Morning, everyone. Jeff Elliott with 3 Part Advisors. Next company we have presenting today is Miller Industries. With us here today from the company, we have Will Miller, CEO, and Kateryna Kitar.
Katerina.
Katerina. Kateryna Kitar, Director of Finance. And Miller is actually a client of 3 Part Advisors, so if anyone would like a follow-up meeting or call, please just reach out to me directly. Happy to help set that up. With that, I'll just turn it over to Will.
Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. We have a light crowd this morning, so we'll have some fun. We're going to start with a quick video. If you've seen it before, I apologize. We've made some slight modifications to it, but it's about four minutes. It tells you a little bit about our company, and then we'll move on to the presentation.
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 feet in length with deck capabilities up to 40,000 pounds, 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 the 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 to 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 record are built and hand-assembled. At this point, the record are 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 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 record 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 in 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. And as the world leader in towing and recovery, we look forward to continued growth and success.
Yeah, full screen. Perfect. Thank you. Well, good morning again, everybody. Hopefully, if you haven't seen the video before, it gives you a little insight of what we do at our manufacturing facilities here in the U.S. as well as abroad. Our Safe Harbor statement that you can closely read in any one of our materials. But to get started, we are the world's largest manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment.
Miller Industries, as Jeff said, New York Stock Exchange MLR, was founded in 1990 by our founder and chairman, Bill Miller. We are headquartered in Ooltewah, Tennessee, with approximately 1,500 employees worldwide. We have a very simple core philosophy. We have the best people, the best products, and the best distribution network in the towing and recovery industry. It's a quote that our chairman said in 1990. It still remains true today. It's really what we focus on. If we build the best distribution network to take care of our customers, ultimately, we will win worldwide. When you look at our investment highlights, one of the key factors we look at is our compounded annual growth rate. This chart, which is impressive, but more impressive is that most of that is organic or almost entirely organic since 1997. We have also announced our 60th consecutive quarterly dividend this quarter.
The towing and recovery industry is a multi-billion dollar global market. Commercial towing is our primary market segment, although we do focus on transportation fleets, both in rental and salvage. Those would be companies like U-Haul, Hertz, Sunbelt on the rental side, IAA, and Copart on the salvage side here in the U.S. Government and municipal fleets globally, as well as military contracts. Our primary product types, as you saw on the first slide and through some of the presentation or through some of the video, we have light-duty recovery vehicles, medium and heavy-duty recovery vehicles, and carrier transport vehicles are our primary products that we manufacture. Industry drivers, it's relatively simple industry to understand. Miles driven is our key indicator. Accidents per miles driven, last mile deliveries, which is deliveries, Amazon deliveries, UPS parcel deliveries, things of that nature.
And overall, aging fleet worldwide, both in the U.S. and Europe, which are our 2 largest markets. We're looking at an aging fleet at 12.8 to 13 years for vehicles, which is the oldest on record. General infrastructure and construction also helps the towing industry, as well as natural disasters. I hate to say it this way, but ultimately, when things go wrong for everything else, for everybody else, that's really when a tow truck is needed. So that's what we thrive off of. Accelerators that we've seen in the last few years is an accelerated trade cycle, future emission changes, global conflict, and military vehicle recovery upgrades. Our strategy, develop a world-class team. We really focus on employees from building them from the inside up.
So education, career development for our employees, innovate, design, and manufacture the best product for our customers, really focused on greater payloads with lower weight of the overall vehicle. Locate, develop, and maintain our five-star distribution network globally, invest in our business, and grow our commercial market share, explore new market potentials, and develop innovative products to create new opportunities for manufacturing. Our experienced management team has over 200 years at the company and more years than that in the towing recovery industry itself. As we stated in the video, we have manufacturing locations here in the U.S., as well as abroad in England and France. Predominantly, you won't see Miller Industries as a brand if you're looking at tow trucks out on the road. Predominantly, what you're going to see are Century, Vulcan, and Chevron brands, the ones listed on the left.
Holmes and Titan are also brands that we utilize here in the U.S., depending on distribution network channels, and then GJ and Boniface over in the European market. When you look at sales channels, revenue streams for Miller Industries, North American distribution, approximately 90% of our revenue comes out of the North American distribution market. We have export product from the U.S., our European operations, and national accounts. We have about seven national accounts, which would be U-Haul, Hertz, Sunbelts, Coparts, IA, larger national companies here in the U.S. Government business, military, aftermarket part sales, and chassis sales. North American distribution, we have about 53 distributor principals here in the U.S. with 75 distributor locations. The interesting thing about our distribution network is 100% of our distribution is exclusive to us in the sale of towing and recovery equipment.
About 95% of them solely sell towing and recovery equipment as their primary business. There are approximately 300-plus retail salespeople that sell our product every day in North America. So really, what we have is a very concentrated group of individuals that focus their entire life on selling our product and repping our product here in the U.S. as well as in Canada. Commercial towing operators, it's a relatively small industry. Average fleet size for towers is 10 to 15 trucks. So these are small owner-operator, entrepreneur, mom-and-pop businesses that run through generations, two, 3 generations old. We have a trade cycle and warranty offering. That's really what the operators are looking at. You say, "Why do they replace their tow truck so often?" They're really looking at maintaining their vehicle inside that trade cycle and the warranty offering.
So once that truck gets outside of the warranty offering, there's potential large expenses for them that they may or may not be able to absorb as a small business. Most importantly, the engine and aftertreatment system of current diesel engines. They try to get those small and medium-duty trucks traded around 42 months on the Class 8 side, usually between five and seven years. This allows them to really put a pencil and paper to their cost of ownership throughout the life cycle that they have, that first owner has of the vehicle, and then also utilize depreciation. Looking overseas, our international manufacturing GJ, which is located in Reuilly, France, has 3 sites: Boniface in Bedford, England. We have a strong backlog in our European market. We are currently announced in Q2 an expansion project at our GJ facility for 8 million pounds or 8 million euros. Apologize.
And we're really focused on opportunities for growth in the European market. Foreign market distribution, we have about 30 distributors globally outside the U.S., far more higher percentage of direct sales in foreign governments, militaries, and direct-to-consumer. We export out of the U.S. to approximately 60 different countries. When we look at investing in our business, we focus on really making sure that we always have state-of-the-art facilities. So focus on robotics, capacity, human capital. We've integrated a new ERP system in 2021. Cybersecurity and IT infrastructure is needed in today's world. Research and development of new products, vertical integration, and our employees' health and safety. These are just a couple of photos of our U.S. manufacturing facilities showing the growth over the years.
We've expanded originally from 1990 with approximately 40,000 square feet to just over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space here in the U.S.. When we look at our people from internally, we're really looking at focus on our employees' health and safety, employee engagement, and employee development. Really focused on bringing our employees, whether they're hourly employees or salaried employees, through the ranks of the company to be a valued team member. When we look at future growth opportunities for Miller Industries, global military contracts, the rental industry market share. In 2014, Miller Industries entered in and really focused on the rental industry. We had pretty close to 0% market share. It was really dominated by some of our competitors.
Today, four of the largest rental companies buy their products from us and really focused on that next level down, which are those mom-and-pop rental companies that make up about 75% of the rental industry and making sure that we get our market share there as well. Expansion of our global market presence, consolidation of the European market similar to what we've done here in the U.S., and any potential M&A opportunities in the future. Switching over to a quick look at our Q3. This presentation really has been out there, and it's our presentation from our Q3 release. Revenue of $178.7 million with $3.1 million of net income and $3.5 million of cash returned to shareholders, both through our dividend as well as our share repurchases during the quarter.
Our outlook, we continue to focus on cost reduction initiatives as we roll through a slower period in our industry, burning through inventory at our distribution level. Focused on watching industry demand, our distributors' inventory, production levels, and then making sure we keep a close eye on tariffs. At this moment in time, we have not seen any major impact on our products from tariffs, but we are closely monitoring them. This chart's been out there for the last 3 quarters or so. You can see the gray line and the blue line. The gray line is our chassis inventory at distribution level. Blue line is our bodies that we've manufactured at distribution. You can see they spiked back in 2024. We've been working diligently with distribution to reduce this.
We've now gotten our bodies and chassis below where we believe the average distributor inventory should be and believe that production levels and order intake should return to meet current retail activity sometime mid-Q1 of next year. For our outlook in 2026, we have a strong balance sheet, commercial market recovery, European growth, and continued focus on military RFQs or requests for quotes globally. Our capital allocation strategy, mentioned a little bit earlier, but quarterly dividend, debt reduction, share repurchase, M&A opportunities, innovation, automation, human capital, and capacity expansion. Just a quick touch, we have reaffirmed our guidance for 2025. It was reduced mid-year, but approximately $800 million. Fourth quarter reminders for all those who aren't that familiar with Miller Industries. It is the shortest quarter for us with holidays, and we also do our annual inventory and shutdowns at all of our facilities here in North America.
As well, we noted a one-time expense at the end of Q3. We did a retirement package for all U.S. employees over the age of 65. It was voluntary. That hit at about $2.6 million. 900,000 hit in Q3 with approximately 1.7 million expense in Q4. This is our last investor relations opportunity for the year. We'll start roadshows up again in the beginning of 2026. But if you'd like more information, you reach out to Jeff Elliott at 3 Part Advisors or us at investorrelations@millerind.com for more information. I appreciate the time and would love to open it up for any questions that the audience may have. We'll start first in the back. I'll move this direction.
I know you said this, but I don't remember. I didn't understand what you said. What percentage of your sales are through distributors and what percentage are direct?
The question was, what percentage of sales is through distribution versus what percentage is direct? We don't really call out the differences between the two. I would say that 90% of our revenue comes from North America. That includes both direct and indirect. The vast majority of that, although it's not penciled out in black and white, the vast majority of that is through our distribution network. They're the same. As far as cost structure, the national accounts and distribution are all priced at similar levels. And then we have about 10% that comes from export products out of the U.S. and/or European operations. 2 guys, but I'll take one more and then I'll move on. No problem.
You mentioned something about focus on M&A opportunities. I don't really see any direct or indirect M&A.
No. Well, we did our first yes. Since 1997, there's been very little.
2022, we purchased SHC Southern Hydraulic Cylinders in Athens, Tennessee, which is vertical integration for us. It was a supplier of ours that was going to be for sale. And we thought the best thing at that time, especially with the supply chain crisis, was to start some vertical integration. As I've stated, we're keenly focused on the European market. We believe that's our next large growth opportunity as it's the second largest market in the U.S.. It's very fragmented. There's about 50 manufacturers of towing and recovery units in Eastern and Western Europe. Most of them are extremely small, sub $10 million a year in revenue. So they're very small. We continue to grow ourselves, right, with expanding our facilities in France. We've been purchasing facilities in England and growing organically and expanding our sales force in the European market.
There are a handful of companies out there that have interest to us that are a little bit larger. Nothing at this moment in time, but we're still focused on it. The good spot for Miller Industries where we are as the world leader, we generally get to see any opportunities that are out there. If someone's looking to sell a manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment, we're usually going to get a phone call. But we really look at when M&A, it's got to bring something more than revenue for us. It's got to bring either capacity expansion, entrance into new markets that we don't have success in, management, a sales team, something other than just capacity. We have the capital. We can build capacity. So it's got to bring something else to the table for us than just some revenue. Yes, sir. I think you were second. Yes.
Well, first, I'll make a point that I like the video showing all the people doing the work, even all the chattering here about AI taking over everything.
No, AI is not taking over anything. Well, we do use AI. We are a good use of AI. There's some great uses inside our organization, parts order entry, things of that nature. But yes, we still utilize humans to build tow trucks.
But my question was, so for all the kind of types of overall vehicles you sell, how much of it caters to light duty, like cars, SUVs versus specialty and military?
So when you look at the breakout of manufactured product, and I'll go by sort of volume. So our highest volume product is our small two-car carriers. That's what's going to focus on picking up your car and my car if it breaks down inside the road.
That's the highest volume product. The next highest volume product is going to be your small recovery vehicles, your small tow trucks. Used in the repossession market, more used a lot by more rural areas than car carriers where they want to be able to tow and maybe recover a car off the side of the road. And then your lower percentage is going to be your commercial vehicles, but from a dollar perspective, they're much higher dollar vehicles. Since 2019, there's been very little military in our revenue since 2019. I think we have one, and I'll come over to you.
How's electric vehicles and just self-driving? Why would you see that impact in your business?
Always a good question. So I don't see any major impact in the lifetime of anybody in this audience on our industry.
The reason why I say that is electric vehicles really don't change much at all. So you have autonomy in electric vehicles. Electric vehicles have to be towed on a car carrier. They can't be towed with their tires touching the ground. They'll catch on fire. But the market has pretty much, starting in the '90s, has already changed to mostly car carriers anyways. That's what you're going to see running up and down the highways because of monobody cars. So when we went from chassis body-on-frame car production, which is what the only thing really left today is going to be your full-size SUVs and pickup trucks that are body-on-frame. Once you went to monobody, the only way to really damage-free tow that car is to put all four tires onto something and move it.
You can't hook to the bumper like you used to be able to, the big metal bumpers. So that had already shifted. So our production's already there. That's our largest production anyways. Question then positive? It's really net neutral. It's net neutral. They still break down. They still run out of battery juice. They still have flat tires. They still need towed. When you get to autonomy, which is sort of the second part of the question, it's how does autonomy and less accidents on the road affect the need for tow trucks? Well, the first statistic you know is that two-thirds of the retail revenue is from breakdowns, not from accidents. So it's only a third of the industry really is accidents.
And the way I look at autonomy is that until you get to that hurdle where 51% or so of all half the cars on the road are autonomous, you and I driving our car can still hit that autonomous vehicle. It can avoid an accident, but it can't avoid being in an accident. So I think it's a long time coming. I think eventually there is some point at which that third of the market will get reduced over time. Unfortunately, today, distracted driving and these incidents per miles driven is still continuing to rise. No matter how much technology they put in the cars, autonomy, and everything else, distracted driving, the more technology they put in the vehicle, the more lazy the operators become.
And so they feel that they can now utilize their phone or be more distracted, and really the technology can't actually completely avoid an accident. So that's actually I hate to sound horrible, but it's actually a net positive for us, which is when everybody else is in need of something, that's really when the towing industry shines. Yes, ma'am.
Yeah. You said we have not been affected by tariffs. It's good, but what are the areas where you might be looking to take care of what you're doing?
Yeah. We've been affected some, right? But tariffs today, it's interesting. So what you're watching is a lot of your supply chain isn't passing on 100%, right? We put on a tariff surcharge in Q1 of this year.
That has seemed to, based on our margins, has seemed to have been able to keep our margins status quo throughout the remainder of the year. So it's absorbed what we've seen today. I think a lot of the supply chain is looking to figure out where it's going to end up, and they don't want to lose their U.S. market share. So they're not passing on 100% of the potential tariffs and they're eating them. The question is, how long and when do they stop eating part of that? Our biggest concern probably is steel. We do import quite a bit of steel from the European market from Sweden. We use a very specialized steel called Domex or Strenx. It's made by a Swedish company. They do have U.S. operations, but they don't manufacture the product we use in the U.S..
We are currently working with multiple different steel manufacturers here in the U.S. testing steel as alternatives. But at this moment in time, we're still importing with the tariff prices that they've given us, cheaper than we can buy steel here in the U.S.. Yes, sir.
Did the market slow suddenly, or what caused the increase in inability to?
The market started to slow in Q2 pre-election last year. Not sure exactly why. I can't answer that. But we definitely saw a slowdown in retail activity.
Retail activity has not slowed as much as our revenue has slowed because what we saw is as it slowed and we were continuing to build at the rate that our distribution had ordered and were requesting, by the time they figured out that the market was really slowing down for a longer period of time, I think originally it was, well, it's a pre-election slowdown. And we got a spike after the election. It's like, "Oh, everything's back to normal," and then it slowed right back down again. And it's been slow ever since. We've now adjusted our rates even slower. So really, retail levels are slightly slower than last year. Then you have order entry for our distribution network to us, which is lower than that, which is signaling to us that we want less inventory, right? We're ordering less than we're selling on a weekly basis.
And then we've put our production rates even lower than that, which is we're trying to help them flush out that inventory as quickly as possible so we can get back to a normalized production rate for the manufacturing facilities. Retail activity is a little bit slower, but it's not significantly different than it was. It's just we saw a build-up in inventory because we were building more than they were selling. We believe that somewhere mid-Q1, we should sort of start to see all of that normalize. I don't see car lots like a dealership. Where does inventory sit and then balance sheet? So it would be at distributor locations. So I mean, you'll see if you went by one of our distributors, where normally they might have it's lost small numbers, right? So a distributor normally might carry 20 tow trucks in inventory. He's got 45.
Well, it doesn't look like a car lot with hundreds, but he's got more than he wants, right? And he's paying interest or curtailments on that product, and he's looking to skinny that back down to a level that he's more used to having and has the inventory turns that he wants and really trying to work within the term limits that we provide him as well as the chassis suppliers provide him and trying to minimize his interest expense. Yes, sir.
I think you said there was a slowdown or a big slowdown in the military market. What did you say?
No. Well, in 2019, we haven't seen much military since '19. So really, when you hit COVID and supply chain crisis, a lot of the RFQs, most of the RFQs evaporated. There wasn't really a lot of capital there for government spending.
Once post-Ukraine, post-Middle East conflicts, you started to see just an explosion of RFQ activity again that went back to normal. And now you've seen most of our businesses with NATO allies. Now you've seen that increase of going from 2.5 to 5%. So now you're starting to see even more RFQs pop up for our product. We announced last November the Canadian military contract right before this show. I think it was right before this. It came out last year. That's scheduled production for '27 and '28. And then we have a multitude of other tenders that are in the process. Nothing that we can put out publicly today, but we're excited about the opportunities, looking forward to '26, '27, '28, '29. So the market is strong today or very sensitive? It's extremely strong today. It's a stronger market than we've ever seen in the last 30 years.
What percentage of your total revenue is minus part of the market? The highest it's ever been is around 20%, which was back in 2010 when our commercial market, but at that time, our commercial market was very soft. And we had a really nice contract with the U.S. military. So it creeped up. It's tough to tell where it'll max out in '27, '28, and '29. But military product is interesting, right? So we don't sell the chassis. So we're not the prime contractor for the military contracts. The prime contractor is going to be someone like Mercedes or Iveco or RMMV. Usually, for the NATO allies, it's going to be some European chassis manufacturer. We're going to be a supplier and sell them a body to mount onto that.
For us, that means that normally, different than our commercial market, where a lot of times we're selling a lower cost or a lower margin chassis with a higher margin body, which is where you see our margins sit in those 13 levels as a consolidated margin, the military only has the higher margin body sale. So it does impact the margins as we get into larger contracts. Also, the military product is usually higher margins than our commercial product as well. Got about 3 and a half minutes. Where do these so the average fleet size is 10 to 15 trucks. Where do you typically get financing? And is that source of financing stable or does it kind of fluctuate like every other? The only time we've seen a really serious impact financial crisis, '07, '08, '09, right?
There was no our revenues dropped significantly, and really you had a problem financing trucks. Today, we don't seem to have an availability issue of financing. Street rate today is probably 7.5, 8%. The guys liked it better when it was 5. They don't love 7.5, 8%. They'd like to see it come down a little bit. But primary banks, one of the banks that's pretty large in the U.S. market, Santander, has a specialized group that focuses on towing recovery. People utilize their own personal banks and standard institutions. Nothing else. You get out early. It's like getting out early in class. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Miller Industries. Like I said, if you have any additional questions, please reach out to Jeff Elliott with 3 Part Advisors or investorrelations@millerind.com. We'll be here all day. We've got one-on-ones. Love to speak with any one of you.
If you'd like some time, just reach out to Jeff. Thank you. I appreciate it.