Okay. Thanks everyone, appreciate you joining us for Sidoti September Virtual Investor Conference. Before I introduce our next presenters, I'd just like to remind everyone, if you have any questions, press the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, type them in. We expect to have a couple of minutes remaining at the end of the presentation to get to as many as we can. With that being said, I'm so pleased to be joined this morning by Luxfer. The ticker is LXFR. We're joined by CEO Andy Butcher, CFO Steve Webster. I know they have a lot to cover this morning. I don't wanna take up any more time, so with that, let me turn it over to Andy and Steve.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. So Steve said, I'm Andy Butcher, and I'm Chief Executive Officer of Luxfer. I've been with the company for about 30 years, and in the CEO role since April of 2022. I'm based here in Riverside, California. That's the location of one of our largest facilities, and despite my accent, I'm a U.S. citizen. With me today, Steve Webster, our Chief Financial Officer. You'll get to hear from him shortly. What we plan to do is spend maybe the next 15 minutes walking you through Luxfer, telling you a little bit about our strategy, our performance, and especially some of our growth opportunities, and then look forward to questions.
Just to begin, of course, we've got our standard advisory on forward-looking statements, so please refer to that on the screen and in our materials. Let me tell you about Luxfer. Luxfer was founded back in Chicago in 1897. Today, we're a global industrial company. We've got a strong presence in North America, but also in Europe and Asia. Publicly traded since 2012, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and our purpose, you see here, to help create a safe, clean, and energy-efficient world. We've got about 1,200 employees across 10 facilities around the world.
Our expertise is in innovating in niche applications using materials technology, and we're gonna talk about that as we go forward. Our strategy is one of profitable growth, and over the last five years, we've put a lot of time into simplifying our operations and strengthening our balance sheet, and this slide here takes a look at our business from kind of a number of different perspectives. Over on the left here, we generated in 2023 over $370 million of revenue, a strong EBITDA margin, EBITDA of about $43 million. We've got a strong balance sheet with a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 1.6x .
And we operate over on the right now. We operate in three primary segments, end markets, if you like. Defense, first response, and healthcare is the largest. Transportation is the next largest, and that includes aerospace, and then some general industrial sections. Our largest market is in North America, predominantly the U.S., relatively even mix of sales thereafter between Europe and Asia Pacific. A shout-out on the bottom right to our Luxfer Business System. That's our internal driver for driving efficiency and sustainable growth, and there's six segments and elements to the Luxfer Business System.
And our products are both high-performance materials, magnesium, zirconium, as well as high-pressure gas containment devices. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about those in a moment, but for now, I'm gonna hand over to Steve and give him an opportunity to talk to you about our expertise in materials technology, some of our growth trends, and some of our recent financials. Steve?
Thanks, Andy. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, just a brief introduction. So I'm Steve Webster. I'm the Chief Financial Officer. I also have an accent, but I'm a U.K. citizen. I'm based in Manchester, in the U.K., which is again one of our large facilities. I've been with the company for eight years, since September 2016, and I've been the CFO since March of 2022. So moving on to the materials technology, you can see that we are a recognized leader in materials technology, and we have two main segments, so Elektron and Gas Cylinders. You can see in the Elektron segment there, we deal in high-performance magnesium alloys and specialty zirconium catalysts. Both magnesium and zirconium are metals.
Magnesium is an alloy, though, so it's really a mixture of magnesium and other metals, which give it some very good strengths, which apply. You can see there into aerospace, defense, and also some of the flameless technology that we use for heating meals. Zirconium, yeah, as I say, it's a metal, but actually what we're selling is a compound, so it's typically a powder, or it's a slurry or a solution, and that goes into catalysis. So either in emissions controls for industrial applications, in large chemical applications or refinery products, but also into automotive, for catalytic converters in vehicles.
And besides that, we also have used the same sort of zirconium technology to expand into areas such as pharmaceutical products and also electronics. I could give you an example of the glass in a mobile phone or a tablet. That contains a zirconium chemical, which actually makes the glass much tougher and stops it breaking if you drop the equipment. Moving on to Gas Cylinders. We are the world leader in the high-pressure carbon fiber cylinders, and we serve several industries. Fire safety, we have a cylinder which is called self-contained breathing apparatus, which goes on the back of a firefighter.
It's ultra lightweight, and the weight is very important there because one of the leading causes of death in a firefighter would be cardiac arrest through stress, and the weight of the cylinder or the light weight of the cylinder is very important, and we're the leader there in North America. We also work in aerospace, so we make cylinders, which would go into aircraft, either deployment of cabin oxygen or also the inflation of slides, escape slides on aircraft. Finally, clean energy. That can either be containment of compressed natural gas in vehicles, but also increasingly hydrogen transportation and storage.
So across both Elektron and Gas Cylinders, we have a deep expertise in materials technology, and that drives our success and certainly opens doors to future growth. I turn on to our manufacturing excellence. You can see we have a strong manufacturing footprint across both Europe and predominantly or virtually or entirely in the U.K., but also in North America, across the U.S. and Canada, and then we have a smaller presence over in Shanghai. So basically, our Gas Cylinders plants are in the U.S., so over in California and also Canada, and we have a Gas Cylinders plant in the U.K. and China, as I say. Elektron, though, is in the U.S. and the U.K.
So the global network of plants that we have enables us to meet demand across many diverse industries, ensures operational excellence and scalability, and really helps us pursue our latest growth opportunities. So that's our global manufacturing footprint, and that's certainly our commitment to our operational excellence. I'll just put my finance hat back on, and let's just take a quick look at our second quarter financial results. So in quarter two, we achieved adjusted sales of $91.8 million. With, there's an adjusted growth margin there of 22.3% and Adjusted EBITDA of $17.3 million. We do have a very strong balance sheet, and our leverage ratio is pretty low at 1.6x .
Cash generation has been strong this year. It was helped by a $5.1 million recovery we had on a legal case through insurance. That's a historic case, and that really helped strengthen our financial position. Operational efficiencies continue to drive success, particularly through we have very good SG&A management and cost control. I am managing a process at the moment to sell our Graphic Arts division. That's going well, and certainly allows us to focus on the other two segments of Elektron and Gas Cylinders. Certainly in terms of our financial targets for 2024, we are on track to meet them, and we're looking to set a strong foundation for 2025, where we'll be pursuing further growth.
So in summary, the Q2 results, they highlight our ability to execute and deliver value, while maintaining our strong financial resilience. So with that, I'll hand back over to Andy, and Andy will discuss how our strategy aligns with key secular growth trends.
Thanks, Steve. I'll get us wrapped up using the last three slides. This one calls out the three secular long-term growth trends that we identify and call out as offering the greatest opportunity to us as a kind of tailwind to growth and higher levels of profitability, so we call out clean energy as a secular driver, and you've heard from Steve that we supply composite cylinders and systems in that space related to alternative fuels like hydrogen and compressed natural gas, but also our zirconium-based products that help with emissions control.
We identify lightweighting as a secular driver, and, of course, our lightweight carbon fiber cylinders are a great example of that, but our magnesium alloys also facilitate lightweighting in aerospace applications and automotive applications. And then we identify safety, health, and technology as growth areas. And again, Steve has touched on some products there, consumer technologies like cellphone glass, but also our specialty materials going into pharmaceutical applications and other medical applications. So, that all makes us feel really good about the sustained growth opportunities in the years ahead. And, if we look at the next slide, we call out three specific examples of where we're investing in innovation to drive growth in the future.
So we talk here about compressed natural gas cylinders and our introduction of a high-pressure cylinder technology, high-pressure tank technology, which is attracting a lot of interest and discussion at the moment, related to compressed natural gas, where some of you will be aware that a major engine manufacturer, Cummins, has just launched a new CNG engine, a fifteen-liter engine with potential for very strong growth in our North American markets. If you follow our announcement, you'll also have seen that our gas transportation technology is poised to be a significant driver for us over the next couple of years.
We have a new facility coming online in the U.K. later this year, and we've announced that that plant will have capacity for up to $40 million of sales in future years, and we've also been enjoying some really good success recently on the Elektron side of our business with our Unitized Group Rations product that you can also see here, where we're using magnesium in a proprietary blend to provide heating for the meals, and that new product has seen a strong market uptake since its launch last year. Let me get wrapped up here and allow some time for questions. The last slide here was really trying to summarize the key drivers for growth.
So we've called out innovation in clean energy and our solutions, be they composite cylinders or zirconium for helping to drive the global energy transition. We've spoken a little bit about our expertise in high-performance materials, whether that's carbon fiber or magnesium alloys in zirconium, and how that's driving demand in aerospace and defense and healthcare and other markets. Touched a little bit on operational excellence. We are relentless in our pursuit of operational efficiency and taking advantage of our global manufacturing footprint.
We're continuing to go through a process of refining our portfolio to ensure we're focusing on the high-growth, high-return segments, and Steve's mentioned the project work he's doing to sell our Graphic Arts business, which is going to allow us to apply a sharper focus on our core growth areas, and just to summarize, everything we do, whether it's innovation or operational efficiency, is ultimately about delivering long-term value for our shareholders, maintaining a disciplined approach to these growth opportunities, and maximizing returns for our investors, so that, I think, is the 15 minutes we promised to give an overview of the business. Thanks for joining the call and your interest, and opportunity, Steve, for questions.
Absolutely. We do have some questions already coming in, Andy. We got some time, so I do remind everyone, if you haven't... If you joined late, if you have any questions for Andy and Steve, press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Type them in, and we'll get to as many as we can, time permitting. Got a couple of questions in early that I'm sure you were expecting. Not sure if you can add a ton of color, but the first one is: Can you add any updates on the sale of the Graphic Arts unit? Now, clearly, you don't provide your guidance does not include Graphic Arts. It's not. To remind everyone, we launched on coverage late last year.
Graphic Arts is not in our estimates, but people still want to know any updates on the expected sale of that unit.
Great. Thanks for the,
Yeah-
... thanks for the interest in that. That's a relatively small business unit there that we're selling. Steve's been running that process for us. So, go ahead, Steve.
Yeah. So, just to recap, so this is a business which it's been a very good business for us over the years. We basically started that off around about two thousand and three. It's been a very good cash generator for us for many years. It did have some challenges over the last couple of years with magnesium price and also from competition. And we have recognized for a few years that it doesn't really fit the strategy of the other two segments. So we took the decision to sell it at the start of this year. So been progressing very well. As I've said previously, we had around about a hundred, more than a hundred potential buyers interested.
We then narrowed that down to a shortlist, and we've been working with an exclusive buyer for a few weeks now. I've said previously, we expected to complete before the end of the year, maybe a little bit sooner. We haven't announced anything further yet on that, so it's still-
Yeah
... progressing. It hasn't gone through as we're talking because we haven't announced it. But we're still confident we'll be able to get through there by the end of the year.
Okay. Another question. A couple of things that have generated the much better results this year. One, with the new, and we'll, I'll ask more about this in a minute, but the new SCBA agreements. The other one being that you were able to obtain new supply of lower-cost magnesium. But yet I know you continue to get this question, I hear this question a lot, is, 'cause they're very secretive, any updates on the U.S. Magnesium supply?
Yes. So, for people less familiar with that in terms of magnesium supply, there are a number of suppliers of magnesium around the world. In the United States, practically the only one, the largest one, is a company called US Magnesium. Their facility went offline nearly two years ago now for some extensive maintenance work. That facility has not come back on online. But the rest of the global supply chains adapted to that now. So magnesium's readily available in the global markets. We buy magnesium from a number of different suppliers.
So, we'd welcome magnesium, US Magnesium back into the market, if that happens at some point in the future. But we're not dependent on that, and frankly, we're very pleased with the performance of other suppliers. So, there was a price spike in magnesium back in 2022 , 2023 , but that's largely worked its way out of the market now. No, we don't have any special insight into US Magnesium to share with people. We've moved on, and very pleased with our current suppliers, Steve.
Excellent. We've covered those two issues. Now let's talk a little bit about the growth opportunities, which people are getting pretty excited about. If you can talk a little bit about, Cummins has been pretty outspoken, you know, about what they think is the opportunities with the new CNG engine. One of your only real competitor for providing cylinders has also been very outspoken about what they see for growth. Can you tell what the impact can be and how prepared you are, if in fact, Cummins has success with the new engine?
Yes, yes. Be pleased to do that. So, this new engine that Cummins have put out has performed very well in some of the early evaluations of it. It is now on the market. It's offering people the opportunity to use CNG, either for economic benefit reasons, because CNG is a very cost-effective fuel, but also for clean energy. It's a clean-burning fuel compared to some of the traditional fuels. And our part in that value chain is to provide the cylinders that contain the compressed natural gas to power the engine. We've made cylinders for this market sector for over 20 years.
But this Cummins engine, some people believe could be a game changer in opening up the heavy-duty markets to using CNG. Over the last years, it's really been restricted to niche areas like trash trucks and city buses. So, we share the excitement in what this product could do. Our participation in the value chain is to provide the cylinders that in turn go into a system manufactured by a third party. That third party, though, is a joint venture of Cummins. They're called Cummins Clean Fuel Technologies.
They make a super system, and you're right, they compete in that space with a company called Hexagon. So, anticipating that demand, we've been supplying actually quite a number of cylinders as pre-build ahead of the launch of the engine into Cummins Clean Fuel Technologies. We've ramped up capacity in the two plants that we have are making that product. One of those is in the U.S., one of those is in Canada. And we have a further investment that's planned to go into that space in 2025 . So, yes, expectations are high for this product, Steve.
We will see the traction that it gets in the marketplace. If it takes off, we are ready.
Good to know. The other side, I want to talk about, the bulk gas transport modules out of that new facility in the U.K., which is a little bit different. This isn't. You're not just building the cylinders now, you're building the modules. Can you talk a little bit about what you think the opportunity was and why you built that facility now?
Yes. In the European market, we've made systems, not just cylinders, we've made systems for a number of years that get used on trucks and buses, as we were discussing. We have a new product that we've been developing over the last year, and we've constructed a facility to manufacture that. And as you suggest, that's a bulk gas module that contains up to 50 cylinders. And the products used for moving gases from where they're generated to where they're needed.
That sort of products, those products have been used over a long period of time, but they're getting a lot of traction now in Europe for moving hydrogen from where it's generated to where it's needed. So we will begin manufacturing that product right at the end of this year, ramping up sales during 2025. And there, Steve, we have put out a number. We've indicated the capacity of our facility there as $40 million, $40 million dollars. Now, we will not sell that next year through the launch phase. But it does give people some idea about what we see the potential of that product could be long term.
We've been really excited about the initial levels of interest we've seen from a variety of potential customers, all keen to take the first few units.
Who uses that? Who are the buyers?
Yes. So we see a broad spectrum of operators of a module like that. Some of that are traditional gas companies, major industrial gas companies. So think about Air Liquide or Air Products, Linde. Many of the global gas companies use that product, but also what we would call new energy companies. Companies that are embracing the alternative fuel and the hydrogen revolution in Europe and helping wind farms with production of hydrogen and then transporting that across Europe. So yeah, large, like we have a large funnel actually, of interested parties in the product range.
Excellent. We do have a question about how your sales structure works, 'cause you're selling into a lot. You sell a lot of different products into a lot of different markets. Can you talk a little bit about how the sales structure works and, you know, how these businesses tie together?
Yeah. So we're our target audience our target markets tends to be large OEMs in the main. So on the cylinder side of the business. Think, I think large companies like 3M buy a lot of our product and Mine Safety Appliances out of Pittsburgh buy a lot of our product. So we have a network of sales managers employed by Luxfer around the world. They are segmented by Gas Cylinders and Elektron. We don't wholesale the product, so they're sold through those different teams.
In some of the emerging markets, we use a network of distributors to assist with that. But most of our sales are direct sales.
Okay. And, you know, it leads us into the question about the strategic review that was completed earlier this year. One of them was to sell, determined that the Graphic Arts sales made sense, and that's a process you've pursued. The other one, which you've said is not necessarily short term, is maybe Elektron and Gas Cylinders. There's not necessarily a clear strategic tie.
Yes. Thank you. We conducted a strategic review that we launched about a year ago now. And perhaps the most important conclusion of that strategic review was how much potential we believe there is in the Elektron and Gas Cylinders business. Elektron really continued to grow in its profitable niches, and cylinders with what seemed to be some tremendous opportunities in the field of alternative fuel. We kind of underscored, underlined our desire to invest in those business first for growth in the future. Two of the other conclusions were, as you've said, that graphic arts no longer fits in our portfolio.
But looking at the Elektron and Cylinder businesses, we specifically called out, we've probably known this for some time, but we specifically called out that there are no direct synergies between Gas Cylinders and Elektron. They can cohabit together very successfully. They have done for over forty years under common ownership, but there are no direct synergies between them. So we identified the possibility that some stage in the future that the business could be separated. I think it's important, though, Steve, for me to highlight we're not going through any live process for that at the moment. We're monitoring the performance of those two business units. We're monitoring external market conditions.
Okay. Do you have a question? Because we covered a couple of the growth areas, talked about a lot of the challenges you've addressed and actually corrected with the, with the SCBA agreement and with, with the lower cost magnesium supply. You have another number of really good growth opportunities, but what are the challenges? What, what keeps you up at night?
Something keeps me up at night, but it's more excitement for the future rather than concerns. Look, the magnesium supply crisis was difficult for us, and in two thousand and 2022 and 2023, when inflation was high, certainly some of the long-term contracts that we had with big OEMs was a drag on our performance. We reset those contracts at the back end of 2023 . We've configured those in a slightly different way so that we can more quickly pass on any changes we might see in material costs in the future.
So, I really appreciate the way our customers have stuck with us through that, have embraced some higher pricing, and we got some better contractual terms going forward on those. So, yeah, I'm excited about the future, Steve, as you can probably tell.
How important is product development to your future growth? You mentioned the ration heaters. You have that new ready heat, the new ration heater. How important is product development moving forward for you guys?
Yeah, it's very important for us. In the Elektron side of the business, our strategy over a long period of time is to call out profitable niches where we can do different things that other people can't. So, so we're continually investing in the innovation of those projects and the products, and finding new opportunities to deploy them that really create really great value. And so, maintaining that funnel is a really key part of the Luxfer Business System. On the Gas Cylinders side, we invest to make sure we remain the market leader in terms of the cylinder technology that we deploy.
And if you're looking for a high-pressure cylinder, if you're looking for a lightweight cylinder, that Luxfer is the first name that you call. So yeah, that's a key materials technology. It's how the business was founded, Steve.
Yeah.
It's a key part of our values.
So we covered a lot of ground. Any closing thoughts you wanna leave people with?
Yeah. I appreciate everybody's time and interest in listening in. We're excited about the progress we've made with the business on our operational simplification, and excited about the opportunities for profitable growth in the years ahead. Thank you, everyone.
Excellent. That was Andy Butcher, CEO, Steve Webster, CFO of Luxfer. If we didn't get to your questions, please reach out to me at Sidoti or reach out directly to Luxfer. I'm sure everyone would be happy to address any follow-up questions. Thanks so much for being here, and thanks everyone for joining us to hear more about Luxfer. Thanks, everyone.