My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu with the Jefferies Aerospace, Defense and Airlines Equity Research team, in case you are on the webcast. And we have John Plant, who is Chairman and CEO of Howmet. John, do you like what I have in my hand here for the first question?
Is that something you stole?
I did. I stole it from Whitehall, Michigan. It is a piece of a core at a very impressive facility, and I keep it in my bag actually all the time as a little bit of a lucky charm. And I thought, what better way to start off than say, "I stole a piece of a core," and it seems like lots of people are trying to steal a piece of your core, whether it is SpaceX—
Ooh.
—or GE. So what is
I still think you should hand that back to us.
No, no. I actually have a spare one in case you did try to take this away from me that I have secretly locked up in my jewelry box. How do we think about your next move from here?
Are you talking about me personally or the company or what?
I don't know. You—
I do not know. You just want to tantalize you with all the opportunity you have to consider. I am inviting you to get more specific.
How do you think about my interest in war games from here and how the scenarios play out? You said on your office call—
Well, I was rather shocked at one of your suggestions. I decided that you really had lost it in your positioning. That is me and the way I think about you, Sheila. She who steals parts from us. My assumption is you are referring to some recent announcement, SpaceX, and that was a topic [Non-English content] a week or so ago.
You had another chance to follow up.
Yeah. I never want to avoid anything. I think to myself, "Yeah, let's talk about it." It's far better that I do, because you'll just be relentless in following up questions if I don't. My first thought about it is, let me try to put the whole issue of power provision into, and the demand seen by turbine manufacturers for whether it's provision for oil and gas pipeline, or whether it's into data centers, and what is all that about, and where are we in that journey. I think the most important and acute aspect of it is the demand evolution in the data center market, because that clearly is a data center without power is useless, and availability of turbines has never been less against a greater need. Where are we?
I think I've got to start off with trying to make sure that we're all level set on the nature of today's data center demand. Historically, if you go back, let's say the storage of your images on your iPhone or your email in a data center, that was more, let's call it plain vanilla demand, and that was using, I'll say standard merchant-available chips, very different to the data center demand which is really emanating today from the likes of the software being written by OpenAI or by Anthropic, and now I'd say data centers that are being built out with very advanced GPU chips, let's say using NVIDIA or custom silicon. You've got very much yesterday's, let's say more standard silicon, and tomorrow it's custom silicon. You've got air-cooled versus air and liquid-cooled.
You've got stable power demands for yesterday's data center to highly variable power demands for the more exacting, and certainly topic of the day of where data centers are. That also influences the turbine selection and also the technologies that go into that. When you've got variable power requirements, it puts very different loads on the turbine compared to, let's say, the more stable plain vanilla demand. Not only is more power required, but it's the type of power that's there. You get very different answers to what's the preferred turbines that service this market beyond even the electricity from the grid, but what are you putting in there? It's also driving the nature of, let's say, not just for the use of natural gas, but also the robustness of the set of turbine blades.
The evolution from Equiax through directionally solidified to single crystal, all of that is going on. At the same time, all of the movement towards air-cooled turbine blades is also going on. The one thing about Howmet is that we provide that pathway of technological evolution which is rather unique in what we do. It's a world away from the plain old, let's say, solid equiaxed turbine blade of yesterday. These things get exponentially more difficult to manufacture as you go through that technological journey towards the future. What do we see? First of all, going back, is that very much the offering that we have goes very much the more advanced, it's a custom silicon variable power requirements of these modern variable according to how many searches are going on at one particular time.
It is important to talk about that, the technology drift for the future. It is something I have not really talked about much in the past. I think that is an important thing to get out there. I wanted to say it in a more public forum, so I am not advantaging anybody else in that knowledge as we go through. Second point that probably should be made is that, as you know from what I have said in the past, our market share is significant. That market share has been growing, and indeed, is growing.
We have, according to the last earnings call I gave, that we have now concluded agreements with all of the, I used the word seven, but one of the seven being, let us say, our aggregation of various aeroderivatives. But all of the big turbine manufacturers, so think GE Vernova, think Siemens, think Mitsubishi Heavy.
Then you have got the smaller and mid-sized turbine manufacturers. So you think about Caterpillar, Solar, Baker Hughes, Doosan, and so on. So you have got all of those laid out. These contracts, first of all, are multi-year. They go through the end of the decade and beyond, and in some of the cases, to the middle of the next decade. That is an important aspect as well. Also, it defines price and also supply position and share within it. In one case, we actually have an exclusive arrangement. Exclusive means 100%. So that is really a good position for us to be in. The biggest issue that we have today now is really not only facilitizing for the capital that we have been deploying, but what we are going to continue to deploy over the next two or three years.
Also, our next decision is do we need to have more building footprint for the capacity expansion. This part of the market is exciting for us. I am going to say, I probably sometime in the next two or three earnings calls, maybe the one in February, I will probably update everybody about. My statement was that from 2025, we would see a doubling of our revenues somewhere in the three to five-year time period. I think I am going to update that, not today, but it will be coming at some point.
Yeah. I am not 100% exclusive with you, so I would not get that, right?
Yeah.
I'll wait until February.
I was going to get to the second point now.
Okay.
Because you'll want to ask a second question at some point during the meeting. But let's get the two big things out there and talk about it. Of course, the topic du jour yesterday was the announcement that GE were buying and hopefully closing a year from now, the acquisition of CPP, which is a turbine. Sorry, I didn't address SpaceX for you, did I? So you wanted me to. Let me just go back and just cover that, because the question now I think has is the intention to become a supplier of third-party parts as a merchant supplier, or just because today, maybe it's Colossus 1 or 2 , they're requiring a lot more power. I think a smaller turbine company was purchased, people who run turbines for a living, not manufacture them.
Or even the provision of buying old engines from Aero Engines and repurposing them for that. So there's a lot going on, and the question is how can they get replacement parts for some of those things? So I think you need to look at more that part of the market than the more advanced part of the market that we've been talking about in the last five minutes. So I had missed that before I went to the GE announcement.
Sure.
I think I've covered that. But if anybody else, if you want to follow up on SpaceX, be my guest. The more interesting one was the GE and CPP, which we knew was coming up for a sale. We had read, but essentially, we also knew that for us it was an impossibility in terms of antitrust, et cetera. It does, of course, beg the question, well, what's the intent? You saw the intent yesterday was to look at developing it over the years. I think we should be fine with that. I know, and the question is, if there is additional investment and capacitization of CPP in the future, is that at the detriment of everybody else, or is it one of our competitors, or is it more aimed at the turbine side or the structural casting side?
But I think we're pretty confident in our own abilities. In fact, the biggest issue we have now is actually provisioning for additional capacities in the aerospace market. Without getting very specific, because I don't think I should talk specifically about any one or two customers, but it is multiple customers within the aero-engine market, including the name I just talked about, are asking us, can we provision for increased capacities going through the end of the decade and beyond. Of course, we're unlikely to do that if we're not clear on that capacitization and durability of that provision. So we're fairly confident in that. That's born of, in fact, being asked for a special doubling of demand for one of the engine customers because of our extraordinary quality, and what's probably more important is our 100% on-time delivery.
That's the biggest, I would say, challenge that we're facing is that that's like an additional 1.5 manufacturing plants worth of capacity build-out on top of what we're already doing. As you know, we're spending an extraordinary amount of capital today and building footprint. I'm unlikely to do that without be sure that capacity is going to be fully utilized during the 2030s and beyond. So, I feel as though we have extraordinary technology, extraordinary capabilities, and we'll be showcasing that increasingly in the future.
That's great to hear. I think you've mentioned in the past, you have 50% share of the turbine and blade market across both aerospace and IGT combined, and Merrick slipped in March at the Analyst Day in Whitehall and said this year, 2026, would be the year of highest the record number of new product introductions. I guess, how do you protect your IP from people like myself, SpaceX, and GE to dig into the moats of your business as new entrants try to come in?
We protect ourselves in many ways, not only just in, let's say, the IT environment of their various vaults for information, because we are attacked every day from certain jurisdictions in the world in trying to obtain information. We also pay extraordinary attention to CMMC compliance because of our defense industry, I would say, requirements, and have, I think, tried to make sure we're at the forefront of that level of cybersecurity. But we also have physical security of petitioning our production into very different parts of the process. So there's only a few people in the company that can ever see across the whole range of the processes that we do.
We're always making sure that you can't just go and hire someone from Howmet and let's say, get an extreme jump from Howmet and go be enticed to go to Texas to somewhere, because you only know a fraction of the information. So we try to protect it in all of that way as well. It's true, we have a lot of new product introductions. You know some of them because they're very public in terms of some of the, let's say, upgrades of narrow body engines, but there's a lot of others going on as well, both in commercial, but also in the defense aerospace markets and now, I'll say, collaborative combat aircraft and missiles and the large cruise missiles where we're doing work for. Not just in the traditional componentry of the structural parts, but I'm talking about smaller turbines.
The one thing I hadn't mentioned is that on every single one of our major aerospace customers, we have long-term contracts, which again, define share and also go beyond to the end of the decade and beyond. Also, we will be wanting to or we always consider duration of where we are. In fact, there's only one customer in the aerospace world, which is mainly in the business jet turbine market, where we haven't got a lockdown, where that's due for renewal on 11 2027. So they're already well past date of supply.
Got it.
What I've been trying to do is to give you a picture of our sustained business, both technologically and by way of contract, but more importantly, of the way we protect information as well, to try to keep stuff inside Howmet and knowledge. We also choose, in most areas, not to patent things, so you're not even aware of what we're doing, because if we patent it, then you become aware of what we're trying to protect.
That makes sense. Maybe the third element could be perhaps CapEx and the ability to build out greenfield facilities, which you're no stranger to. I guess, is it feasible that in a few years we wake up and there's a fifth supplier of blades and vanes out there, whatever spectrum that has?
Well, because in this life, you never say never, because that's for a future event that we know nothing about. I can say it's probably very unlikely, but I'm not going to say never. Somebody with unlimited funds and maybe unlimited time could, but highly unlikely, and it would not be an economic decision.
Got it. On that front, if we could talk about the industrial gas market. It's moved at roughly a high single-digit growth rate, and you're clearly seeing the business double now to $2 billion in annual sales. You've talked about the business doubling. How do you think about the timeline for that and just milestones in achieving that along the way?
Well, I think I said earlier, I'd probably be updating everybody about that.
I'm trying to get a little bit of a glimpse into—
I know.
—that look.
I recognize that. But I'm going to stay strong. As enticing and as nice as you are, I'm not going to weaken at this point.
A little bit of crazy, based on—
With Sheila, you always get a bit of crazy.
Yes. Yeah.
I think you all know that as well. But if I say to you, when I update the markets, assuming that I carry through with what I just said, I am probably not thinking I am going to take it down. How is that?
Oh, that is—
Is that a lot for you? Is not that a lot just for you?
That is quite unhelpful, actually. When you think about the IGT market, you started off the discussion with the evolution of how data and additional data centers have evolved, and that puts more pressure on blades. You have also talked about scaling your single crystal into IGT over the medium term.
Yeah.
How do you think about the technology moving within IGT blades specifically?
There is clearly this move that has been going on as the aerospace market has done over the last 50 years, going from the equiaxed type of blade construction to directionally solidified towards single crystal. It may surprise you the single crystal aspect of the market is actually quite small today. It is only in the most exacting environments where you have that. It also can depend upon what position in the turbine you are, with more likely that it will be towards the front end of the turbine and the gas path. Yet, at the most extreme, particularly in the midsize turbine, at the most extreme, the modern blade is now every bit as sophisticated, if not even more so than the latest aero-engine blade. I am talking about compared into the commercial arena. I am not talking about into the military arena.
What we have developed for one customer, and now it is not just the first blade, but also we are talking about air-cooled very microns of control in multiple parts of that blade on the inside across at least the first stage or two or so. Again, I want to be careful. I do not want to give too much information on behalf of our customers, but they are truly at the most, I will say, sophisticated level. We are doing that not only in those mid-sized turbines, but we are also provisioning and also now supplying at both a direction solidified and single crystal level in the very large turbine blades. Now you are talking things which are 3 ft plus long, and getting bigger.
Hitherto, we had had the singular biggest casting furnace in the world, and we are actually commissioning the building of several more, and we are almost turning that into our industry at the moment. Going to be, again, at the forefront of that and building the next biggest one in the world that again can take the scale and size of these blades to another level, anticipating there are, say, further requirements coming towards us.
I don't blame you for not wanting to give out info. Every Grok tweet about a blade and a vane has a quote from you as a factual comment to follow up, so.
Does it? Oh, shoot.
So.
I did not.
I don't blame you to not focus on the tech, not provide as much technology color. You're in the middle of a significant CapEx cycle, and maybe most people don't realize your CapEx has actually doubled since 2023 to support the revenue base that's set to exceed $10 billion in 2026. As you look to major expansion plans you have in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., how do you think about how you balance that with the OEM discussions you're also having through the 2030s, and what conversations look like to actually deliver on that demand?
Well, I can tell you the sheer scale of the capitalization is certainly testing us. You actually do interestingly reach physical limits on certain things. For example, when we are building a new casting furnace, what you see above the ground is only half of the machine. The rest of it is sitting at an equivalent level below ground. Things that you have never seen because as you visited us, you obviously did not go below into the tunnels underneath. And why should you, especially if you have got heels on?
I have flats.
We would not have shown you anyway. It is interesting, because when you actually manufacture these things, you actually have to have a plant with big open holes in the floor so you can build these things. We have just actually, would you believe it, built another one just so we can have lots of holes in the floor, so we can build additional machinery to capacitize the future. It is testing us in many ways because we had not thought we were going to be there building this amount of equipment. So far, we are on track, and we know that our customers want it.
In fact, as recently as this weekend, an email, because we just completed something with one of the large IGT customers and saying, "Thank you very much, and please understand that we would like you to produce even more in 2027 and 2028." It is almost like it does not really matter what, just produce something, just because the demand requirement is so great. Just now, the emphasis on build. It is just build. It is quite exciting. We are just up against capacity limits, and that is why I have been emphasizing in the last couple of earnings calls what we have been able to try to achieve on yield.
Because while the capacity is beginning to come in, all what we have done so far this year in getting out this additional 30%+ has been a function of yield and also moving to more repeatable production using takt time because we are now having, in certain areas of provision, being able to go to serial production rather than batch production. That matters to us.
To think all these investors thought last week's share price performance was the only thing testing you. It happened to be just physical capacity and being able to deliver to customers that you were worried about.
That was interesting because on Friday, it was all about how am I going to build another 2.5 manufacturing plants on top of what we have already talked about. Everybody else is worrying about something else come Monday morning. It is like, "Ugh." That is the way it is.
I guess to quantify that, how do you think about your level of support to the commercial OEMs and IGT OEMs over the next several years as you have built out these facilities and done a ton of hiring?
We try to be really good partners with all of our customers. We try to take the attitude, do what you say you will do, and meet the commitments that we have agreed on. It is not to say sometimes that people do not want more, because that is also. It is more which has come from, for themselves getting surprised by just the sheer scale. Three years ago, I do not think any of us were really talking about these levels of demand and build either in the aerospace market or in the, I would say the gas turbine market.
It was not something in aerospace. It was, we know we are going to build more aircraft, but nobody had any concept of just the sheer amount of spares that are going to be required. In the gas turbine market, nobody anticipated, I do not think, what was going to be required.
None of us thought we were going to have chips built by NVIDIA at this level, or is it Cerebras or any of the other custom silicon manufacturers, and therefore turbine manufacturers as well.
On that point, I think spares is 22% of sales doubling from 2019 levels. How do we think about how much higher aerospace IGT and defense spares could go from here?
It is difficult to know who is going to win the race on volume increase, given that I think we all are expecting additional aircraft build over the next few years. We are also expecting, because we have been provisioning, and that is what the capacity is all about, producing more. Obviously, let us say Mitsubishi is going to build a lot more turbines, or is it GE Vernova, and therefore we are going to build a lot more OE blades as well.
But every one of these things is also producing its own revenue stream for the future by way of additional spares requirements. The fleet is working harder. I tried to describe to you it is not just the volume effect on the fleet, but it is the variability of the power demand, which is also driving some of the spares requirements. It is difficult to handicap it exactly right now.
If you say 2027, I'm clear that we're going to be in, during the changeover that's going on more likely than not the LEAP-1B, and then I'm thinking about the GTF Advantage, and therefore there's going to be some aspect which is going to retrofit some of the fleet in some of those things as well. The gas turbine fleet's working harder. The pipelines are working harder. The liquification of natural gas for shipping to give more energy provision to Europe is providing demand. Everything's working harder. Everything that we're going to build, we'll have built from 2025 through 2030, that's going to produce a level of aftermarket demand in the 2030s. Should the OE demand stop going up? Which I don't think it happens.
At the moment, it seems like build rates are going to increase into the 2030s, and the question is how far into. How far is your crystal ball? Is that the spares demand is also going to increase by a significant factor for us as well. Handicapping which one is going to have the highest percentage growth, I don't think I'm too worried about it because one aspect of me thinks, does it really matter? Because if they both go up, life's going to be good.
Sounds good. Defense portfolio's been growing double digits, 11% in Q2. It's anchored by the F-35, and I got to think all the usage in the Middle East is going to help some of the blade work. How do you think about your defense portfolio shorter term and also longer term as we think about missiles and drones?
It seems like things are changing there as well. You have the base level of demand for F-35, and I think that just continues, given both the build-up for the U.S. Air Force and Marine and Navy, but also for the export orders. Clearly, some of the legacy fighters are seeing some renewed interest, so you have now significant increases expected for the F-15 and the F-15EX Eagle II, and basically its weapons carrying load that it can provide. The thing which every one of us is grappling with at the moment is missile demand and what's being asked there. That's the existing designs for missiles. I'm not just talking any classified program. Then there's also, what is the method of delivery of missiles in the future for the larger cruise missiles, et cetera?
Is it going to be bigger solid rocket motors, or is it going to be smaller turbines? I think the bet is on some of the smaller turbines. Then the whole aspect of these collaborative combat aircraft, there are things we just don't know, except that there's going to be these unmanned aircraft flying alongside manned fighters or manned bombers. We provide into that part of the defense network as well into the strategic bomber area. But is it going to be two collaborative combat aircraft per manned, or is it going to be 22, or is it more, what's a swarm? I don't know how big a swarm is. These things are just unknown. The only thing we know is we want to be engaged and participative with them.
Do it as an act of faith that directionally it's going to turn out to be good.
Two more questions before I let you off the hook.
Okay.
Your balance sheet sits at 1.2x leverage post CAM. I guess, how do you feel about M&A from here? Do you have a bigger appetite from M&A, just given the two recent deals you've done and the casting news in the market? I'm going to try you one more time.
Yeah. I think that M&A should be part of what we think about by way of capital deployment. Clearly, we still want to have investment in our own capacity for organic growth as the favored, I'll say, return that we get on that. We've been buying back shares. We've been increasing the dividend, and you've seen us do a couple of M&A moves, and I think that roughly speaking, that at the end of this year, then we're going to be in a position where our leverage ratio is the same as we exited 2025, having bought back a very significant amount of stock, having done almost a couple of billion dollars of acquisitions and increasing them.
We are generating cash to do all of these things, and so I think that we'll continue to examine, is there anything else that is appropriate we could bolt onto the company? I'm still thinking in that vein. I'm not anticipating any very significant deals, no matter what you write in your reports. I just wanted to get that one in there just in case. But I could have a rush of blood to the head, but most unlikely.
Sounds good.
I don't find it enticing to do things which take us out of our lane. And I don't think I'm going to answer the second part of your question.
Okay. Last one. I think the Howmet story, and as I look at my note, there's 60% upside to my price target. Howmet's story is about technology differentiation process and more. What part of the Howmet story excites you most from here, and what do you think investors are underappreciating?
I think that there's so much of what we do which is not necessarily visible. You see the outcomes, but you don't see what goes into it. I think I see that, and I mean, not surprisingly. I think the outcomes really will continue to be good and healthy, and we've taken ourselves a long way. We've established, I think, a technological leadership position, a supply lea dership position, and just want to keep being anal about trying to be the best at what we do.
Great. Well, thank you so much, John, for joining me.
Thank you. Nice to see you.
Thanks. We look forward to February.