Okay, we'll go ahead and get started with the next presentation. First off, wanted to say thank you everyone for joining us today here in person, as well as those of you who are joining via the webcast. My name is Joe Noyons. I am with Three Part Advisors. Up next, we have one of our investor relations clients, Knowles Corporation. They are a specialty electronic component manufacturer traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol KN.
Over the last several years, management has taken several strategic actions to position the company to benefit from long-term trends within the MedTech, defense, as well as the industrial markets, and expect that to deliver nice top line growth, margin expansion, as well as strong cash flow generation. Presenting on behalf of the company today, we have the company's CEO, Jeff Niew.
Thank you. I would just like to tell a little bit about the story of Knowles, kind of, I would say, where we have been, where we are today, and where we are headed from here. First, for those of you who do not know, our 2025 revenue, a little under $600 million. We have about 5,000 people globally, a lot of engineering and engineering talent, an important part of what we do. We separate out into two segments.
We have our Precision Device segment, which is primarily focused around MedTech, defense, and industrial end markets, selling RF filters, ceramic capacitors, and film and electrolytic and mica capacitors, across all these different applications. I will go into a little bit more detail about this, but it has been a very good business for us, growing at a very rapid rate. Margins have been expanding within this category.
Our second segment is the MedTech & Specialty Audio business, primarily around selling microphones and speakers, very small ones, into the hearing health market. For those of you who are not familiar with that market, it has good trends for the longer term in terms of aging middle-class population in Western countries. An acknowledgment that hearing loss is problematic in terms of causes things like dementia if you do not have it taken care of and is driving growth within this business.
Overall, what I would sit there and say, we have a nice portfolio of products, which I will go into more detail about, in some great markets that have great secular growth trends, across all our end markets, and it is kind of showing up in our results. I think it is important first to state, why do we win? What is the secret sauce of why we are growing at the rate we are growing and expanding margins? A lot of people think of the, use the example of capacitors, as a commodity market. We are not in that portion of the market.
We do not participate in the commodity portion of that market at all. We start all of our products and our businesses, start with high-performance technology, unique capability that very few people in the world have. We then couple that with a strong customer and application intimacy. What that means is, if you look at our customer base, I do not know if we have this, we do not have that slide in here, Sarah, right? Oh, no, we do not. But it is in our investor deck of all the people we do business with, and it is a who is who of technology businesses of who we sell to.
So give you an example of some of our customers, the Abbotts, the Medtronics. In the hearing health market, you may not recognize the names, but they are the leaders within the business they are in. In the defense markets, it is the Raytheons, it is the L3s. But we have been doing business with these, for the most part, for better parts of decades, we have been doing business with. If they come to us and say, "I need a capacitor" and, "What do you got in your catalog?" We tend to say to them, "There are people out there who will sell you those type of capacitors."
We come to them and say, "I have a problem that needs to be solved," and we will go and design something custom for them. That goes across, again, all our businesses. Then we have designed a manufacturing process that allows us to take these high-mix, customized products into production at a very rapid rate. That is kind of the themes of why we win. It has really been a winning combination for us. So let me just describe that.
Now, what has this resulted in? I think for a long time, Knowles was misunderstood. For those of you who are not kind of familiar with the Knowles story, it was about three years ago, we sold the Consumer MEMS Microphone business, which was selling to the Samsungs, the Apples of the world for cell phones and earbuds. It was a very low gross margin business. It was commoditized. We sold that business. Before we sold that business, you really could not see the power of the rest of the portfolio.
So at our Investor Day, which we did a year ago May, we showed this is what the remaining businesses have done over that period of time. Now, you can kind of see, in this slide, we have grown at a compounded annual growth rate over a cycle through COVID, through a lot of things that happened from 2017 through 2025 at 8%, on a revenue basis. We have grown EBITDA at 11%. Now, what we sit there and say is, "This is what we have looked at in the past, done pretty well." We can see, and I have been very clear about this, we see our growth rate.
This was a combination, this 8%, of both organic and inorganic growth. Our organic growth in this was about 4%-5%. The rest came from acquisitions. We are now organically growing at a rate that is exceeding the 8% over the last two years, three years, we have been growing at a faster rate. Our EBITDA We have a lot of great things going on here in terms of the idea that we have a lot of leverage on our overhead, both in manufacturing and our operating expenses.
It is allowing us not only to grow EBITDA, but also expand the EBITDA margins over time. Okay. Just a little bit more also about this business. We generate a lot of cash. We are a very profitable business. We generate a lot of cash. If you think about our capital expenditures over that period, 2022-2025, we have been spending about 3% of revenue over the period on capital expenditures. That has been trending up.
This year, we'll be closer to the 5% range, which we've kind of said our range is 3%-5%, but that's because the demand has been so strong in our businesses, so we're expanding capacity in a number of different areas. The cash that we've generated, we've bought back a lot of shares over the last few years. We continue to make the commitment to the street that we will buy back at least stock-based comp. That's a minimum. We've been buying far in excess of that, of stock-based comp every single year. We've been paying down debt.
Our net leverage ratio was about 0.5x a turn at the end of Q2. If you look at historically what we've done, we'll probably be close to zero net debt sometime late this year or early next year. We used $263 million of the cash we generated to actually buy Cornell Dubilier, which is one of our capacitor businesses, which quite frankly, I think for you who know the story, has been a home run. It really is a story of 1+1=3 . It's our fastest growing product portfolio.
The gross margins have expanded dramatically since we've bought the business. We're doing very well with that business. So, a very good story on generating a lot of cash, but also what we do with the cash. If you look at the future, again, you see the past here on the left-hand side, 8% CAGR, including acquisitions, 11% in EBITDA growth. Again, that was including acquisitions. What you see going forward, what we kind of talked about at Investor Day is 8%-10%, including acquisitions.
If you look at over the last few quarters, last almost a year, we've actually been exceeding the 10% on an organic basis only. We have not done an acquisition since the Cornell acquisition. Our EBITDA growth of 10%-14%, we've actually been exceeding that as well pretty significantly, and our cash from operations has been trending towards the high end of the range that we laid out at our Investor Day. So, a lot of what we've kind of said, we wanted to do, we've done, and I'm actually very excited about the future of what the product portfolio, how it's going to perform.
So if you break it out now a little different way on the revenue growth, our precision device business is growing at 6%-8%. That's what we said our target. This year, it's going to grow north of 15% this year, based on the information we provided. Our hearing health business grows at 2%-4%. Those of you not familiar with it's still going to be in that 2%-4% range through COVID, through the 2008-2009 crisis, through the 2001 dot-com bubble. I have a long enough experience with this business. It always grows at 2%-4% at phenomenal margins.
The business gets more than 50% gross margins, more than 40% EBITDA margins, so very good grower. We expect to have 4% from acquisitions. We have not done one acquisition now in almost three years. I would say we are being super disciplined in what we do in terms of an acquisition. If I cannot articulate 1+1=3 and demonstrate that I can deliver on that and feel comfortable, I am not going to do an acquisition. I am not going to spend the shareholders' money on something that is not going to pay back, especially since we have such a great organic plan.
On the EBITDA, again, we said 10%-14%. I think we are going to be close to 20% EBITDA growth this year based on the numbers that we have provided through our earnings calls. How do we get it? I would say one comment that we have been pretty clear about, this year we will probably end up in the 24% EBITDA margins range, but we will probably exit the year north of 25%. We have been articulating a path now we see clearly over the next 36 months to 30% EBITDA margins. It is a combination of EBITDA drop through.
It is going to be very strong. Margin expansion through a combination of price with higher value products, factory productivity, and capacity utilization. We have a lot of leverage on our SG&A. I think it is very clear to us now that with what we are doing in the markets we are in, and I would make this comment, med, defense, industrial, we are not like an AI play, for sure. We may have some peripheral second-level AI business, but it is not a significant portion of our business. We are growing in markets that are generally not as cyclical.
Let us use the medical market. I talked about the hearing aid market, but we sell a lot, example, pacemakers and implantables. If the market turns south overall, people still need pacemakers, right? If market turns south, we sell a lot in imaging, or cancer treatments we sell a fair amount. These things all happen regardless of what the economy is doing. Same thing in defense. It is a big portion of our business. The future of defense looks very strong. I would sit there and say we are well-positioned for growth in that market.
Generally speaking, we are not that cyclical as some of the business could be with AI. A little bit about acquisitions. This is kind of what we have done. I think that was another thing that was kind of hiding. We did two big divestitures, this Vectron business, which is a commodity oscillator business, and then I mentioned the Consumer MEMS Microphone business. We divested from 2017- 2025, or it was actually 2023. We divested about $400 million of revenue, all low margin, not growing businesses.
We bought some smaller businesses, Integrated Microwave, an RF systems provider, DITF, another RF product, Compex in the ceramic capacitor business, and of course, Cornell was the bigger one at $263 million. That was film, electrolytic, and mica-type capacitors. All the acquisitions we have done have been very successful, and we are still hopeful we will do more acquisitions in this space. How I would describe it is some of it would be consolidation. If I found another ceramic or RF or similar products as Cornell, we could do that. That will not be so exciting from a TAM expansion, but there will be tons of synergy.
We could do extensions. If I think about what I would like to do, there is a lot of specialty things like resistors, inductors. There are all these different specialty components that sell in the exact same markets that we sell in. We're looking definitely in that space, as well as adjacencies. But again, we're not going to deviate too far off the reservation here in terms of what we would do. We want to take the formula that we have as a company of applying that unique technologies with customer intimacy and then customizing the product for scale.
We want to be able to make sure the model fits whatever we buy. Okay. Just capital allocation. We talked about organic investment already, 3%-5%. M&A, I think I've talked about. Share repurchase, we've already talked about. I'm not going to go into more detail about this. I think this kind of fits. I think the one thing people are starting to ask us is at getting close to zero net debt with the amount of cash we generate, well, what are you going to do with the cash a year from now or two years from now?
World-class problem to have. I think we'll be able to answer that. My goal, and I've said this on earnings calls, we're probably going to try to have an Investor Day in late Q1, Q2 next year. Another one. We'll update people about where we are with our core, but then also talk about our expansion opportunities to even grow faster going forward. Okay. So summary, I think I'm almost about 15 minutes in. We've made this big transformation.
I think for a long time the business was misunderstood, and I think we're getting more people to understand about what we're trying to accomplish with this business. It was being masked by the fact that we had some businesses, I would say, that were underperforming and didn't have great growth prospects, which we've disposed of. There's nothing left we're looking to dispose of anymore, so you're not going to see me wake up one day and go, "We're selling one of our businesses."
We like all the businesses that we're in, and the historical numbers that we show demonstrate, and 2026 will be another year of demonstrating that again. We differentiate through customization of our unique technologies. We've proven we know what we're doing when it comes to M&A, and we have a very strong balance sheet in order to be able to do a lot of things, to be able to create more value for shareholders going forward. With that said, I can open it up to questions, and I'll repeat the question once you ask the question.
My question is on the margin side. The long-term margin, there is a lot of optimism in the hearing health business, you mentioned great mid-single digit margins in the core consumer market. [audio distortion]
Yeah, and we report that. So, here is what I would say. We have been very clear on the hearing health side. At 50%+ gross margin, we do not see significant gross margin improvement. We may get a little leverage over overhead on our operating expenses that will expand margins. But you are right. That is not where the gross margin expansion is going to come from. It is going to come in the PD business. I think if you look at how we discuss these is we have fundamentally three product categories. We have the RF filters, which I think has some improvement in gross margin.
That is probably running in the mid-40s in terms of gross margin. We could probably see a path maybe getting that closer to 50% over time. In our ceramic capacitor business, also in the mid-40s, and we see that also potentially expanding 200 basis points, 300 basis points through price absorption, right, leverage on overhead, maybe getting closer to 50%. I think the big opportunity is in the Cornell business, and we have been very clear about that.
When we bought the Cornell business, the gross margin in that business was in 27% range. It is now in the mid-30s, and we see the path that over time, I am not going to commit to that is going to happen in 12 months, it is probably going to be able to expand to be more like the rest of the precision device business in that 45%- 50% over the long term, and that is through a combination of new products, pricing, absorption on overhead, value creation.
It is taking our business model, what we do in the rest of our businesses, and applying it to that business. I am not going to say, Cornell was a great business. They have an incredible brand in the marketplace. But it was a family-run business. That is the reality, and the priority was not putting professional thought process into how you manage this business, and it is another component business in these same markets that had unique capabilities. When we bought the business, we told the Street we probably could get $3 million- $4 million worth of price increases in a relatively short order.
And maybe lose 10% of the business. We ended up getting closer to eight in the first year with no loss of business. That kind of tells you the value proposition that business had, and now we are making and improving. So you are right. It's going to all come from the PD business, primarily, though, Cornell. Did I answer your question? Other questions? The question was, we're growing a lot faster than we've talked on our Investor Day. Is that sustainable?
What's going on there? I would say first, the hearing health business is growing right in the range that we expect, at 2%-4%. I have discussed on the earnings calls, Investor Day, there may be some opportunities for us to grow that segment faster in a number of years. First would be is we do see some potential content gains within the hearing health market, and I'm not talking about a 5% content gain per device. It could be significant. That probably would start showing up in the 2028 timeframe, so that could make that business grow faster.
Secondly, for those of you who are familiar with the story, we have some core capabilities within that business in terms of micro-molding, micro-stamping, and coil winding, micro coil winding, that come out of that business. We're starting to apply that to other medical applications. If you saw, there was a recent announcement with a company called Elucent that we just did. We just signed a contract with them to provide micro-molding capability. This would be at very similar margins that we make in our hearing health market.
We do see a path to grow that business faster going forward. But in the short term, the majority of the faster growth has been coming from the PD business. What I would say this is, we wanted to make sure we put a number out there, at that 6%-8% organic growth that was achievable, and maybe we're a little bit conservative, but I see a lot of sustainability in what we're doing. If I divide it up, defense, I don't see that slowing down.
In fact, I would argue within the PD business, there's a potential that our defense business within PD is going to accelerate over the next 36 months, not slow down. Medical, I think the growth rate we've seen in medical is very sustainable. I don't believe it's going to accelerate, at least not short term, without some new products and things that we're working on, which we'll talk about at the Investor Day. But I think that's very sustainable.
The one I would sit there and say, and I've been pretty clear, industrial has been growing at a rapid rate. I would sit there and say that's probably over a cycle is not going to continue to grow at the rate that we've seen. But the numbers we put out there of that 6%-8% organic growth from the PD business, in my opinion, is very sustainable over time. Other questions? Sure. I would say the vast majority-- The question was, for military, what are the applications? We sell from all our products, from the Cornell-type products, the ceramic capacitors, and RF, we sell to the military. But the vast majority of our military business, I would say well over 50%, comes from RF filters.
Our RF filters are like 98% defense, right? That is about, this year, about an $85 million business, which is about 98% defense. I would say that the applications that we are in are all around electronic warfare, whether it be radar, communications, radar jamming, identification of targets. It runs across both the platforms themselves, I would say for the lack of a better word, the launchers, but also across the missiles as well. I think what we kind of see is that there are three things that are going to drive growth to accelerate over the next 36 months.
One is the White House is proposing a significant increase in defense spending for next year. I do not know if it is going to get approved at the $1.5 trillion that is being approved, but let us say it is $1.2 trillion. That is still like a 25% increase over the previous year. That is going to take some time to filter down to the primes and then to us. We are not a prime. We sell to the primes. That is number one. Number two is there is a clear need to replenish munitions.
We will participate in that, depending on the program. Then the third driver of growth that could accelerate is the allies of the United States are being encouraged to increase defense spending as a percentage of GDP. In the short term, and when I use short term in defense, that means 5- 10 years, they do not have the infrastructure in order to go spend defense. Again, I am not saying anything about specifically this program, but if you look at the list of countries that want to buy Patriot missiles and Patriot missile launchers, right?
It is as long as your arm in the allies that want to buy these. There is nobody else in the world capable of making these except for the U.S. contractors. They are going to have to come to the U.S. contractors where we have content. That is how I can see that the defense business is going to grow. But we are in a prime position. We are not in, I would use a better word, like soldiers on the ground type applications. We are in where people are spending money from defense systems to missiles to drones. We are in all these applications.
So it looks pretty positive for us in that space. Yes? The question is, do we do our own manufacturing or does someone else do? We do 100% of our own manufacturing. So our footprint is pretty broad. We have three facilities in Asia, where I would say we do more higher labor content product. Then we have, just make sure I got this right, one, two, three, five facilities in North America that primarily do, I would say, medical and defense, although they do some industrial. We have a very broad footprint.
We are set up a little differently than I think traditionally, although we have different product categories. My manufacturing team reports directly to me, not to the business units. So we are run a little bit more like a semiconductor business that the manufacturing is centralized, and that allows us, when we have a new product come in or a new idea or something we want to do, to say, "Well, what is the best location to do the manufacturing?" Whether it needs high labor content, whether it needs automation.
We have all these capabilities in-house in order to do a lot of things. We are probably, considering our size, much more vertically integrated than you would even believe. To give you an example, I talked about this, in our hearing health business, we mold our own plastics. We have our own plastics operation. We stamp metal parts that go into our products. We are vertically integrated. They are very small parts that have to be stamped. Very few people in the world capable of doing that. We view that as a big differentiator, the fact that we control all our manufacturing.
Other questions? Yes. It is interesting. So what is the competitive landscape for our businesses? In the MSA business, we have one competitor who has been the same competitor, roughly the same share for the last 30 years. Who is that? The name of the company is called Sonion, S-O-N-I-O-N. They are based in Denmark, and that is the one competitor for 30 years. In the PD business, it is very hard for me to identify a specific competitor. A lot of people want to throw out a name like Vishay, but we do not really compete on a day-to-day basis with Vishay.
Their gross margins are of an order of magnitude of half of what our gross margins are. We will sense people to Vishay when they want a commoditized capacitor and, for the most part, Vishay does not want to do these small customized things either. They are set up to do billions of units, right? I would sit there and say, if I gave you some of the names, just like if you heard of Sonion, you probably have not heard of them, I can give you the names in RF, the names in ceramic capacitors, and you will never heard of any of these people. A lot of them are small divisions of bigger companies or family-run businesses. That is what they are.
Not a lot of competition, that is what I would sit there and say. Other questions? Yes, the question is: do you go to market direct or through distributors? The answer to that question is yes and yes. We do have a large direct sales team, which is supplemented by a large applications team that calls on the customers directly. Depending on the market, let us use the example, in our RF business, RF is super unique. It is a very unique design process.
We have a separate sales team that calls specifically on the defense market, separate from the capacitor business and applications team, but we also use distributors. I think what is really valuable for us is that when we find an application at the OEMs that we have a unique offering, we will typically try to transform that offering into a standard product to solve an application problem and then hand it to the distributors to say, "You go after the small customers." If you think about it, I would say, I do not have the exact number, we have probably shipped to about 2,000 customers direct.
I know, because we have our point of sale information from the distributors, we probably ship to another 35,000 customers indirectly. This is built over, just to be clear, this is not something that happened overnight. This is the development of years and years of product development and for specific applications, and then we have all these products in the end market. By the way, there's a lot of special, I'll use RF as example. If you ever heard of a company called RFMW, they're like a RF distributor. We work a lot with them in our RF products, right?
Because there's a lot of startups now in the defense market that are working on new applications. They help service those markets for us, the smaller customers. We have both. Other questions? Got about 5 minutes left. Anything else? Sure.
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That's an interesting question. How long have I been the CEO? Just worth a little bit of history. I joined the company in 2000 when it was sold by the Knowles family to private equity. I saw it through, and I did not run the company at that point. I ran that Consumer MEMS Microphone business, was a startup at that point. We had zero revenue. In 2005, we sold the business to Dover. That Consumer MEMS Microphone business went from zero to like $300 million over that period of time. When we sold to Dover, the CEO of Knowles retired, and Dover asked me to stay on to run the business.
I ran that business then for Dover from 2005- 2010, and Dover actually made me a portfolio manager, so I was now running those capacitor businesses. I was running a whole bunch of different businesses for Dover. By 2014, Dover said, "We don't want to own these businesses anymore," and they spun us out as our own public company. I think this is just worth two seconds worth of history. When we went out, and this is very honest, Goldman Sachs took us out as a public company, and they positioned us as a semiconductor company.
We are not a semiconductor company, and I had to spend the next three, four years trying to get out from under the idea that we were a semiconductor company. By 2018, we kind of said to ourselves, "We got to change the portfolio. Ultimately, we have to be out of these commodity businesses." It took probably a little longer than I would've liked. COVID happened. There was a lot of things that happened. We did a few acquisitions. We got growth going in the capacitor business.
We love the hearing health business. I sit there and say, yeah, I've been the CEO since 2006, but I've seen now multiple owner structures, multiple challenges, and honestly, I'm pretty excited about the next three to four years where we're headed. I think we really got a great portfolio of products, and hopefully we can, again, supplement that with more acquisitions. So it's just a brief story. Anything else? three minutes. Yeah. If you look at what we sold the MEMS business for, it was a declining revenue. Largest customer was Apple. Had gross margins in the low 20s.
Not a super desirable business, but it was generating a fair amount of our earnings. Our revenue, by the way, if we just saw it back to 2018, it was probably 50% of our revenue. I couldn't reduce the corporate overhead as much as I would've had to in order to support that. We kind of said, "We got to get the PD business growing at a faster rate. We got to do some acquisitions." When we did the Cornell acquisition, we kind of immediately announced at that point that we were going to sell the CMM business. That was kind of the genesis. Hard to do this as a public company. That's one thing I've learned out of this whole process. Hard to do this as a public company. Any other questions?