Morning everyone. I'm Jeff Elliott with Three Part Advisors. Next presenting company today is Miller Industries. The ticker is MLR. With us here today from the company, we have Will Miller, CEO, and Nick Tiano, Chief of Staff and Head of IR. Miller is a Three Part Advisors client. If anyone would like a follow-up meeting or a call, please reach out to me directly. Happy to help set that up. With that, I'll just turn it over to Will.
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. Good morning, everybody. We're going to start with a quick couple-minute video for those of you who aren't as familiar with the Miller Industries story, which will show you a little bit about who we are, what we do, and how we manufacture the product and sell it around the world.
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 United States, as well as one in England and one in France. Under the well-known brands of Century, Vulcan, Chevron, Holmes, Boniface, and Jige, 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 toolboxes are wired in with their 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.
I look at that. I can follow instructions. Perfect. Welcome. Hopefully, for those of you who are new to the story, that gave you a little bit of a background of what we do at Miller Industries and the products that we manufacture at our facilities around the world. Quick safe harbor statement. Moving on, we are the world's largest manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment. We specialize in producing light-duty car carriers, specialty transport vehicles, medium-heavy-duty recovery units, rotators, and military recovery vehicles. Our key focus at Miller Industries and our belief is that we have the best people, the best product, and the best distributor network in the towing and recovery industry. That is what has created our success since 1990, and we continue to follow that as we move forward into the future.
When you look at overall investment highlights, we are the world leader in the towing and recovery manufacturing segment. We have consistent organic growth, quarterly dividend. We are the industry leader in innovation, best-in-class products and distribution, strong customer relationships, attractive financial metrics, and an experienced management team. When you look at our senior staff at Miller Industries, we have over 200 years at Miller Industries and more than that in the industry itself. Our strategy is simple: develop a world-class team at our facilities, innovate, design, and produce the highest quality products for our customers, locate, develop, and maintain a five-star distribution to manage the sale, after-sale, and service of our products, invest in our business, and grow our commercial market share. The towing and recovery industry is a multi-billion dollar global market.
Primary segments of this industry are commercial towing, which is towing commercial vehicles, transportation fleets, rental fleets, and salvage fleets like United Rentals and Copart, government municipal sales, military. Primary product types that we looked at earlier were light-duty recovery vehicles, medium and heavy-duty, and car carriers. Our industry drivers are relatively simple that we focus on miles driven, accidents or incidents per miles driven, the last mile deliveries, which is deliveries from warehouses to consumers such as Amazon, the aging vehicle fleet and population both in the United States and in the European market, general infrastructure and construction, and natural disasters. You know, really, when you look at our industry drivers, when things are going bad for everybody else, that's when it's good for tow trucks. I hate to look at it that way, but it's just the way it is.
Accelerators, trade cycle, future emission changes coming up in 2027, global conflict, and military recovery upgrades. What we're seeing in the military, the world globally, is that the militaries are starting to invest in more and more armored vehicles, larger vehicles that are heavier, and they lack the ability to recover those vehicles once they break down or get damaged. As shown in the video, we have manufacturing facilities both here in the United States, in England, and in France. We continue to invest in our manufacturing. If you've done any research on Miller Industries, from 2016 to 2018, we invested a little over $100 million into our U.S. facilities. Last quarter, we also announced an EUR 8 million expansion of our French facility. We continue to reinvest and expand our facilities to meet current demand.
We also focus diligently on investing in our people, promoting from within, and growing talent inside our organization through a multitude of different opportunities that we provide to our staff. When you look at our product brands, Miller Industries is branded under multiple different brands. The largest brand and most well-known brand globally is the Century brand. We also market under Vulcan, Chevron, the Holmes brand, which is the oldest brand. The tow truck was founded in 1916 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by the Holmes Corporation. We do own that company. Titan, Jige, and Boniface. Sales channels, revenue streams, North American distribution. Approximately 90% of our revenue comes through North American distribution. Our export product out of the United States, European operation, and national accounts. Also, government, military, aftermarket parts, and our chassis sales program. North American distribution, we have approximately 53 distributor principals with 75 locations.
100% of our distributors are exclusive to Miller Industries in the sale of towing and recovery equipment. Approximately 95% of them are solely dedicated to selling towing and recovery equipment. There's 300+ retail salespersons, people in the U.S. that work for those distributors that focus on retail selling our product on a daily basis. The market, when you look at the vast majority of the market here in North America, is made up of commercial towing operators, average fleet size of 10 to 15 trucks, with a trade cycle that runs between 48 and 72 months for the first-time buyers. A lot of that's driven by the warranty offering of the chassis that they're purchasing and really controlling that cost of ownership and understanding what that vehicle costs for them to run over the warranty period until it gets outside of warranty and unknown expenses.
International manufacturing facilities, we have our French subsidiary, Jige, also our English subsidiary, Boniface. They both have strong backlogs, current expansion projects, as I spoke about at Jige, and we are looking to continue to expand and take opportunities for growth in the European market. There are 30+ distributors globally, as well as government and direct sales in foreign countries. We export to approximately 60+ countries globally. We look at potential growth opportunities for Miller Industries, global military contracts, RFQs. We saw a reduction during the COVID timeframe of RFQs globally, but post the Ukraine and the Middle East activity, we've seen all of those come back to life in the last 24 months or so. Continuing to expand our rental share market, we had very little rental share market in 2014.
Today, we provide transport equipment to four of the largest rental companies here in North America, and we continue to grow that market share. We are the primary supplier for delivery equipment for Sunbelt, HERC, United Rentals, and EquipmentShare. Expansion of our global presence, as we discussed, we're continuing to expand in our European facilities and look to grow our European market share. Future M&A opportunities, we're always on the lookout for possibilities for expansion through this process. We are a little bit particular on which companies we want to acquire. There are a handful of European operators that we believe fit the scale and the size of what we're interested in. There are also a lot of small regional manufacturers that really don't bring much to the table for Miller Industries from a size of their factories or their technology that they bring to the table.
We are a little particular, but we are open to the idea if it comes. As we continue to deploy capital, we invest annually in robotics throughout our facilities to expand capacity, human capital, our ERP system that was implemented in 2021, and we continue to add bolt-on additions to that. Cybersecurity, IT infrastructure, research and development, vertical integration as we bought a cylinder manufacturing company approximately a year ago, and then employees' health and safety. Also, with our ERP system, we have started to deploy AI throughout to start doing some of those mundane tasks, order entry, and things of that nature in our organization to help control headcount. Capital allocation priorities are quarterly dividend, debt reduction, share repurchase program, innovation, automation, and capacity expansion. The picture at the bottom right is actually the illustration of our expansion of our facility in France. Quick financial overview.
For full-year metrics in 2024, was our best year, record year, $1.26 billion in revenue with a net income of $63.5 million, EPS of $5.47. Quarterly metrics for Q2 of 2025, $214 million in revenue, net income of $8.5 million, EPS of $0.73. As we entered into 2025, we did start with lower guidance for '25 with the buildup of inventory that we saw at our distribution channel in 2024. We believe that most of that would have flowed through by mid-year. Unfortunately, we saw a reduction in Q2 at the retail activity of about 20% that I mentioned on our quarterly call, and we're seeing that inventory stretch out a little bit longer than anticipated.
We set out some new guidance for lower revenue numbers this year, and it looks, if everything stays status quo, retail activity doesn't move up or down either direction for the remainder of the year, we should see our inventory levels return to historical averages by late Q4 or early Q1. We are looking forward to moving the needle up again in 2026 and beyond. Our second half of 2025 outlook, our industry demand headwinds, distributor inventory reduction, which I just discussed, retail activity and order intake, production levels, cost reduction initiatives, CARB, ACT, and tariffs. We have taken quite a bit of cost reduction initiatives at Miller Industries over the last few weeks. We did announce that we did our first layoff in 16 years, unfortunately. Made sure that we kept our best employees by department and still set for success in the future.
We were notified last week that CARB sounds like they are moving onwards and that diesel vehicles of chassis being sold in the state of California will be open again as of September 8th is what we're being told. Yes. It's a good thing moving forwards. Tariffs, we continue to watch. We believe that we are set with the price increases that we put through this year. Currently, it is a very rapidly changing area that we're watching, but we'll continue to make sure that we price our equipment properly to our distribution channel to absorb any tariffs that we need to. Little inventory graph that we've been putting out for the last few quarters. Chassis, as you can see, really exploded at the end of or beginning of 2024. Those have come down below historical levels. They're where they need to be.
Chassis generally trend slightly below our body inventory. We'd like to see our body inventory in the blue line get a little bit lower, as well as the chassis throughout the remainder of this year and get back to historical averages. When you look at the second half and beyond, we'll continue to generate free cash flow, as you saw from Q1 to Q2. Continue to reduce our debt, focus on commercial market recovery. Military RFQs, we're continuing to be active on RFQs globally, looking at our growth opportunities in the European market and expanding our export presence and intend to enter 2026 in a position of strength to continue to grow our brands globally. Our capital allocation strategy, as I've discussed, we will continue our quarterly dividend, debt reduction, share repurchase program, innovation, automation, human capital, and capacity expansion.
Our adjusted guidance for 2025 estimated revenue is $750 million - $800 million, and we have suspended EPS guidance at this time as we are looking at our reduction of force. We've also now officially offered a retirement program to employees at Miller Industries and really looking at how many employees take advantage of that over the coming weeks. We'll sort of adjust our EPS for the year. Our schedule for the remainder of 2025 will be at the D.A. Davidson Conference in Nashville, 17th through the 19th of September. We'll be at the Southwest Ideas Conference with Three Part in November and attempt to do a few roadshows in between. With that, we've got quite a bit of time left, and I'll open it up for any questions that you may have.
Good.
I guess given kind of the top line and guidance reductions, is there a way to kind of quantify that by the number of trucks and maybe by state? Is there any color on the?
Are there any more specific details on the metrics we've given of, I guess, retail activity by state or regionally? Is that what you're looking for? Regionally, obviously, most of the CARB states have come back online in the last, and by September, all of them. We're starting to see some picked-up activity in those areas. The Southeast tends to be doing better. Southeast over to Texas seems to be doing a little bit better than the rest of the country. Our revenue reduction seems to be a general consumer confidence issue. You've got insurance cost rising that's pretty out of control, I think, and that's not just commercial trucks, but overall in a lot of industry. You have customers really looking to, I think they're waiting to see what happened with the tax bill. That was a positive.
Now I think they're really waiting as they look towards what they're going to spend for the rest of the years, hoping for an interest rate drop as well. I think it's just a little lack of consumer confidence. We anticipated to see a bump after the election. It didn't happen. I think we'll start seeing that towards the tail end of this year in 2026.
Is there a pattern of takeaway? Is there any kind of structural changes?
No, I think it's an industry-wide issue. Our competitors are dealing with the same inventory, actually probably a worse inventory issue than we are, which doesn't help us any because they need to get rid of their inventory at some point as well. Product will sell at a certain price. If they get their price low enough, it will sell and enter into the marketplace. As far as our distribution, we have not lost anybody. Our footprint remains the same, and we believe that our overall success in the marketplace is still continuous.
Is there any kind of balance sheet risk that we may not see from the outside, like if distributors are putting back inventory? Do you have anything like that?
No. The question is, are there any balance sheet issues that you need to be aware of? The answer is no. Distribution seems to be extremely healthy. They've done very well for the last couple of years. Overall, their interest they're paying month to month is reducing. Their inventory, as you've seen, has come down dramatically throughout this year, which is their biggest pressure. I think our belief is by the end of this year, our distribution channel, for the most part, will be back to historical levels of inventory and costs and move forwards as strong as they've ever been. Yes, sir.
What do you estimate your market share is involved with the growth?
The old market share question. My answer to the market share question, this will be the first time. This is like on public record. It's usually one-on-ones. There is no real data in the towing and recovery industry for market share. The reason for that is because tow trucks are registered as commercial vehicles. It's registered as a Kenworth, a Peterbilt, a Freightliner, and it's not classified as an emergency vehicle, so it doesn't get like a fire truck tag. It just has a standard commercial vehicle tag. There's no real information. The only information I can put out there is that in 1997, the U.S. Justice Department told us that our market share was less than 70%. We'll stick with that.
Is the military business, are you concerned about that?
Yeah, it's a growth opportunity. You know, military is feast or famine, right? They're contractual agreements. You know, you win one, as we announced last year, I think last November, that we were awarded the Canadian military contract. Production begins 2027 and 2028. It was for 85 heavy-duty recovery units. It'll be a bonus for us in 2027 and 2028. There are a multitude of contracts out there we're currently working, and no more have been awarded of any large size. In the military sector, we are the predominant player for recovery vehicles globally. Historically, we have produced the vast majority of recovery equipment for all of our NATO allies. Yes, sir.
You mentioned the retirement plans that seem to be somewhat oriented towards reducing your workforce. Maybe you could elaborate on that. It sounds like kind of a negative thought that you want to.
No. Obviously, I mentioned we did a layoff for the first time in 16 years. When we look at our workforce population, we do have a 401K and everything for our employees. Looking at the age demographics in our workforce, we felt that it was the right time to also take this opportunity to reward those employees that have given a significant amount of time, effort, years, and success to our company with an opportunity to continue to create space for the next generation to move up. We are looking at it as a positive. It'll help our SG&A short term as we move through this, although it is a cash expense moving forward, but it will also give us some room to continue to grow. Yes, sir.
Two more questions. We've talked about the average usable life of the vehicle and maybe like secondary trading market. Secondarily, do you have any real aftermarket or service?
Yeah. First question was lifecycle of the equipment. On our lighter duty products, class four, five, and six chassis product, which are our light-duty tow trucks and our car carriers, you're looking at approximately 42 months as that trade window cycle that a professional tower is going to want to try to get in and out of the product. Reason for that is all of our chassis come with a proprietary five-year, 300,000 mi warranty. They're trying to utilize that chassis inside the warranty window so they understand their total cost of ownership. There's no unknowns.
Really, it's preventative maintenance, brakes, tires, fuel, and then sell that product for its maximum value where it still has warranty left on the product to get maximum trade-in or retail for it to sell someone that still has some peace of mind that they have 50,000 mi or nine months or a year left on that warranty. We've seen that trade cycle created in that class four, five, and six product. The secondary market for that is going to be towers, smaller areas, more rural areas that don't run as many miles, that that truck could last them a significantly longer period of time, not major fleets. By the time it gets to its third lifecycle, it's generally exported out of the United States where they have less emission controls.
Generally, what happens is once they get it exported, they remove the emission controls on it, and now it's an old diesel engine again. On our class eight product, our larger product, you're going to see that first trade cycle in that five to seven years on that product. It's going to move to someone generally that doesn't have the ability to finance the original amount. Although our heavy-duty product is quite exceptional, it does retain a significant amount of its purchase value even at that five to seven-year mark. Same thing, once it gets old enough, they'll last in that secondary market. They could last upwards of 20 years before they get sort of exported out of the United States. Your second question was retail parts. We do have a retail parts, aftermarket parts part of our revenue. It's great margin. It's very consistent.
It's really not that large of a number from a revenue perspective. When you look at our parts, it's just proprietary parts. A little different than a chassis OEM, you're looking at proprietary cylinders or weldments or potential accessories that could be lost. When you look at hydraulic hoses, things of that nature, due to the small fleet size of our customer base, if a truck is down because of a hydraulic hose, they're generally not going to go to their local Miller distributor, or if that distributor is two or three, four hours away from them, drive there to buy a hydraulic hose. They're going to go to a local hydraulic place, get a hose made that's 28 in long with these two fittings on each side, and put their truck back into service.
Most of our retail parts or our aftermarket parts are weldments for catastrophic failures or something of that nature. Yes, sir.
What's the status of your plans for an electric truck and the partnership with Thomas Engine?
At this moment in time, we've worked with multiple OEMs as they develop their electric chassis. At this time, nobody has provided us with an electric chassis that'll actually work as an electrified tow truck. There are AAA in California was able to use an aftermarket company where they took a diesel truck, stripped the diesel out of it, turned it into an electric vehicle. It took them about two years to get it operational. It runs around in California a little bit, more of a showpiece than an actual usable daily vehicle. We will continue to work with all the chassis suppliers as them and Cummins and Eaton develop electric alternatives to make sure that we have the ability to mount a tow vehicle to the chassis.
When you look at most of the chassis OEMs and their ability to put research dollars and R&D dollars into electrification of vehicles, they're looking at the largest volume of chassis that they can build. You're looking at over-the-road tractors, and you're looking at things like stake beds or box vans that have less requirements from specifics of the chassis requirements that a tow vehicle does. For us, the placement of batteries can get in the way of hydraulics, wheel lifts, and things of that nature. It's much more difficult for them to plan around us. Really, when they look at it, the towing segment and our special needs for a tow truck are so small that it's not at the top of their priority list to develop an electric chassis that meets our needs. We're there to partner with all of them when the time comes. Yes, sir.
Two questions. First of all, on your industry driver slide, there are a couple of pieces I'd like you to explain further. The last-mile deliveries and secondarily the construction infrastructure.
The question was specifically on a couple of the industry drivers, last mile driven and construction. Construction's easier, so I'll hit it first. We do provide a lot of equipment to delivery companies, Sunbelt, United Rentals, HERC. As construction moves up, they start to rent more equipment. They need more delivery vehicles, so they start buying more product from us to deliver their rental equipment. Also, secondarily, the more concrete mixers, the more things that enter into major job sites, the more likely they are to flip over, get stuck. It's muddy, it's wet. Every time a large class eight truck or even a small vehicle gets stuck on a job site, it requires a tow truck to come get it out.
There is some, and then infrastructure construction, when you look at it, the number of accidents on a road, when they're doing road construction, they move, they shift lanes, and they try to warn everybody that they're shifting lanes. The number of accidents in those construction zones goes significantly up, which then also requires tow trucks. The first question was last mile driven. Last mile driven is an interesting one, which is we really thought that, you know, 2016, as Amazon took off, that it was sort of the death of the towing industry and commercial trucks weren't going to drive as much because they weren't delivering anything to malls or Walmart and things of that nature. We were absolutely incorrect because what you see is an explosion of deliveries to residential areas. Not only that, the UPS and FedEx couldn't handle all of these deliveries.
Now Amazon has created its own driver fleet, and there's been no consolidation of freight. Where you may have gotten one delivery at your house historically in 2016, today you could get four deliveries at your house, sometimes from FedEx, FedEx Ground, UPS, UPS, another segment of UPS, an Amazon Prime truck, and the Postal Service. What you've seen is this explosion of need for drivers to drive these vans that are historically used to driving their Honda Civic. Next thing you know, they're in a big Amazon Prime van, and they tend to not drive them quite so well. It's been a very good thing for the towing industry. That last mile driven really exploding has expanded the need for towing and recovery equipment.
The second question is relative to your distribution network. Would you please characterize how complete you believe it is? The spirit of that is that I see Las Vegas doesn't have a dot on it. Seattle doesn't have a dot on it. It seems like maybe there's.
Yeah, we actually do. We have a distributor that actually does have a service location in Las Vegas, but it's a transient town. We believe that the locations to service the towers, although most metropolitan areas have a distributor, is the appropriate amount of locations that really has worked. We've shrunk that down from 145 locations, 125 locations to the current 75. We believe it's the best distribution network in the industry, and we can continue forwards with that. I still have two more questions. Do you want to let me go? Go. All right.
Who are the clients for the?
No, the vast majority of our sales is to commercial towing operators. There's very few municipalities that own tow trucks. The largest fleet of municipal tow trucks is New York City. Outside of that, there's no real major fleets. There are some small ones, but no major fleets. A few fire departments will own a rotator or something like that, but it's very, very limited.
When you spoke about the growth possibilities, you didn't actually include any sort of line extension. Is there no possibility of, like, I mean, you carry one car. What would it take for you to manufacture the regular car carrier? What's it for delivery of new cars?
It's pictures that we have. Those will deliver two. We actually build four-car carriers as well. People like Copart use four-car carriers. Also, some of the larger car dealerships will transport cars back and forth. CarMax uses our product to move their multiple cars back and forth. We stop at four cars. We used to build seven-car trailers, but most of that has moved to an 11-car transport trailer that you see. We got out of that business and focused on the four-car or four vehicles and less.
Those, that is what portion of your business?
When they're buying, they're a good business, but our distribution channel is still, even an individual distributor, is still significantly larger. In 2024, we did not have a single customer that was over 10% of revenue. It's very diversified. Yes, last question.
Yeah, I was just going to say, you had this extraordinary period when your revenues and currency exploded. What is the main reason for that? I think that came to you mentioned it was delivery business.
I think it's a multitude. Moving into new products, new product development. We really focus on innovation. When I say we're the innovation leader, in 2010, we had seven engineers. Today, we have 60. Really innovating new products into new market segments, getting into the rental industry. Two years ago, we got a call from MobileMini. If you're all familiar with them, they move small containers for job sites and home use. They needed a new solution. They were unhappy with their current supplier. They said, "Can you build us a delivery truck?" It looks like a car carrier to us, right? It moves product from point A to point B. We're now MobileMini's provider for all of their delivery equipment.
Really just being open-minded that when someone brings a solution to us, we're not just towing, but we're actually really looking at if you have a problem moving something from point A to point B, we're in the transportation sector of moving product from point A to point B if it's something hard to move. I think that's what has brought a lot of the success along with it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Sorry I went over. Have a great day.