Well, thank you everyone for joining us for this fireside chat with the CEO of Karman, Jon Rambeau. Karman is actually one of my favorite ways to play this early stages of a defense tech cycle. They are a key merchant supplier to almost all of the key missile space, unmanned systems, hypersonics programs out there. Super excited to have Jon here. Jon, I think just to start for people that might be newer to the story, can you give us a high level overview of Karman? What you guys do, where you sit in the value chain, and how the business has evolved over time.
Sure. Thank you. You know, Karman really is unique in where the company sits in the Space & Defense value chain. We're a purpose-built company. We have a presence in high growth parts of both the defense and space market. You know, the thesis of the company was to target these high growth areas. We have, in most cases, put together smaller businesses that had deep history in the industry. In some cases, decades long relationships with our customers. We operate exclusively at that second layer of the supply chain as a merchant supplier to both the traditional businesses as well as the new entrants in Space & Defense. We have representation across over 130 programs and over 80 prime level customers. We support virtually all of the primes in Space & Defense.
The company is, you know, been a high growth business. We've been growing organically double digits annually, you know, north of 20%. Also we're looking at about 10% a year of inorganic growth on average through a series of generally small bolt-on acquisitions that continue to follow on in the end markets that we support. Very excited to be a part of the company, and I think, you know, we are really unique in the sense when we think about competition, it's not really other companies that we're competing with to fill the same role.
It's more the primes making the decision, do they wanna buy the piece parts and integrate themselves, vertically integrate, or do they wanna come to a company like Karman who can take on the investment, take on the risk, do the end-to-end, you know, requirements all the way through full rate production. We can do all of those things for those customers, and that's really where we've been able to differentiate and add value.
Awesome. Well, Jon, you recently stepped into the CEO role in Q1, after a long tenure at multiple defense primes such as Lockheed and L3Harris. What specifically attracted you to Karman as an opportunity at this point in your career?
Yeah, you know, I wasn't expecting this, to be honest. 30 years at two very successful large defense companies. You know, at the same time, I got this call, it's before the holidays, it was about this company that I had not heard much about. I knew of Karman, I, you know, asked for some information just to at least take a look at it. Over the course of several days, I just kept coming back and picking up that package and looking at it again and again and flipping through it. I thought to myself, "You know, I've been in this business for three decades. I've never seen anything quite like this." I decided to learn a little bit more. Got to meet David Stinnett, the Chairman of our Board, who actually put the company together.
Got to meet some other members of the Board, talk a little bit more about the vision. I thought there's really an opportunity to be a part of something different and special here that hasn't been done this way before. That's why I decided to make the jump. It's been a really rewarding experience so far.
Well, kinda to piggyback off of one of the points you made, a question I often hear from investors is like, Why don't your customers bring more of this capability in-house? From like your experience.
you were on that other side of the table, what drives the decision to partner with a company like Karman instead?
Yeah. As a prime, you know, I've considered this. As a prime, what you really wanna have is you wanna have control, you wanna have surety of supply, you wanna have no risk, right? When you're entering into a large, complex development or production program in defense, it's all about risk and it's about schedule, it's about performance. You'd love to have everything under your control all the time. The reality is you can't. You can't afford the investment in the infrastructure or the intellectual property to put together a complete, complex defense system all on your own. You have to partner. You know, I think the value proposition here for Karman is to say, we can offload some of that risk. We can offload certainly a lot of the investment.
We are willing to invest to build capacity to support our customers, we can do that while still providing them the surety of supply, the delivery, the quality, and the competitive pricing that allows them to fit within their budget. It gives them that surety that they were looking for without having to do it all themselves. That's really the value prop.
Okay. Well, timing was great for this fireside chat. Yesterday, you guys reported very strong results exceeding consensus expectations, top and bottom line, raised the full year guidance. Might be helpful just to kind of get a sense of summarizing the results or any specific drivers that you guys want to point out.
Yeah, sure. We had record results across the board. I mean, you know, we were up over 50% year-over-year. Some of that was organic, some inorganic growth. You know, EBITDA up about the same amount, high 40%s. In terms of the, you know, top line and the bottom line performance, it was strong. All of our end markets grew double digits year-over-year. The strongest growth that we had was in Space & Launch. 29% and change, so almost 30% growth year-over-year. All of our end markets grew. We saw just a little bit of pullback in hypersonics.
I think what's happening there, as you think about hypersonics and tactical missiles, there is so much happening right now with, you know, the depletion of the stockpiles, the need to replenish those traditional munitions, and I think there's probably gonna be some decision about how much money's gonna go to replenishment versus how much goes to next-gen munitions. I think what's happening this quarter is a little bit of just taking a breath as the customers decide. Okay, how is that going to move forward? You know, how are we going to allocate the resources that we have? Are we going to see this big budget, this $1.5 trillion budget next year? Generally across all of our end markets, we saw strong performance.
I think the missiles and munitions in particular will pick up quite a bit towards the back end of the year. As those decisions get finalized. It's worth noting we did also announce that we had received since last week. We had our year-end call a little over 30 days ago. In that time, we were able to secure four written, call it contingent demand commitments for munitions production, Space & Launch capability. We are starting to see now a lot of the talk turn into specific numbers on specific programs over specific time frames. I think the numbers that we're seeing are generally more of a floor. There's upside from there depending on how much momentum each of the primes is able to build with these platforms.
I think something that's really unique about the Karman story is how exposed you are to these key programs. I think you guys highlight you're working with 80 different customers, 130 different programs. These are some of the most important defense programs we're seeing and using. Maybe just like you're exposed to several of these fastest growing defense markets, such as missiles, space, drones, and now submarines. Can you walk us through what you're seeing across each of these today? If there's any kind of key programs investors should be keeping an eye on driving the business?
Yeah, you know, I guess maybe start with maritime defense. That's an interesting one. You know, the work that we're doing there is principally supporting Virginia, Columbia, and Seawolf class submarines. We are seeing growth year-over-year, substantial growth in terms of the budget. That will drive, I think, an increased pace of production. We are building a new facility down in Gulfport, Mississippi, to support expansion of that business. I think there will be some inherent limitations on how much faster submarines can go through the shipyards. At the same time, over the last three, four years, we supported in my prior role the undersea community. For the major subsystems on the submarines, the shipyards are saying as much as you can, as fast as you can. If you can do it, we're going to order it. We're going to buy it.
We're going to pay for it. We'll put it somewhere. They are continuing to take the capability as fast as they can get it. I think we'll continue to see an increase of the pace there. There's going to be some limitation based on how fast the submarines can be produced. If you look at the tactical missiles, I think we'll start to get a much better idea at the end of this year as those framework agreements start to turn into prime level contracts. Those are expected to be multi-year contracts up to seven years. We fully anticipate we're going to get the same kind of commitments from our customers.
Those contingent supply agreements that we're seeing right now, I think they'll start to turn into contracts as early as the fourth quarter this year, which would give us some real lift as we go into 2027. Hypersonics, as I mentioned, I think the question there is how fast will the new programs go from development into production? Will there be any trimming of the production quantities on programs like NGI to support the tactical missiles replenishment? That's a question in my mind. We are seeing growth there. It's not quite as fast as we predict in the tactical missiles. The unmanned systems, the launching systems that we produce, the subsystems for the vehicles themselves, some of the propulsion systems, those are, again, significant demand coming.
It's a little bit less precise in terms of how much on what time horizon in terms of not having necessarily long-term agreements. We are expanding significantly. We're putting a new facility in Salt Lake City. It's about a 200,000 sq ft facility. We'll start taking deliveries of equipment there around the midpoint of the year. That's going to principally support ramp up of tactical munitions subsystems as well as the launching systems for UAVs. That's where that business is headed. I'll come back around full circle again to Space & Launch. That was our largest year-over-year revenue growth piece for Q1. We're finally starting to see, I think, the launch cadence get to that point where it's going to hit the knee of the curve and really start to increase at a very significant rate.
We're talking to one of the four agreements that I talked about in this release yesterday was related to Space & Launch, multi-year agreement, hundreds of millions of dollars of value. Again, that's a floor. That's a minimum commitment, and that's likely to go up from there. That's a long-term agreement we're looking to finalize and sign in the next several weeks.
Well, I think something, too, that investors are paying attention to is so like when does all this funding get deployed? Just listening with what I think Secretary Hegseth has said, they want to deploy a big bulk of that $150 billion in reconciliation money. I think as of like a few weeks ago, like $30 billion has only been deployed yet. Like how are you guys preparing or like what are you guys seeing as we get into the second half of the year and the fiscal 2026 year ends? Like are we expected to see like just you think like a big inflow of order activity?
Yes, I think we will. In the back half of the year, we'll certainly see things pick up. We've seen so much happen differently in this environment in the last 18 months. One thing that hasn't changed that much is the pace of contracting is always slower than you expect it to be. I would say it's faster now than it might have been a couple of years ago, but it still takes longer than you'd like. The primes are talking about getting their framework agreements finalized by the end of the year. We've already provided proposals. The numbers are all in on the table. It's just a matter of them turning around and issuing some contracts. They want to receive their prime contracts first. I think we will see a big push to spend the balance of that reconciliation money on time.
I'm hopeful that most or all of it will get obligated. We look to the $1.5 trillion budget proposal for next year. That one, you know, that contains a lot of multi-year money, and that's intended in large part to fund a lot of those multi-year munition replenishments framework agreements. Even if the entire $1.5 trillion doesn't get allocated, and there's some lesser portion, it's still gonna be, it seems, a big uptick from what it was last year. Also, even within the budget, we're seeing a reallocation of money more towards the areas that are more favorable to Karman. You know, those end markets that we're in, they're chosen very carefully, and we are gonna continue to see that significant double-digit growth in those markets.
I think that's an important or it'd be interesting customer behavior. As your customers are 3x or 4x-ing their production on missiles and stuff.
I've always took the stance that when your customers are expanding that quickly, that's not the time when they're likely to say, "Hey, we're gonna now bring stuff more in-house." Seems like that's more of an environment where like, "Hey, we're going as quickly as we can." Karman, can you guys help us maybe now with this, and this? Like, how does, how is the customer behavior, you think, gonna change as they go into these massive ramp programs?
Yeah, well certainly we will be on offense as we go into that massive ramp. We'll be looking for areas where we can opportunistically step in and help if there are other parts of the supply chain that are not meeting demand. I think you're right. You know, it's not the time that the primes are going to be looking to bring everything in-house. There may be targeted areas where they might feel out of necessity they have to do that if they have a small supplier that can't get up the ramp and there is no alternative. You know, certainly we will not be that supplier. We have been very thoughtful in planning our investments to stay a little bit ahead of need.
You know, if you think about the areas we're going to see big growth in unmanned systems and missiles, that is exactly what the 200,000 sq ft in Salt Lake City is going to be supporting. We have new capital equipment coming into our Huntington Beach facility. Some of that's online. We had one of our top customers in the factory yesterday. They walked in and the first thing they said was, "Wow. A couple months ago, none of this was here," right? It is really real- time happening. We have a lot of new equipment coming in, facilities expanding, capacity coming online. The demand is, you know, when I'm talking to customers, it's just, "Are you going to be able to keep up with us?
We need you to continue to perform, deliver, and scale. As long as we continue to do that, the last thing, back to primes, what's the number one thing they want? They want that surety of supply. We have to be that consistent partner that's there to get them what they need when they need it needs to work, and it needs to be at a competitive price that meets their budget. I think we're in that position across the board, and we're going to continue to work very hard to stay there and not ever be that supplier that a customer might feel needs to be second sourced.
On that comment of supply and just, like, making sure you guys have enough supply, what does that dynamic look like for you guys as we go into this larger ramp in the second half of the year?
I feel good. I feel good about capacity. I'm optimistic. I'm excited. You know, one of the things that really surprised me when I got to Karman, having come from 30 years as a prime, is, you know, I walked in and I said, "Where's the list of red suppliers? Where are all the problems?" Really there weren't any to speak of in the supply chain because we're very vertically integrated. We're generally, you know, taking raw materials and starting from that place. There are some instances where our customers might give us a component and say, "Integrate this into a broader subsystem.
Give it all back to us." Most of the time it's raw materials, it's metals, it's resins and fibers and composite structure, and we're taking it from that place and building it up into something that's an integrated electro-mechanical, energetic system. About the only thing we don't really do is we don't write a lot of software. We don't do a lot of total system integration. We do the electro-mechanical structural energetic components for them, that's a huge burden off the shoulders of the primes.
Well, could you maybe talk about kind of your capacity today and, like, what type of investments you're making and where you're hoping that ends? I know you guys are doing a big expansion in Salt Lake City with your UAS l ineup.
Yeah. I would say that most of the investments that we're making are related to manufacturing. We have, you know, we do have a full-scale end-to-end design all the way through full rate production capability. That's where we tend to do our best work, is when a customer comes to us and says, "I have a requirement." I have a requirement, for example, for a deployable shroud that's gonna protect a sensitive payload. It has to keep it at a constant temperature from launch all the way through the atmosphere and then into deep space. At the moment in time it has to pop open and deploy that payload and do it with no net force applied to the vehicle.
These are complex problems. When we get those requirements from our customers, we're able to do the engineering, the design, take those solutions to production. Again, though, when you're talking about our investments, they tend to be more in the manufacturing side of things. We have a lot of manufacturing intellectual property as well as a lot of design IP in a number of our solutions. About 90% of what we do for our customers from a revenue point of view has either design and/or manufacturing IP that protects it from competitors.
Okay. Kind of drones is the hottest subject in defense tech right now. A buzzword, but obviously we're seeing more and more of that demand. I think you guys are exposed to, I think, one of the most critical areas in this drone supply chain because I think, like, the FPV small stuff gets a lot of the headlines, but if you look at what the military's using, it's more group 2, g roup 3 long-range precision strike. Could you maybe walk through like, what are some of the key components and subsystems, and if there's any customers that you guys can highlight that you're exposed to within the UAS market?
I mean, you know, generally speaking, we've certainly worked with AeroVironment. That's one customer I think that certainly we have shared that we work with. We build the launching systems for them. It's a very complex system that has to accelerate the payload from zero to 300 ft per second in an instant and do all that without damaging the vehicle itself. We provide, it's sort of an integrated, you know, electrical, mechanical, energetic system. We also provide some of the small diameter propulsion, you know, kick motors or booster engines that'll support the launch of those loa munitions, and we provide some of the key subsystems on the vehicles themselves, not generally in the larger scale vehicles, the smaller ones.
We have a payload that can be attached to a much larger UAS that has sort of a cartridge-loaded launching system to launch smaller vehicles from a larger one. We have opportunities to be exposed across the entire spectrum. The one place I don't know that we have as much presence is in group 1.
Yeah. Okay. Well, like, it's still a little bit of a black box. We've seen some more information. The DAWG program, Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, $54 billion in autonomous systems. Do you guys have a sense on kind of like the exposure you guys might have to that funding or?
Yeah, I think as our, as our prime level customers start to realize the benefit of that funding, we'll naturally follow along behind them. That's our, that's our principal area of focus. We do have some work that we're doing with unmanned underwater and unmanned surface vessels out of our, out of our Seemann Composites business. That's not big business right now. There is opportunity potentially there as some of that DAWG funding gets out for us to support some of the manufacturing. I think it's a little bit early to speculate on how much that might be.
Would that be just exposed to the underwater, the UUVs or 'cause the USVs, the autonomous boats on the water is obviously a market that's getting a ton of traction as well? Are you kind of exposed to all maritime autonomous?
There, yes, there is some potential exposure to all maritime autonomous. I would say potential because we're working with some of the, some of the primes that are looking for additional manufacturing capacity. That's where we're starting our focus is there. As they need that capacity, we think we'll be able to provide it.
Okay. Well, I think kind of a key part to your guys' growth strategy has always been M&A. How should we be thinking about M&A now with like you in the seat, and maybe how the strategy might be changing or it might be staying the same?
I think the strategy for the company is sound. You know, I'm about six weeks in, so it's perhaps a bit early here, but I don't see any reason at this point in time to shift the strategy of the company. I think the continued focus on those end markets that are high organic growth and to continue to supplement with a couple of bolt-on acquisitions every year is about the right pace. If you think about maybe, you know, 20%-25% organic growth a year or another 10% on average coming from inorganic feels about right to me. That's about where we've been. It feels like a reasonable pace.
Someone asked me the question earlier today, "Are you just buying these companies and, you know, letting them operate the way they've always operated?" That's not, that's not how we're running the business. We are doing the hard work to get the integration done. We're deploying a common ERP system across the company. We're deploying common manufacturing execution system across the company. We're gonna have that integrated, what we refer to as the Karman Operating System, and that's gonna be everything from HR systems all the way to the factory floor. We will integrate these businesses. The targets will generally be in the end markets that we've been in for the most part. I don't know that we see any right now on the horizon that would deviate from that formula.
Generally, you know, founder-owned, founder-led businesses that come in at a good multiple, you know, at a reasonable purchase price, and we can fold those in naturally as part of the way we do business and how we continue to deploy that operating system. That's how we'll continue to think about M&A going forward.
If you look at like some of the, like even the most recent, Seemann's acquisition, it seems like, material property, strong material proprietary portfolios is a key aspect. Is that something that like is a big differentiator when it comes to these type of decisions?
It's huge. I mean, we're absolutely looking for a differentiated IP. Where's the competitive mode around that business, and how will that continue to complement the rest of the Karman portfolio? Generally, as these acquisitions come online, they add value across other parts of the portfolio. We're seeing composite technology now already coming out of Seemann that we can port over to our missile business. We're seeing opportunity to bring, you know, manufacturing workload from the missile side of the business or the space side of the business and put that into the Seemann Composites infrastructure where they have excess capacity for production.
We really are taking advantage of the full breadth of the enterprise, whether it's from a systems integration point of view, whether it's looking for economies of scale and how we manage the business, or it's looking for how we distribute the work across the factories. All of that has been taken into account.
Okay. I'm gonna say the buzzword here, AI, but it goes back to the comment you made on you're building this integrated manufacturing system.
I'm curious, what are some of the advantages that you're seeing maybe when you integrate these more next-generation AI tools? Is there a huge value add that obviously like you think of improved efficiencies, productivity?
I think AI is gonna be transformational for all companies if they're not already well down the path they need to be. You know, you think about a company like Karman, I said earlier, we don't do a lot of software in Karman. There still is tremendous opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence. We actually had some outside partners in to do a workshop two weeks ago that was focused on leveraging AI in the business, and we ended up with, I would say three horizons on which we could realize benefit. One was a very just practically, how do we take the information that we have at our fingertips and leverage it to do our day-to-day work smarter?
Whether it's building basis of estimate for proposals, whether it's, you know, analyzing a complex request for proposal and pulling out the key requirements for us, simple things like that. Then we looked a little bit at the moonshot scenario, which was, how could we design the munition for our customer in half the time at half the cost by leveraging all of because what really is important with AI, I think, is the ability to leverage data in general. If you have data that's uniquely yours, then that can really be a competitive advantage. I think one of the challenges to unlocking the power of data is typically that a lot of it's unstructured. You know, it might be test reports, it might be handwritten notes, it might be emails.
Well, with artificial intelligence, we now have the ability to access all of that unstructured data to solve challenging problems. The team actually conceptualized how would we take the data that we have and automate the first few iterations of a munition design process. That's kind of the moonshot that we're thinking about now. Yeah, I think it's gonna add a lot of practical value and a lot of long-term strategic value as well.
Awesome. I'm gonna pause here and just open the floor if there's any questions. I still got a bunch for me, so you're not getting off the hook yet, All right. No. Maybe we'll pause again in a few more minutes to see. A question I have for you. Obviously, a big bulk of your business is really driven by U.S. DoD. What's unique about this defense cycle we're in, every region of the globe is going through their own defense spending cycle. Canada is increasing, Europe, India, the Middle East. Is Karman exposed to any of these other geographic markets?
I mean, in the immediate term, certainly there are Foreign Military Sales of some of the U.S. platforms, and we're exposed through that. You know, that demand will pull through for Karman. That's really not going to change the way we operate with our customers today. We sell them the components, then some are domestic and some go for export. That's just a given with, you know, the way we're positioned across key programs. More broadly, are we going to go international on our own? We do have some acquisition targets in the pipeline that could open up opportunities more globally. We are evaluating those, it's a big decision for us, I think, to consider, you know, venturing outside the United States. We've just had so much tremendous growth here on the home front.
You know, that's been our number one priority. As we look to the future, yes, if we have opportunities to selectively enter other markets that are strong U.S. allies, you know, certainly Europe is an area where we're gonna see increased defense spending. I think it's been clear that our government expects European governments to spend more on defense, and they've answered that call. There's a real push to take those increased dollars that are allocated in their defense budgets and put those into local industry. We are looking at some of those companies to see if there's anything there that makes sense that would fit, again, with our end markets that would be complementary to the things that Karman already does. You know, Australia would be a place we could consider.
Canada would be a place we could consider. Yeah, there are some non-U.S. markets that are attractive that we will selectively evaluate.
Okay. Well, and I think too, kinda maybe getting more into the P&L of the business, not only are you guys growing 20%-25% organically, but very strong margin profile, operates EBITDA margins north of 30%, which I think clearly speaks to the strong competitive position you guys have. How should we think about the sustainability of these margins, and what are kinda the key drivers of potential expansion?
Yeah, I think the margins are sustainable, and we've talked about targeting 50 basis points of margin expansion per year as the company grows. You know, certainly my first priority is to make sure we see no degradation, no erosion of the margins. As we think about these framework agreements at the prime level, my understanding is that the government's asking the primes to hold pricing constant over time effectively to find efficiencies to offset inflation. My guess is that same ask will flow to us. We've already started to think proactively about how we manage our way through that, which would be long-term agreements with our suppliers of the raw materials. It would be, you know, looking at how we get increased efficiencies and economies of scale as the company grows.
I think there are multiple levers that we'll pull to offset any, you know, any pressure on our pricing, and that would be to continue to optimize the factory. I think there is still capacity within the infrastructure that we have to leverage that more fully. I think there will be increased operating leverage as our revenues increase. The customers that have talked to us about price reductions, again, given the pressures they're under to go faster and to be more efficient, they've been willing to say, you know, real customer conversation about one of these long-term agreements that we announced. It was, you know, "I'd like you to take another 10% off your price.
How can I change requirements, you know, relieve some of the inspection requirements, or change the design in a way that makes it more producible? Typically, the conversations about price reductions have come with a conversation about how they can be more flexible to allow us to maintain our level of profitability while offering them a more competitive price. At this point in time, I don't see any reason to think the margins are gonna be a concern.
Okay. This is something a lot of, obviously, military key components are already made in the U.S., but we are seeing this reindustrialization, this build in America, especially like in the drone space. Do you get a sense that there's a lot that your customers may have been buying internationally, that they now are realizing that, oh, we now need to source these additional components that they're not doing to you, and like how that dynamic is going to benefit Karman as we go forward?
Yeah, I think certainly on the domestic front, we're gonna continue to see tailwinds coming from that push to buy U.S. There are not a lot of places right now where I would say we are taking over work that's being done by a non-U.S. supplier today. Could change. Certainly we're not seeing non-U.S. suppliers get any traction moving into places that we occupy right now. I think that gives us a little bit of insulation. It does again raise the question of if we were to want to expand internationally, my guess is we would have to acquire businesses that have local footprint or establish local footprint because there's gonna be a real pressure from non-U.S. customers, I think also to buy locally. There always has been.
I think that pressure will be as strong or stronger going forward given U.S. is taking that position.
Okay. I think too, like competition always comes up and especially like when you have 30% EBITDA margins, that puts a bogey on your back 'cause you're doing something right. How do you guys view about competition? Has that increased, obviously given with the reindustrialization, and how do you guys feel about, kinda maintaining this, I think, really strong moat you guys already have built?
We feel good. What, what we're doing, what Karman's doing is really unique. If you look at other companies coming into the space, they are generally focusing in one or two domains or have one or two very focused products, many of those coming out of a lab that was maybe venture- backed at one point in time and is continuing to mature, and they wanna bring that to market as a, as a prime offering. That is not at all how Karman has been built or is positioned. We've been built from these pieces of capability that in many cases have been well established for decades with strong either design or manufacturing intellectual property that sort of protects those from competition.
We've put those together in a way that has allowed us to be a subsystem provider to primes across the entire Space & Defense spectrum. We're exposed to over 80 customers, 80 unique primes in Space & Defense, and over 130 contracts. Those contracts span the life cycle from, you know, concept design all the way to mature production, all the way to even post-delivery support and sustainment. We really are a unique merchant supply company operating in that, in that, you know, prime to the primes kind of a role, if you will. That's this unique position, and I think we're gonna continue to be in a very positive competitive position going forward.
Okay. Yes.
So, I'm curious, do you have to make any technology or R&D priority bets when you think about your customers, the areas that you wanna focus your technical capabilities on? If you do, what are they?
Yeah, we have some munitions programs where we're making some targeted company investment in design IP, opportunities to go on offense, as I mentioned earlier, and take some share in certain munitions programs, so we have some targeted investments there. I would say the vast majority of our technology investments are more in manufacturing technology. You know, we do have some very strong positions on established production programs and the ability to ramp those to do more automation in the factory, think about advanced manufacturing methods. That is an area we're investing.
If you think about the work we're doing in Seemann Composites, you know, building these massive, you know, bow domes for submarines, out of composite material and doing the curing of those composites outside an autoclave, that's a capability that exists nowhere else in the world. The moat around that, if you will, is tremendous. We do it at a very competitive price and using some very proprietary technology that we've developed. A lot of the investments, I would say, focus more on the manufacturing technology differentiating there, although there are also some targeted investments around missiles and munitions.
You don't really wanna look at the end product or program and say, give an assessment as to really do you wanna be on that platform because it's either an uneconomical, it's too expensive a platform long-term, its viability is gonna be undermined.
We don't typically pick and choose platforms we want to be on. We tend to want to be on every platform and be a part of everybody's team. In many cases, for the new missile and munitions programs, for example, we are typically on all the teams, providing maybe different subcomponents or subassemblies. Sometimes we're working on advanced, you know, composite technologies for a next generation hypersonic weapon. You know, some of the advanced carbon-carbon composites that we've invested in, for example, exist nowhere else in the world. The manufacturing methods we've developed are substantially lower cost than competing methods.
Again, it's looking at what are those next-g eneration platforms, how do we make sure we're a part of as many of the prime- level teams as possible, how do we take as much share on each of those designs as possible, and we invest where necessary to make sure we're bringing the value to the team and to the partnership.
All righty. Well, Jon, Well, any other questions from the floor? All right. Last question I have for you, I'm just gonna pass it back to you. Any kind of last couple thoughts you just want these investors who are here and listening to take away?
I guess where I'd end is just to say, you know, look, I've been in this job about six weeks, I have been really impressed with what I've seen so far. This is something that excited me so much that I walked away from 30 years as a prime and came to do something very different and I think very special. I feel very good. You know, investors are here to talk about the numbers, I think at the bottom line, I feel great about the plan that we've put in place for this year. We're hoping to see a little bit of upside at the back end of the year as the framework agreements start to get formalized.
As we look to 2027 and beyond, I just see tremendous potential for the business and, you know, you all have my commitment that I'm gonna do everything I can to make us as successful as possible.
Well, thank you, Jon, for participating, and thank you everyone for attending. This ends the webcast.