be doing our part of it, but ultimately it always comes to, you know, what's the weakest link in the chain, and therefore, you know, we have to, like, apply a cautious lens to it, let's say, how we feel.
Thank you.
Okay.
I'm gonna go to Mike here.
I'm glad I'm not doing this. Peter's directing us to answer the question.
Michael Ciarmoli, Truist Securities. Thanks for all the information. Maybe at the risk of not making friends, it sounds like Randall, you take tremendous pride in the business. You know, Wheels only 10%. It's got a tremendous market opportunity globally. Does Wheels make sense in the portfolio over the longer term? You know, kind of fighting for resource allocation with some of these mega trends in aerospace, defense, ICT?
Well, I think if you've got something, it's a bit like my children. I love each of my children equally. You know, I love each of the businesses equally. It doesn't mean to say I give them the amount of resource allocation equally. That's a different matter. If Merrick's like tall and growing like a weed, then maybe he deserves a bit more if he's gonna build some muscle as well. No, Randall deserves, and if we have Wheels in the portfolio, then we must make it a good part of the portfolio and be willing to invest.
Again, you know, relative priorities and, you know, have to be, you know, we look at it on a Howmet basis, not a Wheels basis or you know a fastener basis. Now, does each business have to justify its place in the portfolio? Of course. I mean, you know, it's all a question of, you know, try to look at it in a very dispassionate way as well. Like, what's the value that we can create from owning the business compared to, what's the size of the bag of gold you're willing to offer me for the business? I'm also dispassionate enough to say, you know, I think I will do the right thing for the shareholder.
Mike, if Truist and your affiliates put a bigger bag of gold in front of me, I might get tempted to sell Wheels, but not today, and it's unlikely you can afford it, the way it makes sense. That's how I look at it. No, Randall's a valued part of the portfolio. If you don't think that way, you shouldn't have it.
Helpful.
Why don't we pass to Sheila?
Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. Maybe for Merrick and John, in engines, can you talk about the conversations you're having today? Merrick, I think you said this is the most, this year you'll have the most new product introductions. How that's helping you gain content in your revenue algorithm, and how you think about where we are both on the aerospace side and the next gen fighter side in terms of the new engine build, how you're balancing investment in the build, and how you think about folks like Pratt & Whitney building up their own castings capacity.
Yeah, I thought that statement that Merrick made might get us into trouble. You know, but I mean, when we talked about it earlier, I thought, no, it's first of all, it's true that we do have a large amount of new product introductions, which I suppose in one sense, it's pretty exciting. You know, I don't think I'm gonna pick out, like, a list of the top five for you, but it is good. The flip side of NPIs in any manufacturing business is, you know, the ability to screw it up. It is always one where, as you know, we go through learning curves on these because of the complexity of some of the products.
There's an appropriate, I'll say, amount of caution of like, where are we today? What yields we'll get? How we'll improve them as we go through the year into 2027. The way I look at it is that those NPIs are gonna be progressive through the year and, you know, they're gonna be carefully controlled, so we keep ourselves in, I say, in good shape. Some of them, you're actually gonna see bigger benefits as we go into 2027 than you'll see in this year, both as the volume scales and also the, I'll say, the improvement as we get in yield, as you know, like three months in, six months in, a year in. You see, you know, very different outcomes in terms of those as we have to learn.
Merrick, anything you'd like to?
No, just that each program has its own story, but they do, they continue to build and ramp throughout the year and into 2027. You know, it's really across our business, whether it's airfoils or IGT or structures. We've got new product introductions across the segments.
I think the final part of the question was, were we worried about who it was you were saying? First of all, it's not easy to do. As each time anybody thinks that they may, let's say, consider doing some things in the investment casting market, if you've listened carefully to it, we move the goalposts by a considerable amount. The best example I can give you, like, in terms of like, so what has happened, you take the F-35 and its engine, the original plan was that that would be dual-sourced. That was the Department of Defense back in, at those times in the, I don't know, 2016 or something period.
It was meant to be, I think, 70% for Hammond, 30% for our competitor. As it was, I mean, that was 20 years in the development, that level of technology. It takes. If you looked at this as an example I'm holding in my hand, which, as you know, one thing I forgot to mention to you, but as I digress, is that you see it now, then you don't see it. When someone in the room crumbled one of these things up last night, whoever it may have been, is that, you know, we I think we did try to retrieve the parts, or Annette did, because we were worried about you chemically analyzing them to see what would had been done.
Because you see, what you'll see today is you'll see it, and of course, in the final delivered product to the customer, which is metal, it's all disappeared. So all of the control that went into the core prep or into the wax, every bit of it is then sucked out and dissolved and disposed of, that you'll never find it, never see it. You don't know what it's got. So I'm gonna put this one and put it back in my pocket just in case I were to drop it and whatever. When you think about it, we talked about third generation tolerance control.
You look at where we've moved to since 2021, and that level of tolerance control that we had back in the, let's say, 2018, 2019 period, when it was 70/30, but our competitor was never able to get qualified after 20 years of development. 20 years is a long time, and they weren't able to get there. That then when we did the LTA renewal, we contracted at 100% across the turbine. Now, what does that do? You could have the simplest level. Well, you get a bit extra guaranteed profit and cash flow. Well, that's like, yeah, but that's not the reason why we would be willing to do it. It's because it actually stops somebody else learning how to do it.
If you think about the things we've been talking about, you know, when we've talked about what's the balance between price and share, and it's always been the and conversation. I'm not interested in necessarily taking our shares down 'cause I want it to grow above market. But gaining that share has been really important to it 'cause every time we gain a scale advantage, it's really important to us because it gives us a level then of our ability to invest in automation, which you saw in the previous generation of what we showed you. But now if you imagine that we've moved the goalposts both on the technical front and on the ability to automate and on the digital thread, then it's made it even more difficult for somebody to compete with us on an equal footing.
When we think about the things we're doing for, let's say, the next generation military engines, think those engines which will go into either the F-35 upgrade or the F-47, or maybe it's gonna be, I mean, every one of those is going to be at another level. You know, we're able to take the technology to another level. We're working on solutions which enable additional, you know, temperature ratings, additional thrust, ability to carry, you know, weapons payload, and all of these things. Then in recent ones what we've done in the rotorcraft programs is that we've again sought to be at the highest share possible. What we've done is where the policy has been, we want dual source.
We said, "Yeah, we'll do it for you, but you can dual source it to Howmet." Now, you know, what do I mean by that? Well, we'll put part of the production in this state and part of the production in that state, so you have supply security, and which is what is necessary, supply security, so that those military assets are able to keep flying through any form of confrontation and have, let's say, immune to, let's say, fire or explosion or anything else that might go on. You know, because the technology is such that we've moved the goalposts to enable the performance that's required, it's like given us a unique technological advantage, which you wanna do.
We keep pushing it so it's, you know, driven by the technology mode, driven by the volume mode, driven by the ability to scale giving us what, I mean, Randall talked about, you know, the amount of, I'll say, machine assist and automation. Again, these parts now, a lot of them you actually don't want a human. This was proven last night. Anybody that picked it up and they said, "Oh, shoot, I've damaged it." Well, you don't want the human to touch it. You really don't. Because when we do it, you know, we actually also place them in a certain way. The things that we, like, don't talk about, you know, is it flat? Is it aside? Is it moved a thing?
We will cover it in, let's say, wax. We'll insert, you know, the seeds that go in to grow the crystals. At what angle do we do it? When we nest them, and it's like multiple paths of multiple metal moving through nesting systems where these things are going. We also angle them at different angles, so we're controlling the rate of flow of metal, the viscosity of the metal, and also the orifices, how fast does it flow. It's so. It's, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. I'm getting quite carried away now. I mean, as long as we're saying we're trying to move it. It makes it difficult for anybody that wants.
As Merrick said, it really is, it's relatively easy to make one, you know, in a lab. But making 10, 100, 1,000, making several thousand a week, that's really difficult. Merrick, anything you wanna add to that?
Nope.
Why don't we go to Matt at the back?
Yeah. Hi, Matthew Akers from BNP Paribas. Could you talk about structural castings? I think it was one of the only areas you mentioned in the presentation where you're not number one. As you kinda look at the opportunity set ahead of you, does it make sense to kind of invest and become number one in that market? How do you think about kinda gaining share over time?
Our strategy has been, first of all, I mean, same in principle that do we want to improve our relative market position? Yes. Have we been doing so? Yes. You know, have we been going about it? Well, we talked. Well, probably 5, 6 years ago, and it's the same strategy now 'cause we tend not to change them very much, is that where our competitor was number one in that segment is Precision Castparts. So they were the big guy on the block. It didn't seem to make sense to us to just try to go head-to-head with somebody who's got the capital assets in place already. They've got the tooling in place already. They've got the experience of making those parts, you know.
To go in mid-cycle and try to wrest parts away from them, in my view, is stupid. It's too strong maybe, but not of the greatest sense because what have I gotta do? I've gotta put in new capital assets. I'm not, you know, I'm not on yesterday's depreciated assets. I've gotta build new tooling. I've gotta spend 2 years, 3 years in qualification. I've gotta spend 2 years in going through a learning curve process to be able to produce at rate to compete with the yield. Every part of the economics that I would have on yield, cash deployment, and therefore expected returns, in my view, it was not a very sensible mission to take on. Now, does it make sense that where we have some special capabilities?
Like for us, we're really good at small and round stuff, putting it into very basic terms. We majored there. We looked at other areas that were coming up or where there were supply difficulties, and there was a justification for us to enter. We also have engineered ourselves onto a lot of new programs. Rather than try to compete on yesterday's LTA, which is still on a renewal program 'cause the engine's still running, we looked at what's coming up new, and then we deployed all our engineering resources to make sure that we engineered onto. We would plan out, there's the whole engine, there's the 20 structural castings of that engine.
We will plaster ourselves all over that next one that's coming through, so that what it would do is as and when those, you know, say, those products came to market in the engine space, that we were there and we would naturally, first of all grow, and we would naturally, I will say take share and do it from a sensible set of capital deployment. Because the other thing about the structural castings business why it also has different hallmarks to it because of the capital intensity, so it's a high even though you'll see extraordinary capital intensity in the turbine blade business, structural castings is a level above that because the size of the mounting size of the furnaces as an example. You don't have the aftermarket.
You know, you get very few that require, I'll say, change on an MRO visit, whereas it's very different in the things that we major. I really like being on the wearing part of the engine because of that volume. If you look at some of the high running programs that we have, we ended up after the volumes going into the service sector, through the customers to the MRO shops, is as high as what's going into OE. That gives you a level of repeatability and also a life going to the future. Like you take, you know, the one we are all working like crazy on, the CFM56, that stopped production essentially. I mean, there's one or two engines a year, but stopped production five years ago.
Today, we're making more of those parts today in 2026 than we did in the last any year in the last decade. That's the wonderful thing about, you know, positioning yourself right, thinking your way through what gives you that sustained advantage into the future. What's more, the volume's gonna go up again this year. You know, what could be better than that? Now it's gone past model, and therefore the pricing structure is different as well. You know, you have to really think, you know, where do you wanna be the big guy on the block? In every way you're not, how are you gonna improve where you are?
At the same time, don't take on a, what I judge to be a suicide mission of just throwing the forces at the castle or the fort or whatever you wanna call it, and just getting a sore head. That's not what I call being a good businessman. Or you can call me a wimp, whichever you wanna do. I don't mind. Yeah, I'm very relaxed about it. We'll go to Ken.
Yeah, thanks. Hey, John. I wanted to follow up on some of your comments you made on the digital investments you're making. Do we see this reflected maybe across the segments? I think you were specifically talking about the engine business. In margins, how do we maybe better sort of gauge the return on these investments you're making, maybe in better top-line growth through yield? Maybe a little bit more detail on how we see that flowing through in the scope of these investments.
Yeah
how they can really impact the business.
You're entering in an area now, let's call it machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how do we apply it and where do we apply it in the company, which is a really big topic. I would like to believe that I try to educate myself as much as possible, like where are other companies, who's at the forefront of this and where do we stand? Because there's a lot of talk, maybe a lot of hype and how does it fix it? I'm not talking about me as an individual using Claude, the Anthropic search engine or something like that, or ChatGPT. I'm talking about now using some of these, let's say large language models to model our data.
I think the biggest payoff for Howmet is in our manufacturing operations more so than in our offices. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't things to be done, you know, in there as well, but in terms of gaining control of manufacturing and what it offers us by way of, let's say yield and smoothing everything out, I think those opportunities are vast. It's where I choose to spend my time thinking about it.
You know, we've had reviews collectively and individually with each of the businesses, and I think the last one was even two weeks ago, and it was that one more centered on the engine business and how we're applying camera systems and, as you know, series of images that we gain, how we're using CT scans, how we're using X-ray images and all this sort of thing. Also, in terms of the things we heard about digital thread, 'cause there's lots of threads even within that subject. I think we're still in its infancy, quite honestly, because we try to put into place those things that we have the bandwidth to do.
What I mean by that is that we've been under such stress for deploying our capital in new facilities, and I think, you know, we have built three, I think, new manufacturing plants, extended two, and we've just bought another site in a brownfield. We're sort of reorganizing another one, so we've got a lot going on. The best place for us to deploy these, I'll say potential control techniques of using artificial intelligence is where we can gather the data and put the sensors on the machine. Putting sensors on, say, measuring the vibration in machines, measuring the temperatures to operate, measuring the pressures in molding machines and so on in a very detailed way in how they affect the part. We're
I don't wanna say experimenting. We're certainly not. It's more than showcasing it, we're actually doing it in the plant you're gonna see today. That is not representative of the whole company. It's not representative of even what we do on the Whitehall site. Because, so we looked at, is it Plant 1 we upgraded, you know, a few years ago, maybe 2021. Then was it Plant 10? I don't know. I always get confused by the numbers. You know, in 2015 or something. You see the generations, but those machines don't have all the sensor capabilities that we have. You cannot achieve anything, in my view, on artificial intelligence in manufacturing if you don't have the data.
To get the data, you have to fit all your machines with optical systems, with sensors on measuring all of the facets of that machine. We have a capital base developed over tens of years which doesn't have that. In the case of John Wall's business, in our Engineered Structures business, while we've upgraded many of those, like large forging presses to the latest and greatest in hydraulics and control systems, they don't have all the sensor capabilities that we require to have data capture to go that next part of the journey. What you shouldn't take from that is that we're, let's say, Luddites in certain parts. We are not. What we're doing is thinking our way through, you know, where do we wanna put those sensor and data gathering systems? How can we apply it? What control points do we want?
We're working our way through methodically, like, you know, like oil dispensation in a forging press at 1,500 degrees. How much even do we wanna spread that oil is before the forging press come out? All those things. And how we meter it rather than just, you know, just, oh, just spray a bit in there. It's good enough, you know, we're gonna spray a bit of oil. You've got to gather that data. It's a journey which is gonna take us, I don't know, 5 years, more. The important thing is that we're thinking about it, applying resources, we're spending money at it, and I think have a clear-eyed, well-thought-out program of what we want to do.
Spending time when I go to Japan in April, it's not just to visit a customer, not just to visit our new plant, but trying to look at what's the latest and greatest that I see in robotic manufacturing where AI's being applied, and can we keep up with the people who are at the forefront of this in the world? That's what we're seeking to do. I'm just trying to describe to you, this is a journey we're on. Because if we can apply it where all of that, all those like new things are coming through for us in our new plants, that's maintaining control at the forefront of the manufacturing and product and materials technologies, where we're using it then to also change our chemical compositions on shrink rates, as an example.
We're actually applying AI for that today already. It's fascinating, but we're applying it where it matters to stuff that's new coming through, not trying to think we're gonna, you know, spread our energies over everything because we don't have it. You know, we're pretty much maxed out on a lot of. Despite recruiting hundreds of engineers, we're maxed out just because of all the opportunities at the moment. You know, my you know, for me, it's plastering the waterfront and to make sure that I've got that contract, that customer to gain that revenue. I can fill in afterwards a bit of automation and a bit of AI, you know. My view of the world. Well, I think that's a good place to stop.
We've run out of Q&A. You sure? 'Cause there's one guy there been putting his hand up. I got one more question 'cause. All right. Rob's been trying for so long. All right. We'll go to Rob. I mean, he's got the right accent. Oh, sorry.
It's Alex, the British mafia. Thanks very much, Peter Arment. Robert Stallard from Vertical Research Partners. Actually, a question for Merrick Murphy. You mentioned patents, I think it was trademarks, and how you had way more than your competitor. I was wondering how this works. Is that a patent over the actual part, or is that a patent over the process? And how difficult does that make it for your customer to subsequently give that work away to someone else?
I'm sorry, I didn't catch the. Can you?
The patent side. I'll cover it for you. I'm gonna rescue you.
Okay.
We don't have patents over the design. That's not what we do. We work together to co-design, so we explain what is the art of the possible. We can take, they can take, or jointly we can take those design limits to its extreme, and to achieve that. All the things I talked about, what goes into making one of these? What goes into the temperature we cast at, the angles we cast at, how we position crystals, how we have, I will say, models to look at how we gate, how we run, what angles we do, what cooling that we do with different parts of the casting, that's all Howmet's technology.
The final IP, so let's say the part that goes into a GEnx engine on a 787, then those turbine blades will have the design control reside with our customer, GE. They also then, 'cause part of the deal is they control effectively the route to the aftermarket, to the MRO shop. We don't go directly to the MRO shops around. We'd have to have a different, I'll say, commercial, you know, strategy altogether if we did that, and we choose not to for, I think, good reason.
Thank you.