Okay, good morning, everyone. My name is John Franzreb. I'm an analyst at Sidoti & Company. Our first presentation of the day is Matthews International, ticker MATW. For those not familiar with Matthews, Matthews is a manufacturer of diversified products to the industrial, deathcare, and branding markets. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO Joe Bartolacci and CFO Steve Nicola. Following a presentation, there will be time for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A icon to submit questions, and I will present them to management. With that said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us this morning. The floor is yours.
Good morning. Thank you. I'll kick it off to talk about the history of the company, and then I'll let Joe jump in with a little bit of extra detail on the businesses themselves. But I'm Steve Nicola. I'm the company's Chief Financial Officer. And Matthews is a company of three business segments, diversified, as John just pointed out: the industrial technology segment, our memorialization segment, and our brand solution segment. One of the common questions that we typically get out of the gate is, how do we end up in these three businesses? We're a 175-year-old company. This year, how do we end up in these three businesses? It's really in our history. What I mean by that is, and just very briefly, in 1994, we went public on NASDAQ. In 1994, if you read our prospectus from then, we were an identification products company.
That's what we call ourselves. Everything that we did either identified a product, a building, or a person. One hundred seventy-five years ago, we started out with hand stamps and branding irons. Those were the origins of our industrial technologies businesses, those marking products. By the late 1800s, early 1900s, we were doing printing plates, primarily rubber printing plates that were used to print packages. At the time, it was basically corrugated boxes, one-color block letters that would say it would have the product name, this end up, that type of printing. By the early 1900s, we were doing bronze plaques for basically building signs and other types of identification. We had a customer in the 1920s that had requested that we do a bronze plaque as a cemetery marker.
About 75 years into our existence, that was our first memorialization product, our first cemetery memorial. Those were our three businesses primarily through when we went public, those identification products businesses. When we went public and had greater access to the capital markets, that's when we started a program of our next evolutions where we were extending those businesses and growing those businesses. The simplest one to think about, memorialization, where not only did we do cemetery memorials, bronze memorials, we did granite, we moved into caskets, we moved into cremation equipment, cremation-related products. Basically, all things memorialization. Those printing plates that I talked about, we moved not only from we were not only doing the corrugated boxes, but we moved to what we call primary packaging, store shelf packaging, which had the advanced graphics to it.
Then we moved upstream as well, meaning we're doing the design work as well as the pre-press work related to packages. Again, that's now what we call our SGK brand solution segment. The industrial technology segment started with those simple marking products to the consumables that are used in those products, meaning ink and inkjet printers, the software that directs the print in a production line process, meaning telling the printer what to print, to the readers that read that print and move products around the warehouse, our warehouse automation solutions business. Really, everything that we do has been an evolution from what we had done previously.
The most recent, most exciting evolution today is in the energy storage solutions space, where we started with printing technology, steel cylinders, and extended the use of those steel cylinders into calendering equipment that today provides the ability to calendar dry lithium-ion-rich powder into sheet for use in electric vehicle batteries. This page simply provides not only our revenue percentages by segment last year, but by geography. You'll note our largest segment from a revenue standpoint is our memorialization segment, and then geographically, largest in the Americas, predominantly the United States, but obviously a significant presence in Europe as well.
My name is Joe Bartolacci. I'm the President and CEO of the company. I'll pick it up from here. Let me just talk to you a little bit about some of the most exciting parts of our business. We'll start off first with our engineering business, our EV battery business. Many of you may be aware of the EV market and what's happening around the world with respect to batteries. We operate in this space. We've operated in this space for a better part of a decade. Everything in the marketplace today is what is called wet electrode. Wet electrode is the process of taking lithium-rich material, adding a solvent to it to create a slurry. That slurry coats copper and aluminum sheets. You can see an example of an aluminum sheet on the machine that's sitting there right now.
It gets coated onto that and then baked off in an oven that is about 100 meters long and operates at very high temperatures and is relatively slow. That process is very energy intensive, very capital intensive, very space intensive, highly pollutant, as you have to recapture all of that solvent as it is being evaporated away. It leaves a battery that is very porous as a result of that. What you ultimately end up with is the batteries that you have in the marketplace today. It is a technology that has been around for a long, long time. Most of that effort has been done in the Asia-Pacific region, a lot of it in China and elsewhere, in Korea and in Japan. We operated with companies like BASF, Bosch, ExxonMobil, VARTA in the European and American markets for wet electrode, but ultimately, those businesses went to Asia.
About a decade ago, we started doing some research thanks to a German research institute that involves government funding to allow us to look at next-generation battery production. That next-generation battery production is what's called dry electrode technology. What dry electrode technology does is takes the same lithium-rich material, adds a binder, but no solvent. That binder today oftentimes is Teflon. That binder then is mixed together with that energy, with the lithium material.
It is then run through our calendering and laminating equipment to create a solid sheet through high pressures, high forces, and tensions to create a sheet that is then laminated onto the copper and aluminum in the same process, eliminating all of the slurry, all the environmental issues, all of that 100-meter oven that you have out there, and ending up with a more energy-dense battery because you don't have the porosity that's left over whenever you evaporate that solvent. Dry battery electrode, we believe, reduces total investment by 70%, reduces labor by 75%, reduces utility consumption by 75%, eliminates all the solvents and all the environmental impact that is out there, and improves battery performance because of the density you get out of the electrode that's being produced. All in all, better, cheaper battery. We started working with this in about 2015, 2016.
Ultimately, we found a partner in a company by the name of Maxwell Technologies. Maxwell came to us looking for this similar solution for their ultracapacitors. ultracapacitors are energy storage devices, not too dissimilar to energy storage batteries that are used for EVs. We did that for them, produced a dry powder ultra capacitor material. They then came to us with a bag of lithium-rich material and said, "Can you do this?" We laminated, we compressed that lithium-rich material into a solid sheet and laminated it onto copper and aluminum to create the dry battery electrode. We were in the midst of beginning to market this, joining into a joint venture agreement to market this around the world to battery providers and auto manufacturers in 2018 when Tesla acquired Maxwell. The story goes from there. We began, started working with Tesla in late 2018.
In 2019, we did $20 million. We did $50 million the year after that, $80 million. We then landed a $200 million order for their first production lines. Those production lines are still in the works as we speak right now. They have slowed, as many of you know about Tesla. Their volumes have slowed. Their need for batteries have slowed. The dry battery electrode technology we sold to them is going into their Cybertruck, which has not done very well. As a result, they've kind of slowed their development. We have about $75 million worth of equipment still sitting on our properties ready to be delivered. We expect those to be delivered over the next 6 months-12 months.
They've announced publicly they're going to put the dry battery electrode into their next vehicle, which is the Model Y that comes out here at the end of the year. We expect that to continue the development as we go forward and will be part of their portfolio of solutions going forward, if not all of their solutions as we move. Steve, you want to move forward? The next business in our industrial technology segment is our warehouse automation business. In the warehouse automation business, we are a leading provider of warehouse execution software. Many of you know companies like Manhattan, which are warehouse management softwares. We operate one level below them. We actually run the products that are in the warehouse itself. You can see an example of an automated warehouse on the pictures on the right.
Our products identify what is to be picked on the shelf. Once that is put onto a conveyor, we manage that conveyor's movement throughout that warehouse and re-aggregate it into single orders. We then pick it up at the end and drop it down to an individual operator to bag it or to box it or whatever it may be. We ultimately pick it up again for companies like FedEx that uses our software to manage it through their distribution system. This is a software-based business. Many of you have seen what has slowed down in some of the warehouse capital that has gone over the last 24 months or so. We are starting to see a pickup in this business again this year. It has been a little bit cyclical because it is a high capital-intensive industry.
We are a leading independent provider in the space and have some unique properties that allow us to match with some of the best operators in the world, allowing companies to pick best of breed out there, whether you want robotics, whether you want particular conveying systems, sorting systems, whatever it may be. There are turnkey providers who will provide you a warehouse solution that is just turn the key and it's all yours. Many are moving to what I would call best of breed, where best of breed allows you to pick that best operator for whatever system that you need. We're perfectly suited to be able to do that. The next business, our product identification business. You heard Steve talk about our history. Our history starts in this place right here. This is where we started 160, 175 years ago.
This is what was the hand stamp and branding iron has moved into industrial printing. We are a leading provider of heavy industry marking equipment. An example of that you see on the bottom right-hand picture on the steel tubes there. We put industrial marks on piping, on rubber, on gypsum board, on lumber. This is an important part of our business, a wonderful place to be because of our position. It is a high consumable business. Consumables principally in this business are inks, and inks come with significant margins. We've always wanted to move into the greatest part of the market. You can move to the next page for a second, Steve. The greatest part of the market is what you see on the right-hand side is what's called continuous inkjet.
Continuous inkjets, what you see on food products coming by your grocery stores, things like expiration dates, lot numbers, born-on dates, whatever you want to call them for track and trace for food purposes and for other barcodes and things of that nature that are associated with fast-moving consumer goods. Those products are important because of the amount of consumables that are associated with it. However, that product that is currently in the market today is a highly fragile product. It clogs, it breaks. It ultimately creates a problem for the operator because they have to shut down their line until that is repaired because regulations require there to be a mark on product as it's coming down that line.
We've never been able to get into this market, not because we don't have a product that works with it, but because you need a repair maintenance team that's at the ready at any time that that may be. We can't afford that kind of a maintenance team to be available because we don't have the revenue. I don't get the revenue because I don't have the repair maintenance team. As a result, it's a chicken or the egg. We've never been able to enter the market. Over the last several years, we've spent some research and development dollars in developing a breakthrough technology in this space, which is a disposable printhead. That disposable printhead eliminates the need for the repair and maintenance itself help.
Ultimately, the operator at the site, whether it be a Coca-Cola bottling company or a food packaging company, opens up the front of that printer, pulls out the old printhead, puts another one in, and goes. We will convert the repair and maintenance portion of the market, which is about a 1/3 of that $2 billion market we estimate to be the market opportunity. We will convert that into a consumable. And that consumable is our printhead. That printhead is patented and is going to market this summer. We think this is a significant opportunity as well as we move forward going forward. Those are the three businesses we think have the most excitement around our portfolio, but that does not mean we do not have significant value embedded in the rest of the business as well. In our memorialization business.
We are a leading provider of cemetery, funeral home, and cremation equipment products around the world. When it comes to the casket business, we are the number two provider, only behind Batesville. Together, we operate at about 75% of the market. We are the number one provider of cemetery products, and we are the global leading provider of cremation equipment. This is a business that does about $850 million worth of revenue, $160 million worth of EBITDA, a tremendously stable business, not a growing business of great significance. You'll see this being relatively choppy. You're going to see periods of time when it goes up, periods of times when it goes down. However, much has been discussed about the growing trend of cremation. Steve and I have been here since this trend was about 10%. We're closer to 60% cremation at this point in time.
Business has grown from about $60 million- $850 million during that time period. We still think there's opportunity to continue to grow this slowly, but as we go forward. What you see on the left-hand side is the Census Bureau's projections of total number of deaths at the top. You can see the COVID pandemic going through that period of time in 2021 and 2022, and you can see the projected number of deaths growing from now to 2040. The important part of that is you see that most of that growth in the number of total deaths will be cremated. However, if you look at the bottom, that represents the estimation of what total burials will be during that time, as you can tell, a relatively stable burial rate. That's where we make the predominant portion of our dollars today.
However, what we do not think the market understands about this part of the business is we currently do over $140 million of cremation products and services already. That continues to grow at high single digits, and we expect that to continue to be a growth part of this story as we go forward. Together with price on our overall portfolio, we think this portfolio of memorialization products grows at a modest 1%-2% going forward and with very, very steady earnings on the bottom line. Last, the last part of our business is our SGK brand solutions business. We have operated in this space since the early 1920s. We vulcanized our first rubber printing plate in, I think it was 1925, 1930, Steve, you may recall.
I know you were around by then, but anyway, what we do is we help consumer products companies go to market with their designs for packaging. An example we see here, Coca-Cola, a large customer of ours. We help them make sure that their Coca-Cola labeling is consistent and printable throughout every size, every SKU, consistent with regulatory requirements in any particular market it may be. We also help them with adaptations if they wanted to add a cherry Coke to it, if they wanted to add any other flavorings to it. We do that from a creative standpoint to help them do that. At the end of the day, we ultimately go through and help them produce the tooling that is necessary to print that in any part of the world that they have that. Different printers use different kinds of tooling.
We are the leading provider of rotogravure cylinders in the European market and one of the leading providers of flexographics, printing plates you see above that on the right-hand side in the world as well. The important part too, Steve.
Yeah, and Joe, just to point out, it's the extension of those rotogravure cylinders, the applications of the use of those steel cylinders that took us to the calendering equipment that we talked about a few minutes ago.
Yep. The important part of this story is that we recently announced a transaction where we will merge our business with a number two competitor in the space, SGS. That transaction is expected to close here early part of May. In that transaction, the two companies coming together will have roughly $900 million worth of revenue and about $100 million worth of EBITDA.
As part of our transaction, we will receive about $350 million worth of consideration at closing, $250 million in cash, a $50 million preferred instrument that we expect to be restructured out in 12 months- 24 months and get paid back, as well as $50 million worth of retained receivables that we will use to reduce some securitization that we have on receivables that are out there. $350 million expected to be delivered to us here early in May. We also retained a 40% interest in the combined entity. Let me tell you a little bit about the combined entity. As I said, $900 million in revenue, $100 million in EBITDA, $50 million of anticipated synergies. Those $50 million of synergies we think are highly achievable. That's about what we achieved when we acquired SGK in 2014.
We think there's more synergies out there, but we're confident that the $50 million that we'll go out and we'll talk about today is what will be delivered for sure. We expect that those $50 million worth of synergies will take about 24 months-36 months to be achieved. Sometime during that time period, we will exit. Our total anticipated exit from this portion of our portfolio, together with other retained assets that we have, we expect to be somewhere in the vicinity of $650 million-$700 million at the end of the day, assuming that we execute properly on the synergy capture. At the end of the day, this asset alone will substantially deliver us almost to zero. We have about $760 million worth of net debt today.
This asset, as I said, should generate $650 million-$700 million, take away some of the taxes that are associated, some of the transaction costs, and we'll be substantially debt-free when this is done. What that leaves you with is the balance of the portfolio I just spoke to you about, a memorialization business, which by itself is worth probably twice what our market cap is today. It leaves you an energy business that has a very, very, very significant value that is associated with it and two other businesses that we have significant hope going forward as we launch new technologies in that space into the disruptive part of the world. I was trying to keep us to the 20 minutes, John, and I wanted to make sure I left you the time to get some questions.
I'm going to move it over to Steve and let him finish it up, and then we can turn it on to questions.
Yeah. Just quickly through some of the key investment highlights, as Joe pointed out, particularly with memorialization, we've got some very interesting growth opportunities in our industrial technology segment supported by very good cash flow generating and stable memorialization business. We talked about our competitive positions in these attractive markets, good cash flow history, discipline track record when it comes to investments, and a strong and experienced management team. When we talk about our capital allocation, because we know that's important today, particularly given where our leverage profile is today. With respect to long-term growth, we continue to believe each of our businesses have good organic growth opportunities, not only inherent in their markets, but with the investment opportunities that we have in each of them.
We are working, we're prioritizing debt reduction today. We reported at the end of December a net leverage ratio in the high threes. With the SGK transaction and cash flow for the remainder of the year, we do expect a significant reduction in that leverage ratio. We continue to return cash to shareholders on a consistent long-term basis. We've been a dividend payer for as long as we've been a public company. Even before then, we have an active share repurchase program that's been in place for a long time, and we use that opportunistically in periods of excess cash flow. You can see we do have remaining authorization at this time. Those are the capital allocation, that's the capital allocation summary. I think at this point, I'll open it up for questions.
Great, gentlemen. Thank you.
I'm going to go straight to the Q&A from the audience, given the limited remaining time. Audience member wants to know, what's the status of the mediation with Tesla and what progress are you making selling the battery solutions since the court order?
Yep. I’ll take that, Steve. As many of you already know, we were in litigation with Tesla that was private until they went public with it last June. We did not speak much about it, but in February of this year, we announced that the confidential arbitration that we've been working with them on, that we've been litigating with them, was ruled upon in our favor. That ruling is definitive. We own the intellectual property associated with our technology. We own the right to sell it to whomever we want. Tesla owns the license to use that technology only.
Now, it doesn't mean they can't develop something on their own or whatever it may be, but at the end of the day, we are free to sell that to whomever we want. Many of you may know they continue to try to slow us down. They filed a temporary restraining order. They lost that. They have filed it to try to invalidate our patent. They will lose that. We have opened our doors, as we said during our earnings call. Today, we're sitting at over $50 million worth of quotes already in less than a month. We expect that to continue to move forward. The one thing I will tell you is look at the progress as how we made it with Tesla. We're going to have to build that portfolio again.
The difference will be is we'll be building with multiple customers rather than with just one.
Question about who are you competing against in the continuous inkjet market? Do they currently provide or developing replaceable inkjet heads?
Nobody right now is in the marketplace with a replaceable printhead. We compete with a former company of Danaher. They were just spun off as part of that spinoff they did at Danaher. I can't remember the name. Dover has one. ITW has one. But they all have similar products. This is a disruptive technology that will be significantly different to what they have.
Joe, you might want to also talk about our 2D capability with the new product versus the other one.
Yeah. The one thing that is important for everybody to understand, the marketplace is moving to what's called 2D barcodes. 2D barcodes look a lot like QR codes.
They have multiples of the amount of information that are sitting in a barcode today, allowing for better track and trace. That is becoming regulatory requirements in Europe, I believe, in 2027, coming to the United States thereabout as well. No current technology allows you to do that. Ours is the only one that can. Our competitors have to be working on a solution. I do not know what it is, but no one's in the marketplace today with it. Our advantage is we have that product, and we also have the ability to dispose of it and make it very, very successful for maintenance on their own.
Question about material costs in the memorialization segment. How are you going to manage those fluctuations that we're going to see? I want to add on to that.
Did that business follow the trends in the influenza season in the March quarter?
Two parts of that. From a commodity standpoint, I mean, you all know what's going on. We see copper going sky high as we see it as whatever it may be. The one thing about our industry that I think you've seen will be proven for a long, long time, we pass those costs on. It may take a quarter. It may take two, whatever it may be. At the end of the day, if the costs look like they are permanently going to be higher for an extended period of time, we will raise our prices, and the market will accept that.
As it relates to volumes, John, we had a difficult quarter last time, but that quarter has more to do with the trailing ends of COVID backlogs being worked through that did not occur last quarter. I would tell you we are really back to normal in a lot of respects. We are seeing a higher death rate because of flu season, as you might expect.
The one add to that, John, particularly in our December quarter, the revenue decline, a significant component of that related to our European cremation equipment business. That for several years has been a challenging market for us. We exited that business in September. The result was that we did not have the sales this year compared to a year ago.
On the positive side, and the reason why despite the sales decline, our adjusted EBITDA was relatively flat is because those losses a year ago did not repeat this year because we exited the business. That was another item in the comparison.
Makes sense. Question is, can your automation solutions scale across different industries? Are they tailored to specific verticals? In other words, are you focusing on custom solutions or a standard automation system?
We have multiple strategies going forward. First is other industries, including manufacturing. It is applicable to anything that is out there when it comes to automation, whether it is moving product around a conveyor, moving product through a production site. It is also applicable to multiple geographies. We are now extending it into Europe.
We're also looking to standardize it into a more off-the-shelf solution that can be used by smaller players without having to customize it for everybody. We have three strategies going in that business. We think it's a great opportunity to continue to grow. Again, the software business, low CapEx, a lot of cash flow, and good margins.
Somebody wants to know, how aggressive will you be with share buybacks?
Steve?
It's an interesting question, John. Certainly, our priority recently in the near term continues to be debt reduction. However, at these prices, it's a little bit difficult not to look at share repurchases. I would tell you that once we close on the SGK transaction, we receive that initial cash that we're expecting to receive. That's certainly going to be something we're going to take a look at.
Fair enough. We're into overtime.
Any closing remarks, gentlemen?
No, we appreciate the time and having you all listen to us. I know we rushed through a lot of this. There's a lot to cover, but we are open to speaking to any of you at any point in time to give you more detail.
Thank you very much for presenting, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye now.