Innovative Solutions & Support, ticker ISSC. For those not familiar with the company, ISSC develops and manufactures flight guidance, autoflight, and cockpit display systems, largely for the aerospace market. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO, Shahram Askarpour and CFO, Mike Linacre. Sorry, Mike, I apologize.
They'll have a presentation of roughly 20-25 minutes. Following their presentation, there'll be a lot of time for Q&A. If you have a question, please address it in the Q&A section. You can email me or put it in the chat and I'll address it to management. With that said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. Good morning, and welcome to Investor Presentation. I'm Shahram Askarpour, CEO. We begin with our safe harbor statement since there may be some forward-looking statements here. IS&S was founded in 1988 on an idea that aircraft operators would frequently upgrade their avionics as electronic technology grows. We are an IP-rich company that generates an average of seven patents per year to protect our inventions and product technologies.
We serve three market segments with our product lines being business aviation, air transport, and military. We also provide avionics on new aircraft production, which we refer to as OEM, as well as aftermarket or retrofit. Our mission has been to improve safety and comfort of aviation through cost-effective application of technology, and our vision is to become the recognized leader of certified autonomous flight systems.
That doesn't necessarily mean to be the first. The goal is to become a major supplier of enabling equipment. Previously, our growth strategy has been mainly focused on organic product development. For example, we initially developed and certified the Utilities Management System for the Pilatus PC-24, and we plan to utilize this existing certified system as our platform for autonomous flight. We also plan to leverage our strong financial position and our underutilized infrastructure to augment the successful organic growth with targeted product acquisitions that help accelerate our growth as our current production infrastructure can triple our sales with little to non-CapEx requirement. In the past 5 years, we've had a top-line CAGR of 15%.
As a result of our organic growth strategy, we have a rich product portfolio that has been designed and certified to the highest level of safety or DAL A, and is utilized in some of the world's most prestigious aircraft, such as the Pilatus PC-24. We are vertically integrated in our facility in Exton, Pennsylvania. We internally perform all aspects of product development and qualification.
We manufacture all products, including all sub-assemblies in-house. We have an automated surface mount technology laboratory that produces all of our electronic circuit cards. We machine our own mechanical parts. We even paint our equipment in-house, and our direct cost of labor is less than 5% of our revenue. We achieve this through innovation in product design and automation in the factory.
The reduced labor content is what allows us to achieve attractive gross margins of 60% as well as enable us to significantly increase our revenue without significant increase in skilled labor. As I mentioned before, we are currently at 30% capacity in our production.
Our early products mainly consisted of individual primary flight instruments designed for military aircraft, such as our highly reliable and accurate air data computers that sense and compute aircraft speed and altitude, as well as engine instruments that measure and display critical aircraft engine parameters. In early 2000, there was a mandate by the FAA to reduce the vertical separation of aircraft from 2,000 feet to 1,000 feet when flying at and above 29,000 feet. The IS&S air data products met and exceeded the accuracy requirements.
We shared the market with two larger competitors and yet captured over 60% of the world's business aircraft. We generated $100 million in cash and invested that money over the years to grow our product portfolio. Today, our products portfolio ranges from integration of individual instruments inside the large LCD displays, adding high-performance navigation systems for highly integrated cockpit solutions to highly accurate flight and navigation sensing computers. In the last 10 years, we have been developing products for flight controls, such as our Utilities Management System and our autothrottle product.
The Utilities Management System and our autothrottle product line have provided us with unique actuation and monitoring technology that is the engine for our near-term growth strategy. We are currently in discussion with other aircraft manufacturers to incorporate our UMS product line in their various platforms, as well as expanding the platforms for our autothrottle product lines.
The organic growth will mainly be driven by a number of expansion projects, such as the aftermarket autothrottle installations, aftermarket display system installation, as well as expansion of the UMS to other aircraft platforms. The organic growth will also be realized through our aftermarket solutions that replace other obsolete and inadequate systems in all three market segments, with advanced systems that allow for a significant amount of cockpit automation for pilot workload reduction, which eventually lead to reduction of number of pilots in the aircraft.
The acquisition strategy is to incorporate established cockpit and cabin product lines in our production facility, gaining significant operating leverage. Last one, we obtained shareholder approvals to update our articles of incorporations. This significant milestone has allowed us to better execute on our acquisition strategy in terms of financing, as well as the type of acquisitions we can perform in a more expedient way.
The future of aviation is in autonomous flight, with 2 major milestones being, first, reduce the pilot count to 1, and second, to eliminate the pilot in the aircraft. Our focus is on the lucrative near-term opportunity of reducing the pilot count on Part 25 aircraft. That is aircraft with gross weight of over 12,500 pounds, which covers most of the multi-engine aircrafts out there. These aircrafts are currently required to fly with 2 or more pilots on board. The business case is compelling. Starting at larger business aircraft, such as the Citation XLS and above, where the ROI is less than 2 years, the passenger and cargo airline operations, where a typical passenger airliner has an average of 10-16 full-time pilots on staff per aircraft, and the ROI is less than a year.
Reducing that count to half is highly attractive proposition for all operators of Part 25 aircraft. The aircraft operators have been demanding a solution that reduces pilot count from 2 to 1. The certification authorities are reacting to that demand. The second milestone of pilotless commercial flight is out there somewhere. Our focus is on the initial phase of pilot autonomy, being 1 pilot in the aircraft with a fully autonomous system capable of performing all phases of flight and ground activities.
The automated system communicates with a ground station that includes few pilots monitoring many aircraft and assisting the flying pilot through the automated flight system. We plan to reach this by incremental supply of cockpit automation to the industry that help reduce pilot workload and enhance safety. What is our advantage over the competition?
Two product lines developed by IS&S are the existing certified equipment that enable phase one operations of autonomous flight, being the Eclipse display system and the Utilities Management System. Here's a timeline for our autonomous flight strategy with phase one completion in 2027. As I mentioned, phase one is an achievable and highly lucrative proposition for the market, and we are well-positioned with our technology to take advantage of this opportunity. Mike will now give further details on our financials.
Thanks. Thanks, Shahram. Turning over to our financials, I'd like to speak to the overall strong position of our income statement, balance sheet, as well as cash flows. From a top-line perspective, our sales have grown 4 years in a row, with sales in 3 of the last 4 years increasing 20% or more. Sales doubled since 2018. We have a very profitable business with strong margins, efficient processes, and cost control, which utilize automation and minimizes labor. Gross profit was over 60% in 2022.
Possibly our largest strength is the further financial growth as we grow. Currently, we're only scratching the surface of our production potential at 30% capacity. As we grow, we can utilize our existing cost infrastructure and will not have to invest in significant indirect overhead or SG&A costs.
With sales growth seen in 2022, it allowed our gross profit to grow over 30% and operating income 54%. Sales growth has been consistent over the last 4 years with a CAGR of nearly 15%. Growth has come from each segment of the business, including our OEM aftermarket as well as our repair business.
We continue to work on new product development, acquiring new customers through sales and marketing, as well as penetrating and growing sales with existing customers. We have invested and added to our sales and marketing teams as well as business development. We are also actively hiring engineers to further our research and development efforts. Operating income has increased significantly with doubles the sales volume since 2018 and has created strong operating leverage.
With increased sales and production utilization, the incremental margin drops right to the bottom line, further fueling the operating income leverage. This leverage is aided by our ability to pass through raw material cost increases through our customer contracts. It has also been aided by our process efficiencies as well as our product mix. In addition, our strong cash position enables the company to execute on organic and inorganic growth opportunities. Our cash of $17.3 million as of our most recent fiscal year-end, has also more than doubled over the previous year. We generated $6.1 million in free cash flows and $8.7 million in cash overall. Our balance sheet is very liquid, with the company also not having any long-term debt. With that, I'll turn it back over to you, Shahram.
Okay. I think we're ready for ready for Q&A as well.
Okay. Thank you, everybody. If you have questions, you can enter in the Q&A section, chat section or email me directly. Gentlemen, I'd like to start it off. You mentioned in your prepared remarks about the change in your articles of incorporation and the potential impact on your M&A strategy. I wonder if you could go into that a little bit. Does that change the size of the acquisitions you might be targeting, your ability to add leverage or how else you may want to finance them? Any kind of additional color would be helpful.
There is there's two sides to that. Was that the way our articles of incorporation were written, it prevented us to do any acquisition of any entity as a whole. We couldn't go out and buy any companies of any size without 65% shareholder approval, which kind of put you out of the competitive market of going after those acquisitions.
Another thing that was in the articles of incorporation was that we were not allowed to take on any debt, including having a credit card for the business without getting 65% shareholder approval. You've got to appreciate that typically a lot of your shareholders that are retail, they don't vote. Getting that approval was kind of a near impossible task.
What those changes have allowed us now that we can get lines of credit that we could potentially increase the size of the acquisitions that we could consider. As before, we'd only look at what our cash position was for acquisitions. As well as allows us now to actually buy entities. A lot of companies that maybe the owner is thinking about retirement and those businesses come up for sale, or they don't have a diversified product range, and they're not kind of getting their required more financing and investment, allows us to look at those opportunities as well. It expands our area of growth by acquisition.
Got it. Got it. Mike, I believe you said in your remarks that you only are running at 30% capacity. Is that by design or can you talk a little bit about why you're running at such a low capacity level?
I mean, that's really, you know, where our sales are at currently versus, you know, what our facility is capable of. As we grow, you know, we'll continue to leverage and improve our gross margins. You know, as a public company, you know, we have a fairly, you know, large fixed cost base. As we are able to grow, we're gonna be absorbing more of that cost into our cost of sales, thus increasing our gross profit.
Okay. You mentioned in your prepared remarks, gentlemen, about the aftermarket revenue, and I imagine has a fair amount of impact on the P&L. What's aftermarket sales relative to an OE sales on a typical quarter annual basis?
Typically, their aftermarket sales is about 40% of our business.
That margin tends to be just a little bit higher than our OEM business. Really when you look at our OEM business and our repair business, that's about 60% of the business versus, the aftermarket, which is approximately 40%.
Okay. I've been ignoring some of the questions from the audience. I'll get to some of those now. Another question on the M&A opportunities. Maybe if you wanna just talk about general size or adjacencies that you might be looking at. Anything maybe additional to add on the M&A following what I asked already.
Obviously, we've got a funnel that we've been developing and, like the kind of within the limitations of what we could look at, which was mainly product diversity risks. Most of the things that we see are out there that kind of are a fit for us. They're somewhere around, you know, if I pick a number in the middle, about $15 million in revenue per year. Now I guess we've kind of widened our scope and we're also looking at businesses that are out there. I think somewhere between $10 million-$15 million in revenue are, you know, our first acquisition is going to be in that order.
At least the way that's what it looks like now.
Fair enough.
You know, we're gonna take our time on that.
Sure.
We're not just gonna go buy something because we can. It's important that it's the right product, it's the right product mix, and it's something that we can digest, reasonably in a short period of time. We're reluctant to put a timeframe on it because it's gotta be the right acquisition.
Got it. One of our audience members has noticed that you've had fairly sizable gross margin expansion. Can you talk about what's been the principle driver there? What's the long-term opportunity to improve those margins?
I mean, it's been the volume growth. I mentioned our capacity is only 30% utilized. When you're 30% utilized, you know, you can't absorb the majority of your costs. When you know, when you increase that volume, you are allowed to. Then you do absorb that cost and the cost of goods sold, which becomes part of your gross profit. As we continue to grow and use up more of our unused capacity, you're gonna continue to see that margin enhancement.
Just drop down quickly. A question about your contract structure with the customers. In light of recent events, I guess is there any protection against escalation on material prices in your new contracts? Can you talk a little bit about maybe lessons learned over the past two years?
Obviously, with our OEM contracts, we have escalation clauses in all of our contracts. They don't typically allow you to increase prices for the full amount of whatever the published rate of inflation is. We can escalate prices to a proportion of that. On the aftermarket side, we typically update our pricing on an annual basis. You know, that reflects our, kind of increase in costs.
I actually have a question about your autonomous flight programs. What kind of near-term milestones should the audience be looking for as far as autonomous flight? I know you have a 2027 target, but maybe you could just review what we should be thinking about as far as autonomy.
Sure. Obviously, there's a lot of noise in the industry and there's a lot of back and forth with the certification authorities. You got obstacles like the pilots union. Obviously, they kind of they would fight everything. You know, as a reminder, there used to be, you know, go back 70 years, there were 5 people in the cockpit. Now we're down to 2 y ou know, you can reasonably get it down to one. kind of I'm not holding my breath on that one. It's. The idea is that there's a lot of incremental steps.
It's in our plan that we continue providing further automations of the pilot and the co-pilot activities in the aircraft. Those are marketable products, and you are providing additional safety, you're providing pilot workload reduction through those, as well as you replacing some antiquated product lines in the aircraft. That's our path. You will reach a point where you can say reasonably to the politicians and the pilot unions and all of that you really don't need the second guy in the airplane because he's sitting there twiddling his thumbs.
That's that kind of incremental way. It's the way we've always done things, especially in an industry where it's very conservative, and you have to convince a lot of people when you wanna make a big change. I think from our technology, we're gonna be ready in 2027.
You're gonna need changes, obviously, in the operational approvals of the aircraft to make that happen. There's a big push from the industry and that they want to see that, especially when you look at cargo operators of some of these large airplanes. They, you know, they carry the pilots and the cargo.
There's a lot of ways of getting there. We will get there.
Right.
We've done a lot of firsts in the industry, and we'll see. You don't have to be the first on this one, but we're well positioned to take advantage of that.
You're right. You're right. It's bound to happen one way or the other.
Back to some audience questions. What's the biggest risk to your story today? Where, and what keeps you awake at night as far as day-to-day operations or anything that you're particularly concerned about, maybe on a macro level even?
Of course, I mean, everybody talks about, and they've been talking about it for some time, especially as we're gonna come to another election year. Is about whether the economy is gonna tank or is not gonna tank. Our business has been pretty resilient to those kind of things.
Part of it is because the way that business and our strategy and our products have been devised is that, and the mix of products that we have across the various industries and platforms. If the business is good and people are buying new airplanes, then our OEM side of market grows and does better, and we expand the product lines in those OEM platforms. That's part of our strategy, and we've been doing it.
We just added another OEM contract. We have another one in the cards that we can't announce yet, because of the agreements with the customer. That's. When the, you know, if the economy gets bad and people are not buying new airplanes, they're gonna have to fix the old ones. We have a whole bunch of product lines that would do that. Today, I think our industry is in a good position because when you look at it, the OEMs keep assigning new contracts for new airplanes. From a commercial side is strong.
Then on the defense side, with all the wars and the ones that we think are coming and the ones that are already happening, there's a lot of spending going on into the defense sector. You know, we're seeing a lot of increased activities, and we'll be benefiting from that as well. From those standpoints, from a macro level, it's very good. From a micro level, it's a lot of things that keep you awake at night. It's everything that you don't know, and you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. I think those are good because you preempt the problems and you put in position mitigations before they actually occur.
Okay. We're just about out of time. Gentlemen, you have any closing remarks?
Just wanna thank everybody for attending.
Sure.
Obviously we're open for further one-on-one discussions. I think we're also gonna be in New York tomorrow, where we actually have some face-to-face meetings with EF Hutton conference tomorrow, kinda for a few hours.
All right.
Feel free to reach out to us. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Shahram, Mike, thank you for taking time for presenting at the Sidoti & Company conference, and hope everyone has a great day.
Thanks, John.
Thank you.
Bye everybody.