Okay, thank you, and welcome everybody to the Kimball presentation session of our conference today. Kimball is a highly selective contract manufacturer, specializes in higher spec wins and content with their customers, and not purely scale, high volume type applications. They have long-term contracts and capacity investment and actual capacity, so growth visibility is nicely enabled, and it's a neat small cap story. And CFO Jana Croom and Andy Regrut in IR have joined us today. So we'll turn it over to Jana to walk through her slides. Thanks.
Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. We're very excited to be here with you today to tell you about Kimball Electronics. So Andy requires me to say this: there will be forward-looking statements in this presentation, and I'm sure you all know the drill. So let me tell you a little bit about Kimball Electronics. We are listed on the NASDAQ under ticker KE. We are a global and multifaceted electronics manufacturing services provider. We specialize in three verticals: automotive, medical, and industrial. You know, we have a diversified portfolio of products, and as Chris indicated, our program life cycles are quite long, and we'll talk about that more in a moment. We love the fact that we focus on high levels of complexity, quality, reliability, and durability.
What that means is that the products that we produce tend not to commoditize the way other electronic manufacturing, contract services might. We have long customer relationships. As you'll see, many of our customers we've been doing business with for 20 years or more, and we pride ourselves on staying with our customers, growing as they grow, and then also expanding into new profitable relationships. We also have an impressive track record of revenue and earnings growth. Despite some of the challenges that we've recently experienced as the whole EMS industry has, we're quite proud of the profitability that we've delivered to our investors. What does Kimball do? We provide end-to-end solutions and support to our customers. Everything from design and development, all the way to end-of-life support.
We're there with our customers along the way, supporting them and producing the products that make life better for everyone. We have a rich history of growth and global expansion. We started off in southern Indiana, in Jasper, in 1950, and over the years, Kimball has expanded to multiple regions of the world, including Europe and Asia, with a strong North American footprint. And we'll talk a little bit about our latest three expansions that we did, one in each region of the world over the last 18 months. So here's our footprint. Again, Jasper, Indiana. Our flagship is in Mexico. That's due to nearshoring, and as you can see represented, it is our largest facility in terms of square footage. And then we have sites basically everywhere else in the world, so... Revenue and EPS growth.
So our five-year CAGR of growth is 11%. What we tell our investors is we endeavor to give low digit, low double-digit, revenue and EPS growth over time. Fiscal 2023 was a highlight because as you can see, our revenue grew 35%, and we had really great adjusted operating income margins, and EPS profitability. To note, and we actually just got the latest MMI ratings, hot off the press, and we moved from number 20 to number 19, which we're also very, very excited about. So we're growing, our customers are growing, and it's showing up in the rankings. As I mentioned, our portfolio is focused on three end markets: automotive, medical, and industrial.
I'll spend time talking about each later in the presentation, but as you'll note in the automotive market, our ranking is eight, in medical, seven, and in industrial, 19. So some people ask, "You know, your verticals tend to be a little bit boring. Why did you choose these, and why should we be excited about them and what it represents in terms of growth into the future for Kimball?" Well, can we talk about the fact that your car is no longer just a car? Your car is basically a computer on wheels, and one of the things that Kimball has done exceptionally well is participate in particularly two areas of the vehicle-... that are critical to saving your life and providing an enjoyable driving experience, and that's steering and braking.
Right, so 70% of our automotive business is electronic power steering and braking, and just think about the advances that have come in the last decade in terms of how you steer the car. Automatic lane departure features, self-parking capabilities, all of these things are generated out of the steering column, and so what you've experienced is electrification in terms of the increase of capabilities of what your car can do. Similarly, next generation braking is also a growth driver. It's not just specifically related to EVs, but certainly there's an EV component. One of the things that EV cars need to do well, and we've seen a lot of this in the news, is have the ability to take the inertia from braking and store it back to the battery for extended battery life and driving capability. We love these programs for a couple of reasons.
The first is very, very high quality and stringent ISO requirements, meaning not everybody can do this, and actually, several of our competitors choose not to participate in the steering and braking space. This makes the business sticky, as programs are frequently single-sourced, and if they are dual-sourced, Kimball can actually provide sourcing through multiple locations that we've got. As you've seen, we have multiple locations in Europe, North America, and Asia. Programs are typically 8-10 years in length, and so as Chris alluded to, we've got long line of sight in terms of the volume and the profitability and revenue that we'll get out of these programs. In medical, supporting the continuum of care, we do this through our Kimball Medical Solutions program. You know, and one of the things that we love about medical is really favorable demographics.
I used to say that, you know, as a country, we're just getting older and fatter. Now, thanks to some GLP-1 drugs, we're only getting older, but we participate in things that allow people to have a higher quality of life as they age. The great thing is, globally, what you're seeing is higher access and affordability to quality care. Products that we support include respiratory care, surgical systems, in vitro patient monitoring, drug delivery, including cold chain capability, and we focus on higher level assembly, which has been a really nice area of growth, meaning we don't want to just do the printed circuit board assembly or think of it as the motherboard of the device. We actually wanna manufacture the entire device, soup to nuts, for our customers.
And then industrial, which we refer to internally as green and clean, and there are a few portions of this that are interesting. The first is climate control and smart meter management for energy. The second is industrial, so think HVAC climate control efficiency, and this is not just in the residential space, but also in the commercial and industrial space. In that respect, as we've expanded globally, we are our own customer, and that our industrial controls for HVAC are in our facilities as well. Another is charging stations. So for us, charging stations is not in the automotive vertical, it's in the industrial vertical. And so just as we participate in braking and steering, although engine-agnostic, meaning it doesn't matter if it's internal combustion, hybrid, or EV.
In our industrial vertical, we do support superchargers and charging stations so that you can power those vehicles. Then lastly, factory automation. So as contract manufacturers are looking to get better about optical inspection, Lean Six Sigma, improved automation, being able to provide some of the equipment that supports that is also an area that we serve. People often ask our CEO what is the guide to long-term success? And it's really rooted in our mission, vision, and purpose, and that's creating quality for life. Our guiding principles tell us that our customers are business, our people are the company, the environment is our home, and near and dear to me as CFO, profits are the ultimate measure of how efficiently and effectively we live out our guiding principles every day. This is Rick's slide.
He's not here with us today, but I'm proud to share these metrics with you. Our unique culture is a differentiator. To note, 50% of our executive team is female, which is practically unheard of in tech and manufacturing. 33% of our managers are female, 14% of our executive team is racially diverse, and we have a global composite of folks around the world that help us be the best version of ourselves, and we're really proud of that. One thing that I'll note that is also a unique differentiator, we do not have expats run our facilities globally. Every single GM that runs our global facility is a citizen of the country that we operate in, and that's important. Why Kimball wins? I love this slide. Tight, integrated system around the world.
Kimball runs on a single instance of SAP, and it was really interesting during the global pandemic when we had supply service, supply chain challenges. We would have customers come to us, and we would be on Zoom calls with them, and they would say: "Why does Kimball know more about where our product is around the world than we do?" It's 'cause we have a single instance of SAP. I know exactly where all of my inventory is at any given time. And one of the parts, the components of our strong partnership is that, you know, we will move it and do what our customers want in order to service them in the best way. That makes our relationship sticky, it ensures our profitability, and it tends to lead to longer-term customer relationships. We have a global bonus plan.
One of the reasons that we're able to do this is, while we believe in healthy competition within our facilities, we don't want a structure in place that creates so much competition that it becomes anti-customer, and so these things are important, and region-to-region supply, supply chain. So we're really, really proud of this. 77% of our customers are-- we've had relationships with for over 10 years. We have award-winning support. We've won a number of customer service excellence awards over the years, and actually, there's more about this on our website. We recently published our 2023 Guiding Principles report. It's available on our corporate website. We don't print it because it's an ESG report. I'm sure you all understand that, but take a look. Morningstar Sustainalytics re-rated Kimball number one for ESG risk among electronics manufacturers.
We're incredibly proud of that. And ISI places us in the top 10% of the industry. Now, let's talk about capital allocation. Most of our capital allocation is in CapEx and share repurchase. So how are we growing the business organically, and how are we returning value to shareholders? We announced on our earnings call yesterday that we are resuming our share repurchase program and plan to continue returning value to share owners in that way. The other half of this chart is our program lifecycle. As you can see, as Chris alluded to at the very beginning, we have long-lived programs, 8-10 years in place with our customers.
And we have a strong portfolio mix, where we're constantly end-of-lifing programs, launching new programs, that ensures that consistent profitability for our share owners, and it's very, very thoughtfully done, considering our funnel of new business. We wanna provide you an update to our strategic direction. Yesterday, we announced that we are divesting our Automation, Test and Measurement business. That business represents roughly 3% of Kimball's revenue globally, and we've done that because we want to increase our focus and support on our core EMS business. We're realigning our Medical Solutions business, which includes cold chain capabilities, drug delivery, and plastic molding into our EMS Medical vertical. And we're also doing a fair amount of restructuring and right-sizing, controlling what we can control as it relates to end market softness that we're experiencing.
The operating environment has been challenged for EMS this year. We expect macro headwinds to persist into 2025. These macro headwinds are driven by a number of factors, including global economic challenges and also supply chain, as our customers are sitting on a fair amount of inventory that they need to work through the channels. During this period of end market softness, we're proactively aligning our cost structure, we're maintaining competitiveness and stabilizing our operating income margins, and focusing on working capital improvements. Of note, our inventory is down over $90 million from peak, generating a fair amount of cash from operations and working capital improvements, and we're really proud of that.
We're continuing to make strategic investments in the long-term growth opportunities, supported by a robust funnel of new business that will materialize in the next 18-24 months, and we're deploying a capital allocation strategy that balances that growth that we see in the future, managing long-term customer relationships, and returning the value to our share owners via share repurchase program. We updated our guidance for fiscal 2024, reiterating our adjusted operating income range of 4.2%-4.6% of net sales. We updated our net sales that we now expect to decline 4%-6%, a result of the global economic environment that I just referenced. Additionally, we updated guidance for CapEx, reducing it from our previous estimate down to $55 million-$60 million.
Just tightening up, timing of CapEx spend, maintaining our, maintenance CapEx program, but just being good fiduciaries of, of the way we're managing our balance sheet. We expect to continue to streamline our company, with an additional $1 million-$2 million of restructuring charges over the remainder of the calendar year. If you have any additional questions, I'm happy to take those now in, in whatever way Oppenheimer deems appropriate, in partnership with Andy Regrut, our Vice President of IR. Oh, Chris, you're on mute.
Thank you, Jana. Appreciate that. So, welcome, everyone, and I will look at the link where people can submit questions. Happy to work those in. In the meantime, I'm gonna go ahead with some questions. Jana, where do you feel you are in the cycle? I know you referenced it'll persist into 2025. You also talked about, you know, significant pipeline for growth over the next 24 months. So I guess there's a crossover point with customers normalizing inventory. We've seen several markets make substantial progress by now against lead time corrections and other instances where, you know, it's still churning a bit. So, you know, curious how you see growth reemergence materializing.
Yeah, that's a great question, Chris, and it's really the question: When do we see a return to that normal, steady state, you know, low double-digit revenue growth? We expect that the headwinds that we've seen are gonna persist into FY 2025 for two reasons. First, we announced AT&M is going to be held for sale, and so as we, divest that portion of our business, you're gonna see just a natural revenue decline because it's no longer with us. What we're looking for is flattening of our existing customer base, because what I can tell you is the funnel of new business and new business wins for Kimball is quite strong.
You know, we weren't surprised at all to see that we had moved up the chain in terms of MMI rankings, because we've had some really, really great wins, some strong product launches, and some new wins that we'll actually be announcing on our Q4 call. So it's not the funnel of new business which sounds strange. It's really the underlying base business, where we have a program that's been running for five years at, you know, 10,000 units a month, and now it's running at eight as they're working through inventory challenges.
One of the things that I track personally is as our customers are reporting their queues, I pop it open, and I, I go to their balance sheet disclosures, and I look at the number of days of inventory that they have on hand, and I track the inventory days movement of our customers, and we're starting to see their days come down. Not as much as I would like, but we are starting to see some movement. But it, it's... You know, and, and part of the reason we said it openly on the call is it's likely to persist through FY 2025.
And then after that, we would expect a return to normal, although, in this global economic environment, where you've got multiple wars, a fairly significant election in the United States coming up in the fall, just a really interesting geopolitical environment, I think we're all a bit in wait-and-see mode.
Okay. Things seem to be moving, you know, independently and naturally in the U.S. industrial economy. So, we'll have time to evaluate that disclaimer later on, as time rolls ahead. What's the impact of, in automotive, less than expected or hoped for by policymakers' pace of consumer EV adoption?
Yeah, you know, one of the decisions that Kimball made, which was the right decision, was to remain engine agnostic. And so there were a lot of people who ran to EVs because they were hot and sexy, and we decided that we wanted to remain engine agnostic. And so whether it's internal combustion, hybrid, or EV, we are able to serve. That turned out to be the right decision. R&D and technology's really gotta catch up in the EV space because as much as, you know, the EV space is exciting from an environmental standpoint, listen, if your truck can't tow your boat in Middle America, or it can't tow your trailer because the battery won't support it, it's not attractive. And being that we're headquartered in Jasper, Indiana, that doesn't surprise us. We know that, right? Your vehicle is utility....
It's got to be able to service you well. What I know from conversations with our tier one customers and the OEMs that we serve, is that they are actively investing and improving that in their EV fleet, and I would expect those, those improvements to come into the future.
Okay, so reading into that comment, your applications in electronic braking and electronic steering, the work you do there is essentially drive train fungible?
Yes, it does not matter. It doesn't.
Okay. Okay, great. And, you know, I think part of your revenue comparison profile right now, you did have a med customer with a FDA recall. I think that was about a $100 million run rate. You know, I've spoken with you about that. That's obviously an external factor. But you made some good points about it. I think one was, you know, time will tell, but that could come back online. And second, it was very much an isolated instance, in your long history. So, you know, I think it's important to consider that there's not an ever-present risk that looms over your shoulders of large program, you know, out of the blue risk.
Correct, and thank you for bringing that up, Chris. Yes, we have a large customer who, due to an FDA recall, we pulled $100 million of revenue out of FY 2024. So interesting to note, if we had had that $100 million of revenue in, we actually would have grown in FY 2024, 1% versus our current forecast. It was unfortunate. Kimball was not party to the recall, but there was some impact to us. We stand ready to serve that customer, but we have not placed any of that revenue back into our forecast, as we're waiting for them to tell us how to proceed. And so it was unprecedented, it was unfortunate.
The bright spot, though, is in spite of the $100 million of revenue that we pulled out of our forecast for medical, we still assume that our medical vertical would only decline $50 million, which tells you the strength of all of the other business and new products that we were bringing on in the medical space. And so very, very, very excited about medical and the proliferation of opportunities for Kimball.
Yeah, that's a good, you know, pulling the, the recall out of organic, that was a pretty substantial medical growth profile.
Yes. Yes-
Yeah
A bsolutely.
In medical, component manufacturers and subsystem manufacturers are benefiting as OEMs move more to design and schematics and assembly. It seems like you're probably in that, you know, final assembly area. So I don't know that the industry trend of outsourcing components and subsystems has any impact on you. I suspect you source some of those components and subsystems, but maybe you could clarify a couple of those assumptions.
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because I get asked a lot about M&A versus organic growth, and what I've said is, you know, some of the M&A that I love the most is one of our customers, because we're a tier one supplier in the medical space and industrial space. We're a tier two supplier in automotive. When our customer comes to us and says, "You know, we really want to focus on R&D intellectual property, we don't actually want to make this device anymore. Can you make it for us?" And we take all of the manufacturing for the higher level and final assembly of those products. That is a really great and attractive area of growth for us. And it's exciting.
And so it allows us stickier business with our customers, and that is an absolute area of growth for us in the medical space.
Okay.
We don't want to just do the printed circuit board assembly. We want to do the whole thing, soup to nuts.
Okay, so that a component and sub-assembly outsourcing translates to a trend of final assembly share shift from the IP owner to you?
Yes, absolutely. It is a large component of our growth strategy in the medical space.
Great. And then a couple on automotive. One, curious about the geographic split of your auto, and two, you know, what is growth... Are there growth drivers besides auto production for you, or is it pretty much production controls has exclusive control over the revenue trajectory for automotive?
Yeah, those are two great questions. So we serve automotive in every region of the world. One of the things that I will point out, because it's important, is we are an in-region strategy, meaning what we produce in North America stays in North America, what we produce in Europe stays in Europe, what we produce in Asia stays in Asia, except for Thailand, which is an export back to the States. So China is for China. And so we produce autos in every region of the world. What we've said publicly is the Chinese auto market has been a really great area of growth for us over the years, as well as North America. Europe is a little soft right now, but there are some indications that it's recovering.
In terms of your second question, which just escaped my mind. So, I, I apologize, Chris, I'm gonna need you to-
Yeah, no problem. No problem, Jana. I was just wondering if, you know, production dictates your growth?
Oh, yeah
Up or down, or if there's-
Yeah
A different lever or angle?
Yes. So is there a correlation to production? Yes, but what has fueled our growth more than anything has been the increased content in the specific areas that we serve. So, for example, going from braking mechanisms on each axle of your car to each wheel of your car for increased efficiency in braking in the ICE space, and increased capabilities to store power, battery power in the EV space, and that proliferation of R&D and IP that's, you know, coming that we're able to participate in. ADAS is really exciting in terms of the capabilities and offerings that are there, and also steering, and I talked about that earlier. You know, your car isn't a car anymore. For those of us who are, you know, children of the '70s and '80s, Knight Rider, right? You're actually driving KITT.
Your car talks to you. It does all sorts of of things that we never thought it could. It's not just a car. It's a computer on wheels.
So, sticking with steering there, what's the penetration rate of the level of electronic steering that your contracts concentrate on and kind of the pace of penetration there?
I wanna make sure I understand your question. Penetration rate in terms of-
Well, well,
Adoption of-
Yeah, right. So, steering applications and electrification isn't uniform across all passenger- vehicle platforms. So I think-
Yeah
I think and hope I'm speaking right to what you said, how you generally described the outgrowth versus production opportunity, but trying to land it a little more tangibly in the context of the steering technologies.
Yeah, so nameplate matters in terms of, of adoption, and that matters for a few reasons. It matters in terms of adoption and electrification and where you are in the curve, in terms of, you know, what the vehicle is gonna be able to do, but it also matters in terms of volume, right? So, for example, if you're gonna do business with Ford as an OEM and customer, you wanna make sure that you're on, you know, those high runner, F-150 SUVs that are, are highly in demand because those are gonna have the adoption, right? Because consumers are gonna expect it, and you know that they're high volume, versus, you know, perhaps some other vehicles that, that don't have quite the same adoption.
One of the things that Kimball has also done well is making sure that we're not just participating in the right portions of the vehicle, but the right vehicle nameplates for that penetration and adoption.
Great. And I think we're at time. I did not see any questions in the queue. I apologize for not prompting verbally, like I indicated I would. But if anyone's on the line that wants to follow up, Jana and Andy certainly are available direct, and we're happy to help facilitate any connections or follow-ups, and I'm on email all day, tomorrow, too. Thanks, Jana. Good luck in the meetings today. Appreciate your time.
Thank you for your time, Chris. We really appreciate it.