All right. Good morning, everyone. Jeff Elliott with Three Part Advisors. Next presenting company is Miller Industries, MLR. With us here today from the company, Will Miller, the CEO; Debbie Whitmire-sorry, Debbie Whitmire, the CFO; and Nick Tiano. What's your title?
Vestor Relations.
Investor Relations. With that, I'll just turn it over to Will.
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. We have a small group today, so certainly we'll pivot and answer any questions that you guys have towards the end, but we'll run through the presentation as planned. We're going to start with a quick little four-minute video that we've put together for IR purposes. It is also available on our website as well if you want to go back and watch it later.
Miller Industries was founded in 1990. Since its inception, the company has provided innovative, high-quality towing and recovery equipment worldwide. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Miller Industries has a total of four manufacturing facilities in the U.S., as well as one in England and one in France, under the well-known brands of Century, Vulcan, Chevron, Holmes, Boniface, and GJ. As the industry leader, Miller Industries provides a complete line of quality equipment, including carriers up to 30 ft in length with deck capabilities up to 40,000 lbs, and towing recovery units with boom capabilities up to 100 tons. Like all great products, engineering and attention to detail are at the forefront. Our on-site fabrication facilities are key to our innovation and essential for rapid prototyping or part supplementation. Innovation is key to our product line.
Innovation in weight capacity, tow capacity, and most importantly, innovation in the safety of our trucks. Just what is a tow truck? For the purposes of this demonstration, a tow truck is a vehicle married to a wrecker body, and Miller Industries makes a whole range of various wrecker bodies. How do we build one? We start with a blank slate of a vehicle, otherwise known as a commercial chassis. The chassis has a cab on the front and nothing on the rear just yet, at least not until we put a wrecker body there. Prior to the wrecker being installed onto the chassis, the subframe is assembled in our weld shop. Subframe assembly can take up to 50-60 hours using both robotic and human welders. Once a unit leaves weld, it is taken to our blasting and painting facilities.
We blast the welded components prior to painting them with a primer before we top them off with a finish paint. Once all the components are painted inside and out, we move them over to our assembly area where our wiring, wiring harnesses, valves, electric, and control stations for the wrecker are built and hand-assembled. At this point, the wrecker body is ready to move to distribution or over to our factory install area, where we will mount the PTO on the pump and attach the subframe to the mounting frame and onto the vehicle. After this, the toolbox is wired in with our lights, power door locks, and wiring harnesses that were assembled earlier. At this point, the vehicle is starting to look a bit more like a tow truck. The wrecker body is attached to the vehicle, but it's still missing the toolboxes.
With the toolboxes still uninstalled, we take the unit back to paint, where the unit is stretched out and washed with a deionizing wash, where we eliminate any particulates or dust before taking the unit to final paint. Once the unit has its final paint, it's time to take the truck over to dress out and see it come to life. This is the final stop before becoming a finished truck. In the dress-out bays, we take all of the components we were working with before and we bring them all together. The toolboxes are installed, the final wiring for the lights, the electronics are attached to the hydraulic systems, we put the accessories in the toolboxes, and we finish the truck according to the exact specifications of each customer.
Once everything is installed and the truck is finished, we have a dedicated team that works through all of the features and the line items to make sure the truck checks all the boxes on quality and specifications before moving on to our worldwide distribution network. Miller Industries' products are sold and serviced through the largest distribution network in the industry. As the world leader in towing and recovery, we look forward to continued growth and success.
Looks like it was right there.
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. It's a quick little video. Like I said, it's available on our website. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of the process of actually taking raw materials and bringing them all the way through to finished manufactured product. Quick safe harbor statement, as you guys are all aware. More than welcome to read that in any of our filings. As the world's largest manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment, founded in 1990, based in Ooltewah, Tennessee, suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee, with operations in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, England, and France, with approximately 1,700 worldwide employees. We have a variety of products that we manufacture in different product categories: light-duty recovery units, car carriers, specialty transport vehicles, medium and heavy-duty recovery units, rotators, and military recovery vehicles.
We function on a very simple philosophy, which is that we have the best people and the best products and the best distribution network in the towing and recovery industry. That has been our core philosophy since 1990, since our inception, and we continue to focus on what brings the success to our organization over the past 30 years. Investment highlights: we are the world leader in the towing and recovery manufacturing segment, as we said. Consistent organic growth: we have paid consistently 57 quarters, I believe, of dividend to our shareholders. We are the industry leader in innovation, best-in-class products in distribution, strong customer relationships. The towing and recovery industry is very family-oriented. Average fleet size here in the U.S. is about 5-15 vehicles. A lot of small entrepreneurs that enjoy doing business, generational business with their supplier. Attractive financial metrics and an experienced management team.
Our compounded annual growth rate, as you can see here, since 1990 is approximately 13.5%. As I mentioned, experienced management team. We have a little over 200 years at Miller Industries and a little more than that in industry experience in our senior management team. Our strategy is simple: develop a world-class team, innovate, design, and produce the highest quality products in the industry, locate, develop, and maintain a five-star distribution network globally, continue to invest in our business, and grow both commercial market share, explore new market potentials, and develop innovative products to create new opportunities for our consumers. The towing and recovery industry is a multi-billion dollar global market. Primary market segments that we focus on are commercial towing, transport fleets, which will be rental and salvage related.
For a little bit more depth, we do provide products to the major rental companies here in the U.S.: Sunbelt Rentals, Herc Rentals, as well as Copart, which is the largest salvage company here in the U.S. Primary product types we went through earlier. Industry drivers: what we focus on and what we pay attention to, miles driven, both commercially and from non-commercial individuals. Accidents per miles driven, last-mile driven deliveries, so the increase of commercial operations delivering Amazon packages and things of that to consumers. General infrastructure and construction. Natural disasters do play a role in increased demand for our products.
Some accelerators that have been created over the last four to five years, we've seen a reduction in the trade cycle, which runs currently on our lighter-duty product around 42 months, so right at about four years, and five years to six years on our Class 8, our larger product. Future emission changes: we've seen emission changes on diesel engines starting in 2007, again in 2010, 2014, and the next major emission change happens next year for 2027. Global conflict: we are a military vehicle manufacturer, so global conflict does increase demand for our product. And then military recovery vehicle upgrades. As militaries have started to use more and more armored vehicle carriers, and they've upfitted a lot of their products with armor to protect the soldiers, the current vehicle fleets that they have are incapable of actually recovering the heavier products.
They're looking to upgrade their fleets so that they have the ability to recover the vehicles if and when the time comes. As we mentioned in the video, we have four locations here in the U.S., manufacturing locations, one in England, one in France. We continue to invest in our manufacturing facilities. When people look at priority for our capital allocation, returning money to our shareholders, but then investing in what creates the product itself, which is our manufacturing facilities globally. We also invest in our people. We believe highly that people really bring our company together, both employee health and safety, employee engagement, and development. We have a lot of potential internal career paths for all of our employees at all of our facilities.
When you look at sales channels, revenue streams, North American distribution is our largest revenue stream, exporting product outside of the United States globally, our European operations, national accounts, as I mentioned, with the rental companies and Copart, government contracts, military contracts, aftermarket parts, and chassis sales. North American distribution is approximately 53 distributors, principals, with 75 distributor locations. What's interesting to our distribution network from our competitors and also a lot of other industries is 100% of our distributors are exclusive to Miller Industries. About 95% of them only sell towing and recovery equipment, so they're very focused on moving our product on a daily basis. There are approximately 300 retail salespeople that work for the 75 distributor locations here in the United States. Average fleet size is approximately 10-15 trucks, with trade cycles varying between that four to six years.
A lot of that's driven on the warranty offerings that we provide them. So we provide, through our chassis program, a proprietary warranty with the Cummins engine, five years, 300,000 miles, which is really driving that trade cycle to fit within the warranty offering of the OEM on the chassis, which ultimately reduces the cost of ownership for the consumer. International manufacturing facilities: as we mentioned, we have facilities. Our GJ brand is built in France. The headquarters there is in Revigny, and our Boniface brand is built in Thetford, England. They have strong backlogs at both facilities. We currently have announced an expansion project in France and look to continue to take advantage of our opportunity of growth in the European market. There's approximately 30-plus distributors globally outside of the United States.
Once you get into the European market and a little bit outside of the United States, there's a lot more direct-to-consumer sale than through the distribution network. We export to approximately 60 countries globally. When you look at growth opportunities, global military contracts over the last few quarters or year or so, we've seen an increase in RFQs or requests for quotes from global militaries, our allies around the world. Rental industry market share: we believe we're scratching the surface with getting our products into the major fleets of United, Sunbelt, and Herc, but they only equate for approximately 25-30% of the total rental market. As we continue to push our distribution to get in front of the smaller rental houses, it's a very fragmented industry similar to the towing industry.
Now that those consumers can see our product being used by the large major fleets, it's really allowed us to enter into the rest of the rental market as well. Expanding our global presence, consolidation of the European market. Our next biggest growth opportunity, we believe, is in Europe. Similar to what the U.S. was in the 1990s, it's extremely fragmented with approximately 49 manufacturing companies in the European market. We own two of those currently and are looking to continue to either greenfield or look at potential M&A opportunities in the European market. When we invest in our business, we continue to look at capital allocation with robotics, capacity, human capital. We've implemented a new ERP system in the last few years. It went live in January of 2022.
'21.
'21. January '21. Time flies. Continue to focus, obviously, on cybersecurity and risk assessment, research and development, vertical integration, and employee health and safety. Capital allocation priorities that we've discussed throughout this presentation, continuing with our quarterly dividend, debt reduction. We are a debt-averse company and certainly look to reduce our current debt load to maximize flexibility. We have approximately $20 million remaining on our current $25 million share repurchase program, focusing on innovation, automation, human capital, and capacity expansion. The small picture at the bottom right is an image of our new facility in France that we've just broken ground on. Moving over to the financial review, I'll pass it over to Debbie.
Thank you. This is just a quick look at our year-over-year results, 2023 versus 2024. For 2024, we did increase revenues by 9% to $1.26 billion, a slight increase in our gross profit year-over-year with a margin of 13.6%. That resulted in $63.5 million in net income or $5.47 per diluted share. This was a return on equity of 16.9%. During the year, we also returned $11.6 million to our shareholders through our dividend as well as stock repurchases. First quarter results, we did face some headwinds in the first quarter. We will talk about those on the next few slides, but our results were $225.7 million in revenue with a gross profit of 15%. That resulted in $8.1 million in net income or $0.69 per diluted share. We did return $4.4 million to the shareholders through both the stock repurchases and the dividend in the quarter as well.
That resulted in a 14.2% return on equity. Some of the key considerations we have for 2025 and kind of to go into those headwinds that we faced, obviously, the ever-changing tariff situation is something that we focus on every day, trying to establish what the impact of those will be on the company and take mitigating efforts to reduce those as much as possible. What we cannot reduce, pass that along to our customers so it does not erode our margins. The CARB and ACT, the emissions headwinds that we are facing in several states, we will touch on that a little bit more in a future slide, but that is impacting some of our distributors' ability to purchase product and get it into the market.
Inventory reduction, this is primarily at our field inventory for our distributors, but also a little bit for us internally through the supply chain efforts. We had overpurchased, if you will, to make sure we did not face those same headwinds. That has turned out to be an advantage for us as the tariffs have come into play. Working through that inventory and getting that working capital level back down to historical levels, that should free up some free cash flow, helping our distribution get that inventory down. We have also extended some terms for them, so it has slightly inflated our receivables, but we will be working through that throughout the course of the year.
As that free cash flow is available to us, like Will said, we're very debt-averse, so we'll be working to pay that debt level down for that flexibility that we'll need should these military RFQs turn into an actual purchase order. Also, growth opportunities, looking at various opportunities to either gain market share, expand our product line, whatever opportunities are out. Just to touch on the tariff a little bit more, as we've monitored the tariff situation through the first half of the year, we feel like we've put a price increase in place to cover the majority of what we've seen to date. However, with this last announcement of the 50% import tariff on steel, I wanted to bring one thing to your attention. There is one item that we purchase from Sweden from SSAB. It's called Strinx.
It's a product that is not available in the U.S., and it is used in our wrecker production. The high-tensile strength steel that we import from them has flexibility capabilities that no U.S. steel has been able to duplicate. We are monitoring this situation. We are leaving no stone unturned to try and alleviate this because we do feel it would have a negative impact on us if we have to pass this along to our customer in addition to what we have already put in place. It is a headwind that we are facing, but we are doing everything that we can to mitigate it. This is a slide that we put together just to kind of explain the fluctuations in our quarter-to-quarter gross margins.
The chassis that we purchase from the OEMs and pass along to our distribution network have a lower margin than the manufactured product that we build and sell to them. Through the supply chain issues, the flow of chassis and bodies was disrupted. We do not have as much control over what the OEMs deliver to our distributors. As those deliveries took place, you can see the spikes in the chassis revenue and how that impacts our gross margin. The more chassis we invoice to a customer, the more of a pull it puts of downward pressure it puts on our margin. If we have more manufactured deliveries, it gives us a benefit on the gross margin side. If you look year-over-year, it is pretty consistent. We have had gradual improvement over the last three years.
I think we've gone from about a 12% margin to 13.5-13.6% for last year. If you look, if once the flow of chassis and units normalizes, we should get away from these big volatile swings quarter to quarter. It is just a little bit of an explanation of why you're seeing those quarter to quarter, but year-over-year, it seems to have leveled itself out. Talking about distributor inventory, as those chassis deliveries were inconsistent, what happened at our distributor inventory level is you could see in 2023 that inventory started to decline as you were coming out of supply chain issues. Your chassis inventory exceeded your body inventory. What you're seeing now is a slight, I wouldn't necessarily call it a correction, just a normalization of that body to chassis inventory level.
If you can see in 2023 where it was kind of at an optimal level, it kind of peaked last year, mid-year, and it's working its way back down in the current state. We feel like we're on track to be where we need to be to get it normalized. It was just an adjustment period that we think we needed to do to keep our distribution network healthy. They don't need the carrying cost of all this equipment that they can't integrate and get out to the end-user customer. I'll turn it back over to Will to talk more about the initiatives.
Talk about California. Thank you, Debbie. So touch briefly on this. If you're not aware, there's a group called the CARB, or California Air Resources Board. They work closely historically with the EPA to set regulations. Under the last administration, they went above and beyond, were granted waivers by the U.S. government to actually exceed the EPA's regulations on chassis or commercial diesel engines. They put in place a requirement that you had to sell one ZEV truck or zero-emission vehicle, electric vehicle, to sell nine diesels in the state of California. That took effect last year in 2024. In 2025, another five states joined with them. Since the beginning of the year, Massachusetts has already decided to delay till 2027. The House of Representatives passed a bill to revoke the waiver. The U.S.
Senate had a bill drafted, Bill 699, I believe it was, to revoke the waiver as well. The U.S. Senate, a few weeks ago, did pass a Congressional Review Act, a CRA, to actually revoke the waiver. Since then, the state of California has sued the federal government, and it'll work its way through the court system. There's also conversations that currently New York and New Jersey are looking to push out, like Massachusetts, till 2027. It is still a little bit of a work in progress. It is affecting our ability to sell diesel-powered commercial vehicles into these six states at the rate that they normally purchase vehicles. We hope that by the end of the year, most of the legal battles get taken care of and sales can continue in 2026 and beyond.
Our investor relations schedule for 2025, we'll be attending the Midwest Conference, Ideas Conference with Three Part, D.A. Davidson Conference in Nashville, the Southwest Ideas Conference, and we'll continue to actively work on some roadshows with Three Part Advisors throughout the country in the calendar year. With that, that's all I have, and I'll open it up for questions.
Yes, sir.
Who are your major competitors?
The question was, who are our major competitors? Here in the U.S., our two largest, or in North America, our two largest competitors are Jerr-Dan, which is owned by Oshkosh Corporation. It's a subsidiary of Access Equipment and a privately owned second-generation company out of Quebec, Canada, called NRC. They are probably the second largest manufacturer globally out of Canada. There are approximately 13 different smaller regional manufacturers that don't necessarily focus on the full product breadth that we do. They'll either focus specifically on small light-duty recovery units or the flatbed car carriers. They've always been there. They will continue a totally different sale process, no real distribution network, more selling on price direct to consumers. When we look at the tier ones, ourselves, NRC, and Jerr-Dan, that group is selling through a distribution network with after-sale parts, service, accessories, things of that nature.
Globally in Europe, there's about 49 different manufacturing companies. Globally, you can find manufacturers of sort of the light-duty product, small wreckers and car carriers all across the globe. Where you see us excel from an export perspective is going to be on the large heavy-duty equipment that has a little bit more IP and technology to create trucks that can have capacities between 25 tons and 100 tons. Any others? We try to keep it around depreciation, running right around $13 million, plus or minus. We do have the French expansions, about EUR 8 million, and we're estimating if we decide to pull the trigger on the CapEx project in Ooltewah, Tennessee, that we've been discussing for the last probably year and a half, it's approximately $70 million. That would be spent between now and late 2026, early 2027, about a two-year build project.
Is it your view that municipalities do or do not have a lot of CapEx money in the budgets to spend?
The question is, do municipalities have or do not have capital to spend? We're not heavily structured toward municipalities. Most of the towing fleet globally is privatized, so it's owner-operators. The largest fleet is actually the largest government fleet of tow trucks right here in New York City. They have the largest fleet of government-owned tow trucks in the country. All the tow trucks you see here in New York City were manufactured by Miller Industries. It's a wonderful partnership, but most municipalities may own a few tow trucks. When you really look at the total market, from Miller Industries' perspective, the potential for spend is up, but we don't do a lot of municipal work. Not that we don't do it, it doesn't exist.
Will, can you talk about the pipeline on military?
Yeah. Oh, thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the question from Jeff. No, we've seen during COVID and shortly after supply chain, we saw a lot of the RFQs or requests for quotes starting to dry up. There wasn't a lot of capital out there to be spent at the government level. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war in the Middle East, you've seen that totally revert back to where it was prior to 2020 and probably actually exceed the activity globally. We did announce in November that we were awarded the Canadian contract to be manufactured throughout 2027 and 2028 for their recovery vehicles, and there is a significant amount of activity globally with some large countries. Most of it's outside of the United States with our allies.
Yes, sir?
Will you ever consider expanding beyond towing?
Will we ever expand beyond towing? Yeah. We focus on what we know best. I believe there are some potential opportunities out there that fit inside our sales channel with our understanding of the distribution network that we have today and how we go to market. None of those opportunities have, most of them, or actually all of them, are privately owned in that market. So none of them have come available at this point in time, but there is probably one market that we've looked at potentially expanding into. We'll never say never to anything. Just want to make sure that we're not going out and doing mergers and acquisitions just to create revenue growth, but make sure that we can succeed and be number one in whatever market that we're in.
Is there a business model out there where your operation leases tow trucks instead of commercial ones?
Yeah, there's leasing. Yeah. I mean, there's both leasing fleets out there. We actually, I mean, when you look at it, they can finance. They'll either finance through some of the major Santander Bank and some others that are in the industry, obviously finance through their local banks. We have distribution networks. Our distribution, some of them actually have their own leasing and finance companies as well. That's where you'll see the leases start coming into play. Some of the national accounts lease their product, and some actually acquire it. They use generally Ryder and Penske.
What about that used? I guess, when things kind of reach the end of warranty life, is there a—first of all, would there be any kind of business opportunity for you to kind of get into that and not handling the used stuff?
Our distribution handles the repurchase of the used and moving the used equipment. We find it, obviously, it's large equipment, so having it housed at the point of location, not shipping things back and forth across the U.S., driving trucks, and quite frankly, using their ability and their sales staff to move that product. On an annual basis, if you think about it, for almost every new truck, they're selling a used truck. So they're selling just as much used equipment throughout the year as revenue for the distribution as they do new product. Once it gets to that life cycle of probably first, the second owner to the third owner, once it gets to that life cycle, generally, it's being exported outside the U.S. with less emission controls.
The trucks then, they export them, remove the emission control system, and they run for a million miles like they used to. It's an amazing thing. I have about a minute left. I'll give you guys an extra minute to get to your next one. Thank you so much. Oh, go ahead, sir.
Yes.
What's your idea to show a video of what companies should do?
Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.
That is the first time I've watched.
It's just a little bit of who we are, so I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Jeff at Three Part. He can get you in touch with us. I hope you have a great trip here in New York and enjoy your afternoon.