Okay, I have five seconds on the clock, but I'm gonna get it started a little early, so we get a little bit of extra time with L3Harris. Thank you guys so much for being here. My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu with the Jefferies Aerospace and Defense team. We have the L3Harris team with us, Mark Kratz, who's Investor Relations, Michelle Turner, CFO, and Christopher Eugene Kubasik, who's Chair and CEO. So, Chris, thank you for being here with us. It's been an eventful five years, I think, for you since you became CEO of L3. L3, yes, and since then, you merged with Harris. I can't keep up. You divested an asset, bought Viasat TDL, announced the acquisition and closed Aerojet. I think you announced it and closed it in 221 days, 10 hours, 8 minutes, but who's counting?
So you've kept us busy and more so Michelle than anybody else. To start, congratulations on closing a deal in defense with Aerojet Rocketdyne. It's your fourth- segment, representing about 10% of sales. So can you walk us through, you know, your expectations, how you got the Aerojet deal across the finish line, and now that you've owned it for, I think, since July 28, again, who's counting? Not me. How the integration is progressing.
Okay. Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining, and Sheila, thanks for the invite. Yeah, we did close Aerojet in a little over seven months, and I think it really speaks to the culture of the corporation. We kinda have this can-do attitude. We developed a strategy, and we executed it. It was a small team at the highest levels of the Company that went about this. You know, we didn't outsource it, we didn't hire consultants, we didn't hire attorneys. We did the work ourselves and met face-to-face with the key decision-makers. I think part of the success of being a defense contractor or government contractor is being able to navigate Washington and work in Washington.
You have Congress, the DoD, FTC, and other stakeholders, and, you know, it's one of our core competencies, and I think, the fact that this was approved in seven months is an example of the influence and the ability that we have. In some cases, it's probably actually a barrier to entry, you know, for a lot of these, new entrants, which is why strategically, you know, we've opted to team with, the companies from Shield Capital, the venture capital fund, that we invest in some of the new entrants and work collaboratively. So we're moving forward with Aerojet Rocketdyne.
On the integration, you know, it's about 10% of our enterprise value, and I wouldn't want to say it's easy, but it's relatively easy compared to what we had to do four years ago with L3 and Harris. That was a merger of equals, best of the best. We had to make decisions and such. But this was a good old-fashioned acquisition. You know, I'm gonna say some things 'cause I still get questions. We bought them. Like, the Board doesn't exist, they were gone day one. CEO, gone day one. Most of the leadership team, gone day one. We bought them, plain and simple, and the integration is going well. On January 1 , they'll be on our payroll system. On January 1, they'll be on our benefit system. So pretty cut and dry.
We know how to do it. You know, the IT stuff takes a little longer, the technology and such, so we have a roadmap there to combine and consolidate the systems. I think something that may not be fully understood is from the time we signed it till closing, the Department of Defense provided DPA, Defense Production Act money, in excess of $200 million. So I kinda roll that under the integration. So while we never had a plan to close or shut down facilities based on the fact that it wasn't a competitor of ours, we actually have this $215 million to expand the facilities, modernize, and have the digital engineering.
So I would say the integration is going reasonably well, based on six weeks. We're gonna meet our cost synergies. Most of those will come in 2024. And then, maybe inherent in the question is, you know, just how's it going after six weeks? We've been very active at the sites. I'd say no surprises. You know, they have some, like all of us, they have some really good programs, we call green programs, that are profitable on time, on schedule. There's some red programs that have been well documented and, you know, we're identifying the root causes and coming up with corrective actions. There'll be some quick hits in the next few months, and some things will take a little longer. So glad to get it done and glad to move on.
No, it's great. It's great to just get a deal done. But Aerojet was relatively under-followed on the street, so not everybody might know what it actually does, how it changes LHX, and how it contributes to your growth rate. So maybe if you could talk about that and the revenue synergies that are potentially there.
Yeah, I think just at a high level from the financial perspective, they're in two main markets, the largest being missiles, munitions, weapons, making rocket motors, supporting pretty much all the primes that make the ultimate end product, whether it's Stingers, Javelins, PAC-3, Standard Missiles, the list goes on. And also space propulsion systems, not only for satellites but for launch vehicles. So it's gonna be accretive to our growth rate. They're gonna grow double digits. I believe there's significant margin potential for that company as a result of the synergies and improved performance on some of these key programs.
Gives us longer-term visibility, longer cycle business into our backlog, and then you know, four-five years out, we see it being accretive to our ROIC. So again, from the day we signed it till today, we had the DPA money of $215 million come in, you know, which is, which is great. And additionally, the 2024 budget came out, and we're looking at significant growth in the munitions line, double-digit. Of course, we're still going through the budget process, but high-growth market. So I think it really does, really does change the company for those reasons, and it fits nicely into what we were trying to do in building L3Harris. It gets us into a new domain.
As you know, we're in space, we're in air, we're in land, maritime, cyber, and this really gets us into the weapons and munitions, which is a missing part of the portfolio.
How do you think about their margins going forward? Is there opportunities there, in your view?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, there'll be a couple—you know, we, we have, as part of the FTC review process, just want to highlight, you know, we, we have existing contracts that we'll honor. We did not sign any kind of consent agreement. I did give assurance to the Department of Defense that Aerojet Rocketdyne, L3Harris, would remain a merchant supplier, providing rocket motors to every and anyone in the world that can legally buy them. So there was some concern that we would somehow vertically integrate, which made no sense. So, we're gonna be a merchant supplier. We'll renegotiate contracts based on actual cost, and I think when we look at some of these investments, when we digitize the engineering, take our processes, some of our procedures and tools, we're gonna see some significant improvement.
They're behind on several of their programs, significant backlog of motors that haven't been delivered, so we'll catch up on those in due course, and then I think, when you look at the growth, not only here in the U.S., but internationally, I think people are gonna look back and see the logic of this acquisition.
Sounds like a home run, right? Nothing not to like. Let's talk about your comms business. A lot of soldier-level equipment there, whether it's terminals, night vision, and some of the broadband businesses. How do you think about the positioning of that business overall, and where are you seeing the biggest opportunities?
Yeah, comms, communications is a key part of the Company. It's a lot of our legacy and heritage, and I think one thing that came out in the Ukraine war is the importance of resilient comms. You keep hearing about it and hearing about it, but it's a priority for the DoD, and you're starting to see money flow into the providing these technologies. So we have a tactical communications radio business, you know, probably the best in the world. We have a very strong position in there. It's a commercial business model, so very good margins. The DoD is modernizing, so we're looking at double-digit growth this year in tactical communications. Internationally is going well.
We've been big supporters of Ukraine, and we see a lot of interest, you know, from Saudi to Europe to the Far East. So we're doing quite well there. On the BCS or the Broadband Communications, that's where we made the Viasat Tactical Data Links acquisition. So this gives us a footprint and access on 20,000 platforms through what was what's currently known as Link 16. Gives us the ability to upgrade those, and that deal closed in January. The integration is pretty much done. And already we have, as a result of making this acquisition, we received a large order earlier this year, three times larger than anything possible.
So a lot of interest from the customer, a lot of ability, you know, to connect, the various pieces, and I think we're in a sweet spot when it comes to communication. We're looking at double-digit growth there as well. Some of that's inorganic, but, we're really well-positioned in communications, and we're disrupting ourselves and maybe looking at different ways to monetize some of our waveforms, some of our software. So in addition to just selling a radio with, with some of this technology, we're looking for some creative ideas to, to monetize, software, in addition to embedding it in our own products. So, pretty exciting times there.
Yeah, no doubt you're being creative about it. So when it comes to ISR, you know, you've been relatively conservative in how you're guiding for that, just given the prior experience, the orders sometimes slip, they're long cycle. You know, how do you think about that type pipeline, and when do you see these U.S.-based contracts, like Overwatch, coming to fruition, and how do you think about leveraging that internationally?
Yeah, ISR is our intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance business for aircraft. I think what's unique about us is we're platform agnostic, so we don't actually have an aircraft, and I think that's how we've been able to grow. We listen to the customer. This goes back maybe seven to eight years, where there was a program known as Compass Call, where we listened to the customer, and it appeared that they needed a business jet to satisfy their mission, whether it was endurance, and such. So we take that approach, where we go out based on the contract, and we will team with a different business jet provider or sometimes, depending, you know, it could be a King Air, or in the case of Armed Overwatch, it's actually a crop duster.
So, I think that's one of our secrets. The pipeline is about $25 billion of opportunities. I don't... You know, being conservative, probably being prudent, you know, I think everybody in this industry puts in their plan and guidance, international orders, and then after three or four years, you realize that you ultimately get the order, but, you know, it's one or two quarters or a year off. So we've been conservative by saying we're not gonna include international awards. We just reviewed one the other day for a big customer in the Far East, which could be a couple billion dollars. We have a lot of interest in the Middle East, a couple opportunities in Europe... you know, a lot of these countries don't like to have their names disclosed.
But I see at least four opportunities that we're looking at in the next 12 months. But, you know, a lot of these get complicated. One country has an election coming up, so, you know, the RFP comes out, there's an election, there may be a change of government, could be a change. All those things add to the delays. But about two-thirds of the business is U.S.-based, so, you know, you mentioned Armed Overwatch, that's the crop duster, you know, that we selected Air Tractor, and that's off to a good start for special operations. We won a program with a called Athena. We have Compass Call for the Air Force. So the domestic business is doing quite well, and it's nice to have a $25 billion pipeline.
Not bad. Let's talk about space. You've had a really—you know, you've had really good success on the small sat side there, growing the business as a—into a prime integrator. How much runway is there in that business, just given stuff like SDA, and how much has LHX evolved, either from a main—a domain expertise or just capacity to develop overall?
Yeah, space, the, the space business, I think, is a, is a great success story, and that's probably the example I use most when, when I talk about our trusted disruptor strategy. You mentioned going back to 2018 or so, trying to create this new company to provide more, more competition, move up the food chain and prime, and we have absolutely disrupted the space market. We're beating the traditional OEMs and these satellites as, as a prime. You mentioned SDA, you know, which is now part, part of Space Force. So we were successful in, in what they call Tranche 0 for the tracking system, Tranche 1. Tranche 2, the RFP just came out earlier this week, so we'll, we'll be bidding there and, and hopefully being successful as well. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for our space business.
I don't think it's always fully appreciated. We're the premier provider of weather satellites for NOAA, NASA, and a couple international countries. They're on a long cycle recapitalization, so we're actually in that sweet spot. So there's about $3 billion of opportunities over the last 12 months, next 12 months. We've already booked about $1.5 billion so far. We should have an award in the next couple of weeks. So the weather satellites is kind of our legacy, and that's actually, you know, which was-- you've heard me say before, that's actually how we got into missile tracking, using those weather satellites, monitoring the weather, and then seeing these hotspots, which turned out to be launches of different vehicles, and then we kind of migrated that technology for missile tracking.
We're investing in space. We'll be opening a new factory, a space factory, a satellite factory, in the next year or so. I think we have a lot of capacity, a lot of high volume, and we're in all domains when it comes to payload, whether it's missile tracking, IR, EO, weather. I'm really pleased with the position we're in. The payload is where all the value is and, you know, just like I said, we're airplane platform agnostic. We're kind of bus agnostic. We work with whatever company provides the best bus for our payloads to be integrated on, and then we go ahead and launch. Real excited.
We have a bunch of launches coming up in the next 12 months, and being a Floridian, we can just look outside and watch them go into space.
Yeah.
It's kind of fun.
Really cool. Let's talk about the rest of the SAS portfolio space. You have about a $2 billion business there for airborne systems. You know, obviously, F-35 made the news yesterday. What are the puts and takes of the newer opportunities vs some of the legacy programs there, and how do you think about the overall growth rate?
Yeah, I think of the growth rate as being flat, to be honest with you. And a lot of the missions that have historically been airborne are migrating into space. So we have the benefit of being in both of those domains, but we're seeing a lot of the missions that historically were carried out by the aircraft moving into space, which is where we're seeing the growth. You know, we're involved with F-35, F/A-18, F-16. We have the different mission systems, core processing, electronic warfare. So that's a stable business. We'll be with the Air Force customer next week in D.C. at their AFA, Air Force Association, symposium, and we'll continue to meet with customers. They're looking at new unmanned aircraft. You know, there's some next generation.
We'll have a piece of all those. We will never, as I foresee it, be a prime in airborne. We have the modular systems, you know, that are critical to these aircraft. Someday, the customer might buy the systems directly from me and just give them to the aircraft manufacturer, but for now, you know, we go through that food chain. So it's a flat market. We have good technology, and if we get any growth, you know, it's gonna be coming probably from the international upgrades. But we're well-positioned and proud of what the team's doing.
You know, one of the things I'm getting from our discussion is, you're in a unique position because you could actually use your balance sheet to grow inorganically, but you're also using your trusted disruptor strategy to grow organically, too. So a lot of people look at defense primes and say, "Base budget's growing 4%. This is the growth outlook for LHX." How do you think about your growth outlook and your different businesses?
Yeah, we have four- segments currently and 16 sectors underneath them. Rather diverse portfolio, as I mentioned, in all the domains. You know, our goal and a result of some of these acquisitions, at least the two we've made, and probably aren't gonna make for a while, given our balance sheet and the debt capacity, you know, have been growing faster than the defense budget. We still need a defense budget. You know, there's, you've seen the numbers, and you've written your reports. $842 billion, which, you know, is just a number, right? It's a pretty big number. But I think more importantly, what people forget, two years ago, that same defense budget top-line budget, which we all use as a proxy, was $742 billion.
I mean, we've added $100 billion to the DoD budget in two years. So, you know, admittedly, the growth rate going forward, we'll have an election, we'll see what it'll be. But, you know, it's a small market. There's only so many companies in it, and I like our position, and we would expect to grow faster than the addressable market.
I'm sneaking in a few more questions than we agreed to-
You can do whatever you want.
Originally, so I'm two over.
We agreed to six questions.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
I'm already two over, I'm gonna go four over. So, two more left for you. You know, free cash flow has been a big focus of LHX overall. Obviously a lot of puts and takes with items like tax that are out of your control. So what are the drivers of free cash flow growth here? And just, you know, how do you think about the revenue growth margin profile and free cash flow of your business? Or we could wait till December when you have your Analyst Day.
Yeah, December 11th and December 12th in Florida. I look forward to seeing everyone there. We're gonna have a great, a great couple days. I guess we hadn't announced that previously, but now you know. It's a benefit-
Mark's smile said it all.
Mark wrote it down. December 11 and 12. I think it's a Monday and Tuesday. We'll be there. No, we'll talk. You know, generally, what we've seen, you know, is the cash flow for all of us has been—there's been headwinds for two main reasons: the taxes, but that takes five years to kinda run out. I know everybody's optimistic that the tax law will change. I am not one of those guys, which is why our guidance has always been based on the current rules and regulations. And then, you know, the last couple years with the supply chain challenges and the pandemic, you know, we've built up. And you can see it on our balance sheet, which always gives me comfort in some perverse way.
You can see the receivables and the inventory growing, so I know it's there. And, you know, we need to bring, bring that down as we start making these deliveries. You know, we did a really good job. In the defense industry, you can get billed one-- you can collect your cash one of two ways. You can do the progress payments, which means every two weeks you send a bill, you show up, and you get paid. It's kinda, kinda the lazy way to do it. Or you tie it to performance, which I like to do, which is performance-based payments. Like, I give you a product, you give me cash. So it kinda makes sense, and it kinda correlates the performance.
But, you know, when there's a backlog of products for all sorts of reasons that nobody cares about, you don't actually deliver those products, like radios and night vision goggles, you don't get your cash. So we do have that backlog, and it's coming through. So I feel pretty good about it. We'll probably start talking more about free cash flow per share. You know, Aerojet will be cash flow accretive in year two, EPS accretive in year one. We'll give more guidance. We'll give guidance in October, but that's just for a five-month stub. But, hopefully in December, we'll give you some insight into 2024, but looking pretty positive about what we're doing.
That's great. And maybe just to wrap it up, going full circle, you've given us an eventful five years, you know, with the L3Harris merger behind you, two acquisitions behind you. You know, what should investors, and more so Michelle, look forward to over the next five years, and what do you think is most misunderstood?
Was that one question?
It's-
Yeah, well, what's misunderstood?
1.5.
All right, well, first of all, we're significantly undervalued. There's no doubt about that in my mind. Every day it gets more so. But I think what's misunderstood is, you know, the fact that we're actually doing what we said we would do. And I can appreciate there's so many companies out there that you guys follow. We all come up here, we all kinda look alike, sound alike, we throw out acronyms, programs, and it's just like a blur. But if you go back, as you mentioned, maybe to the 2018 time period, what we said, or what I was saying, is we wanna create a new company, right, to give our customers alternatives and disrupt the market. It's slow, it's expensive, it's bureaucratic. So I view L3Harris as the 52,000 employee new entrant.
are lots of other companies that are out there, they're great, they got a few hundred employees, a few hundred million of revenue. You know, we're close to $20 billion of revenue, 52,000 employees, 25,000 engineers, 25,000 people with clearances, and we are doing what we said we would do, which was to build this, this company. Now, we've had a few bumps in the road, like the pandemic, inflation, attrition, but that, that's behind us. We all dealt with it. And I would just say, if you look back five years, you look forward a couple of years, what you're gonna see is this company, it will be focused, it will be in all domains, and we will be in high growth markets, it'll be a technology company, and we will divest the non-core assets. We started some of that.
Clearly, with the interest rates and some of the challenges, we have some more to do. But, you know, L3 and Harris were decent companies, mid-size companies, as I used to say. You know, we were too small to be big, too big to be small. We came together, made a few acquisitions, divest non-core. When the dust settles, which it will, we will pay down our debt, we will remain investment grade, we'll have a focused portfolio where our customer priorities are, where the budget is aligned. And the next couple of years is gonna be generating the cash, paying down the debt, and then continuing with returning cash to our shareholders, competitive dividend, year-over-year increases, share repos, and, you know, we'll get there sooner than people may give us credit for. So-
We look forward to you keeping us on our toes.
Absolutely.
Appreciate it, Chris, and thank you all for joining and listening in.
Okay, thank you.