Thank you. Are we ready to roll, guys? Okay, terrific. We are here at our 47th Annual Aerospace and Defense Conference at TD Cowen. Very lucky to have with us, the leadership team at Moog: Pat Roche, President and CEO, and Jennifer Walter, Chief Financial Officer. Welcome, guys. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having us.
I'm glad we were here last year as well as this year.
Yeah, well, guys, you know, before we get into, like, what happened in the quarter and stuff, I was curious if we could actually start with what you've been doing. You came in in 2023, big 80/20 initiative, and I was hoping you could describe what you've already done at Moog to kind of improve processes and what's left to do.
Yeah.
But I'm gonna let you lay out the vision and what's already been done and what's—
Yeah, thanks, Gautam, I'd be happy to do that. So, back in 2023, I came into the role of the CEO, and together with the leadership team, we were looking at the performance of our company over the prior decade. Recognized that we had really strong organic growth coming in the business. We've been successful at increasing scope and bringing back business from our existing customers. But our bottom line operating margin hadn't budged over a decade.
Stuck around 10% operating margin, and collectively, we took a look at it and said: "Is there something different that we can do within the business that will actually drive the financial performance?" And that was the path we set upon and laid out at the Investor Day, and a lot of it was using pricing and simplification as levers to change the margin performance within our business. And that transformation has been going on since even before the Investor Day. I mean, we experimented with different techniques and ways in which we could drive improvement in the business, to get to a point where, at the Investor Day, we had the confidence and the conviction that we could drive the change, and we wanted to tell the outside world about it, and that's where we gave our three-year guidance up to fiscal 2026.
Fundamental elements in that, as I mentioned, were pricing. We felt that we weren't getting recognized for the value we were creating for our customers in many of the end applications that we were in. That was across the entire set of end markets that we do business in. On the simplification side, the company had had at least two decades' worth of acquisitive growth that had accumulated, let's say, some baggage associated with it because all of our integrations weren't consistent. We'd brought on some product lines that, in retrospect, maybe didn't fit so well with our book of business, and we wanted to sort that out. We did things like portfolio shaping to take a look at those. It typically was businesses in the $10 million-$50 million range that we said, "No, that no longer fits.
It's not gonna give us the performance we want," and we started working to disposition those.
Mm-hmm.
There were other pieces of business where we had, through acquisitions, brought on another manufacturing plant, and then if you stand back and look at our manufacturing footprint, we've sort of had duplicative resources in certain regions.
Yeah.
Two motor manufacturing plants in the U.S. where our customer needs would say we only need one.
Mm.
Same in Europe, and so we started trying to rationalize our footprint as a business as well. Then we looked at what was going on in the factories, and we had some industrial factories that had maybe 10% or 15%, 5%-15% defense work that was running through them as well, adding extra complexity for the operations teams and the management teams at that site to deal with it. And so we said, "We really need focused factories. If it's industrial, just do industrial product. Take that defense work out and put it in one of our defense plants." So we did a sort of repositioning of some of the businesses within our organization. So there were three of the things we were driving:
Yeah.
Portfolio shaping, footprint rationalization, and some focused factory work. But I think the biggest discovery for us was 80/20 in that time period. We took 80/20 and did a couple of pilots in some of our industrial plants and discovered that they could really generate some insight for us and drive management decision-making locally to run a better business. So break out profitability by customer and by product line and decide which are the core, key customers we wanna focus and grow the business with, and which customers are more of attracting more overhead in the business to support them than we're getting in terms of value from them.
Mm.
We needed to do something about that. As we've built expertise with that, we started looking at value streams through the plant and doing detailed P&Ls, assigning all of the indirect headcount onto those P&Ls and saying: "What are we actually making on that product line or that value stream? Is it what we expected, and if not, what are we gonna do about it?
Mm-hmm.
So 80/20 was a big eye-opener for us. It gave us insights into pieces of the business that we actually thought were more profitable than they were, and then we discovered that they actually had a lot of overhead carried with them that we hadn't recognized before. So we didn't have to go the whole way to activity-based costing to discover this. You can assign these resources and know where the customer support is coming from.
Right.
We were able to make really better-informed decisions, and so 80/20 became the central point of it. If I go back to the Investor Day presentation, I had a pie chart with segments on it describing all these different initiatives.
Right.
80/20 was one of them, but in subsequent redraws of that, 80/20 is the bullseye in the middle. It's the mindset shift in the organization that says we will think about it in a different way-
Mm
... and we'll focus and prioritize our effort to go after those items that have the biggest impact. That's really what it is. Pareto, it's pretty simple for a finance person or an engineer to look at laying out a Pareto chart and say, "Okay, this is where I should focus," and that's what we've been doing for the last three years, and it has delivered results.
It has. I guess, can you talk a little bit more about that product rationalization and that customer rationalization and-
So, that has been an interesting journey for us because in our organization, our philosophy up to that point was all customers are equal... and whatever we need to do to sort out the problems of those customers, we're gonna invest the time and effort in doing that, 'cause that's who we are.
Yeah.
I think what we've discovered in 80/20 was that we were effectively dissipating some of our valuable resources on supporting customers that were never gonna be the right customers for our business. Our understanding of that now has improved over time. If I go back to the original plant that did the pilot for 80/20-
Mm-hmm.
you can walk into the plant now and see a poster on the wall that says, "Platinum customer, diamond customer.
Hmm.
gold customer, silver, bronze, down to tin," and they actually have the names of the customer on the chart. Which is really interesting, 'cause if you're not the top tier-
Right
... well, how are you gonna react to it? And what they've discovered is, the customers are asking them, "Well, how do I get to the top tier?
Oh, yeah.
How, how do I get there?" And so, okay, come and spend more than $1 million a year in this plant, and you will get better response times when you look for a bid, you will get better lead times offered, and so on. So you can actually differentiate the service offering appropriately-
Yeah
... and put it where it's gonna have the biggest impact on our business. So that's on the customer side.
Sure.
On the product side, we discovered some products that were maybe not as profitable or they've gone towards the end of life, and maybe for us, it's better either reprice it significantly or decide to end of life it, and go out to the customer and say they can do a last time buy, or move it on to another organization that's maybe better at supporting that type of business. And so we've done that across each of our businesses as well. We've moved some stuff from military aircraft that was at end of life out to a distributor who we're working with now across the world.
Hmm.
Things like that. So they've been real business decisions driven from the analysis, and it's data-driven. That's-
Yeah
... also a key part of it.
I'm curious culturally how that was received, 'cause I imagine it's not just a simple thing from corporate, you have an edict to do this-
Yeah
... and it happens.
No, that's, that's really good, 'cause,
Right
... good question, Gautam, 'cause, I mean, I'm 26 years with the company, and I've been through other transformations before in the organization. You know, if I go back to 2012, we were really driving Lean as a corporate initiative from the center, and getting traction in limited parts of the organization, but it wasn't... It didn't generate enough momentum itself to keep going. We had to keep pushing.
Yes.
80/20 has been very different for us as an experience in the organization. Conceptually, it's very easy to understand what you're doing. I'm gonna focus energy on the areas that have the biggest impact. That's a really simple message to convey at any level in the organization.
Right.
So we found that 80/20 has a huge amount of momentum built behind it now. We start in the middle, facilitating and enabling, and at the beginning, hiring some consultants to come in and work with us on the early pilots to learn something.
Yeah.
We had a coordination person at corporate who was looking across the groups and looking at where we would go next with those initiatives, and then we had champions appointed within the groups themselves. So now there are people within the business who are understanding what it can do and working with their local teams. And so the corporate coordination now is, we do every quarter a leadership review with the champions of 80/20 from within the businesses, and they tell us what they're doing, and we ask them: What more do you need from support for us to keep this going?
Gotcha. Is this like a facility-by-facility rollout? How do you actually-
Yeah, and that's another interesting learning for us. We started at the beginning, facility by facility-
Uh-huh
... in the industrial business, and you would take the book of business there, and you just go through and do all the early analysis, break it into a quad chart, work out your A and B customers, your A and B products, do some initial business decisions. So within the first 90 days of deployment at one of those plants, you're making... You're updating your business decisions on what you wanna focus on and what-
Mm-hmm
... what you want to de-emphasize.
Right.
So that was very successful. It doesn't work in all other parts of the business, 'cause some businesses, we have multiple plants that are supporting one piece of the business, and so in those, we've sort of stepped up to the business unit level and said, "Let's do that analysis of products and customers at business unit, and these manufacturing sites then will come in line with that analysis and-
Yes
... our understanding of the business.
Yeah, 'cause I was, I was trying to just imagine myself as a tin customer.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, I get it, I have no real influence at Moog, perhaps. But if I'm somewhere in between, and I might have entanglements with a number of facilities that support me-
Mm-hmm
... just looking at it at the facility level, you know, it may be an irrelevant-
Absolutely
... product in that facility.
And we do have that, we do have that level of coordination and-
You have an overlay.
... communication going on between the sites.
Okay, gotcha.
Yeah.
I presume it's an iterative process, right?
Yep.
So-
So, I was asked at the beginning, and I was trying to characterize our progress with it. I talked in terms of the number of sites deployed, the number of people trained.
Yeah.
You get to a certain point where you've done the bulk of the deployments effectively. I would say over 80% of our revenue is now already covered under 80/20.
Mm-hmm.
And so I don't talk to that or speak to that so much in the conference calls now, but what I'm focusing on now is the level of maturity with 80/20, and how do we firmly ingrain it into the way we work around here, the management processes here? So if Jennifer and I are doing a quarterly finance review or a quarterly business review, we're sort of expecting that it's reported back to us in a way that's consistent with 80/20.
Right.
Are you talking about your customers in a graduated way? Are you talking about in a operations review, what's our on time and full delivery for the A customers? 'Cause that's really where the, we're making a difference.
Yeah.
So, so that's where we are with our journey at the moment. We've covered most of the revenue. We need to continue to work on it, 'cause it's... I think maybe go back to an earlier part of your question, this job is never done.
Right.
It's a continuous improvement activity, and it's that working then in tandem with Lean and other tools that keeps driving and sustaining the gains that we have got-
Yeah
... in the organization. So it, it's never done... Yeah.
Well, it's interesting, 'cause I'm just wondering again, and I'm sorry, I'm literally just— I'm fascinated by this because you've got the hard stuff done, which is the first culture change. How do you stratify customers? How do you stratify products within it? How do you be more responsive to your best customers? And presumably, as you get more responsive to your best customers, they either give you more business-
Mm-hmm
... or more pricing or something. So what is that, like, so you've been doing this operationally, now what is sort of the reward-
Uh
for having done so by the customers themselves?
Absolutely. I mean, the end goal, I mean, we talked about simplification at the beginning.
Yeah.
But actually-
Right
... if you think about 80/20, the end goal of 80/20 is to create raving customers who wanna come back and grow the business. And so there, there's four pillars within 80/20. It's simplification, product line segmentation, that P&L that we talked about.
Yeah.
Resourcing, which is the next phase-
Yeah
... which is making sure you're putting the equipment, the people, and the resources on those A customers to optimize, to optimize our in-line, the manufacturing for that. So if it's one of our big customers, let's take data center cooling pumps. If I'm gonna be building 500 a week or whatever of those pumps, it's worthwhile investing in that and optimizing that process. So I invest lean and other tools to make that better.
Mm-hmm.
And then the final part then is growing it, growing the business with those customers.
Right.
That is where the stratification is important. It's where now you look at our terms and conditions that we deal with our customers, our service levels, and you actually define, for tin, it's gonna be this. For platinum, it's gonna be something very different.
Right.
We've laid that out, and that really then helps build it into the way the business works, 'cause now the sales teams and the business development teams, they're looking at the same, the same mental model of how to approach those customers.
Mm-hmm.
So at the beginning of the journey, all customers are equal. This far along the journey, we know we want to treat some of our customers as really special to us because they're gonna be the future of our profitable business.
Can I ask, I mean, being honest about it, like, if you were going back three years, four years ago, all customers treated equal, was that at the current tin level? Or like the... Was that kind of at a, was it bringing down the average where res- your-
It was-
... on time was below average? Or how did you-
No, I would say it was depleting resources that could have been focused-
Okay
... more and better focused on those customers that we now know are the ones that we need to-
Okay
... to support. You waste effort on some customers, and it's a few transactions a year. It's not going anywhere in terms of building the business.
Got it.
The differentiation for them isn't clear as to why they're working with us, so we're just one of many-
Got it
... in many cases there. So that's what's got rationalized and tidied up.
Got it. Are there any wins so far you've had with some of the customers with whom you've actually really leaned into?
You saw that we had, about a year ago, a $100 million plus order from Lockheed Martin for PAC-3.
Yep.
They've topped that up with another $100 million plus order in the recent quarter that we announced.
Okay.
We got an award from Lockheed Martin for 100% on-time delivery, 100% quality over a 12-month period. It's operational excellence-
Mm-hmm
... that grows the business with those existing customers.
Got it.
They become raving customers.
Right.
I actually have examples of VPs from customer organizations walking through our Salt Lake plant, looking at missile manufacturing, and said, "I want my business done in this facility." I mean, that specific.
Right.
That, that's a real strong advantage that we have and sets us apart, I think, from some of our competitors. We won that business from a competitor, the PAC-3 business.
Interesting. That's obviously a very high-growth program, so.
It is one. If I look at where the need is today for munitions, and you list out the 12, 13 missile programs that are being accelerated-
Yes
... we are on at least three-quarters of them. We're on PAC-3, we're on THAAD, we're on Standard Missile- 3, we're on Standard Missile- 6, we're on AMRAAM, we're on JASSM, we're on Tomahawk. I can go on and on.
That's awesome.
And so if you think about what might constitute part of future, Golden Dome-
Mm-hmm
... it's gonna be multilayered.
Yes.
We're not an architect of it 'cause we're too small a company. We're not a prime in it.
Yeah.
But I know that the capabilities and technologies and the platforms that we're on will get pulled into providing that solution.
Right.
I feel we're in a pretty good position to continue to grow that business.
Speaking of that business, I think on the earnings call, you mentioned it's $200 million, right?
It's-
Missiles and-
It was $200 million in fiscal 2025. It will be $250 million in fiscal 2026. It's growing at a 20%+ growth rate.
Right. Yeah, can you talk about-
And the-
Sorry.
One more thing to add to that, Gautam.
Yeah.
The two pieces of the orders from Lockheed Martin, they're at the old, I would say now, the old production rate of 600 per annum.
Right.
The government's new agreement with Lockheed and the seven-year term to that wants them to get up to 2,000 pieces per annum. We had insight into that need over the last 18 months to 24 months, 'cause every time we've been asked to bid on a missile program, our customer has said to us: "Can you go to 2x the rate? Can you go to 4 x the rate?" So we've been doing the analysis internally that's allowing us to say, "Yeah, we will grow with you. We will step up with you." And so now I think the potential is for those orders to flow down at a higher rate of production. So we haven't seen the benefit of that yet.
I was gonna ask, the Salt Lake facility capacity, I mean, or do-
Yeah
... do you, like, how facilitized are you? What do you need to do to actually-
So Salt-
meet some of these demands?
In Salt Lake, we have two facilities. One is medical devices, one is our space and defense group.
Uh-huh.
Space and Defense group plant is the one that has the missiles in it. It's a 200,000 sq ft building on a lot that has an acre or two around it, so it has room for expansion. The 200,000 sq ft building housed a number of other businesses in the past.
Okay.
We had a nav aid business, which as part of portfolio shaping, we sold to Thales a few years back. They had a transition service agreement. They sat in the building for a while, but then they vacated, and we held the space open. We had a digital ophthalmic surgery handpiece business in there, part of our medical business. We took that, and we transferred it into our other medical facility in Salt Lake as part of our focused factory initiative. We left that space vacant for the work to come in.
Gotcha.
So within the 200,000 sq ft, we can do the 4 x rate on PAC-3 without, or PAC-3-
Right
... without expanding that building.
Gotcha.
We're actually gonna put a circuit card assembly line into that building as well to feed the PAC-3 missile, and that's part of our capital investment plan for this year.
What about some of those other missile programs you mentioned, like AMRAAM, similar rates of growth?
Some of the content on those is coming from other facilities around our company.
Okay.
From the East Aurora campus, we do a lot of the stuff that goes into the THAAD missile.
Mm-hmm.
We have content in our Blacksburg, Virginia plant, or Blacksburg, North Carolina plant. I got it wrong. Blacksburg's Virginia.
Virginia.
Our Blacksburg, Virginia plant-
Yeah
... that is feeding into those missile programs as well. So we think we're in a good position to respond to the growth, and as you know, our CapEx over the last few years has been twice the level of our peers. We've been investing in the business-
Right
... which I feel positions us really nicely to be able to do this.
Makes sense. Okay, that's very helpful. I was curious also, if we could just talk about what you've been dealing with most recently, tariffs and mitigation of tariffs?
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Do you want to take that one, Jennifer?
Sure.
Yeah, so, I mean, that's obviously, it's 80 basis points approximately this year, right?
Yeah, so we've got tariff impact that started for us in Q3 and Q4. In Q1, we did have higher than anticipated tariffs as it related to some of our commercial aftermarket business, and just the airlines working through their paperwork process and making sure that all the documentation is in.
Right.
We did have higher than average tariffs in the first quarter. We have mitigated that by working with the airlines and helping them, showing them what forms they need to fill out from a paperwork standpoint to get that down.
Okay.
So that has largely been solved. It's not 100%, but for the most part, contained in Q1.
Okay.
There's a number of other types of activities where we're doing, where we're not bringing something into the U.S. and then sending it back out, where we'll keep it outside of the U.S. to avoid the tariffs. So those are some of the structural types of things that we're working on.
What does that entail?
That will reduce it over time.
What does that entail? Like, what has to change? Why was that product coming to the U.S.? What value add was being done to it here that-
A specific type of expertise-
Okay
... happened to be done in the U.S., and so we would bring it into the U.S. Now, there's a cost to that expertise-
Right
... that might not justify bringing it into the U.S. So we can find another one of our facilities to put it into-
Some of it has to do with the-
-to do that processing.
Some of it to do with the roles of different facilities around the organization. We have a plant in Torrance, California, that was doing the processing that Jennifer is talking about.
Hmm.
We have some similar capabilities in Wolverhampton, in the U.K., and so for us, it was a reasonably straightforward switch to say that the product from this Belgian supplier, instead of going to California, would go to the U.K.
Gotcha
... because the end customer is actually Airbus in Toulouse. So-
Right
... why, why have that unnecessary journey that we don't need? So you could look at it from an environmental perspective and say it was the right thing to do as well.
Right.
But the tariffs actually forced a decision on it.
Okay, and to be clear, on the airline paperwork-
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm
... this is for, like, a duty drawback, or what, what specifically are they supposed to be?
So those products can be going to a bonded warehouse type of arrangement, so you don't pay the tariff on them coming in. You do the work, and then they go back out again. What was happening was that wasn't being properly reported on the documentation coming in, and therefore, it attracted tariffs on the full value of the product.
Oh, got it. Okay.
Yeah, and that was single-digit millions of impact on us in Q1 specifically, and so you think, "Well, that's a pretty straightforward thing to sort out," but-
Correct
... all your airline customers need to come in line, and they need to be a little bit more disciplined on filling out the forms, and so we're helping them with that. So there's a little bit of education going on, but it's certainly a workable thing, and we've actually made good progress within Q1 itself on getting that straightened.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, and so the 80 basis points of pressure for the year is inclusive of the mitigation, or-?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay, so there's still I mean, Q1 was 130... It was something much higher than this-
Yes
... I recall.
Yes.
Uh, okay-
You still have stuff like, Section 232 and those other regula-
You can't
... you can't avoid them unless you change your supply chain, and so over time, you look at what you're doing where, and you think about that as an impact.
Gotcha. Okay. One of the things you also mentioned in the first quarter was some unexpected orders earlier in the year, and I was hoping, by the way, you explained it to me offline, so... But it was an order, but also was recognized as revenue.
Yes.
So, if you could just talk a little bit about that-
Yes, so-
Because that was confusing for some.
For the background, we beat our EPS guide by a little over $0.40 in the first quarter-
Mm
... and we increased our guide for the full year by half that, $0.20. So we did have some strength in parts of our business, like in space and defense, in industrial, and that actually flows through to the end of the year.
Yep.
However, what you're referring to, we saw it on one contract in particular, but we also saw it within some space and defense jobs, where we accelerated our earnings earlier on. So in the specific case of the V-22 order that we got, this is for our aftermarket, we got an order that represented basically a year's worth of activity. It's on long-term contract accounting, so the work that we were doing, the supplies that we had on hand, contributed to progress that gets recorded and reflected as revenue and earnings. So that actually is a pull-in, an acceleration from later parts of the year, so that doesn't add to the full year's benefit in EPS.
Yeah.
So it's really the timing of the order that we had and the nature of the order being on long-term contract accounting that did the acceleration. We also saw it in space and defense, not on one specific job-
Yep
... but we did see that overall, and some of the things that we're attributing to that is the pull-in on some of the military things, from a readiness standpoint.
Mm-hmm. So in theory, that might actually continue, right? Or if it, in fact, is just a more urgent pace of ordering?
It could. Based on what we know right now, we did our two, Q2 guidance-
Yeah
based on what we knew, and we weren't expecting any further acceleration.
Okay.
Obviously, on the V-22 order, that's already been pulled forward, so we don't have that opportunity to pull that one forward, but-
Right
... right now, Q2 represents the best that we know.
That's-
There is a need to increase levels of readiness across-
Mm-hmm
The military aircraft in general, so we're doing what we can to help assist that, too.
There's certainly a lot of activity and a lot of talk. Even if something isn't formalized in a particular contract, the talk is on making sure that you can accelerate plays, that comes into play, for instance, on V75.
Right.
So those are the types of activities that are happening in the supply chain, where you're actually seeing, readiness, ability to move forward, even if it hasn't been contracted yet.
Fair enough. That makes sense. I was gonna ask you also, I believe you hired someone for a Chief Strategy and Corporate Development-
Mm-hmm
... position. That, that's new to the company, as far as I can tell?
Well, we had people involved in corporate development.
Right
... and strategy, but maybe at a different level in the organization structure, and I was looking to the future, and so we've been on a transformation journey over the last number of years, where we've really got a hold of the pricing and simplification work.
Yeah.
We've always kept an active eye on the acquisition funnel, so we've been looking at what's coming up, and, where appropriate, such as with COTSWORKS last year, that optoelectronic company, we acquired it.
Right.
So we've actively been looking, but what I'm trying to change is our approach to acquisition overall, and it's to be less opportunistic and just looking at what investment bankers bring to us-
Mm
... and to be more strategic in targeting potential acquisitions that help assist the business that we have. So add capability or add scope on existing content or on existing programs where we have great relationships with the customers, or geographically, maybe Europe. So I want to look, I want to cast a look across those, but in a very strategic manner-
Right
... and then in a proactive manner, rather than just a reactive manner, and I think that's skill and capability we have to build. And so putting Rob Mullins in place in that role was part of allowing us to grow that capability in parallel with continuing the transformation activities we're driving internally-
Right
... such that at the point as our cash flows begin to improve, we could say, "Okay, there are other ways of deploying, and let's look at them, and let's, let's see what is value creating for us." So that the whole focus is on creating value, but in a much more structured manner. And then I mentioned earlier in the discussion, Gautam, that we had a history of acquisitions over a 20-year period, and that had some carryover in terms of complexity. We are much more focused as a leadership team in ensuring that there will be a consistent and more rigorous approach to integration-
Mm
... such that it's not creating baggage for future generations of leaders in the organization.
Sure.
So that, that's why that role is in place.
I mean, are there any specific areas that excite you most from an M&A standpoint?
I think there's opportunities in a lot of the warfighting domains that we're involved, where we could add some additional capabilities to what we already have. I think what we have is a great reputation with our customers as technology bringing technology insight and into their solutions.
Mm.
They value us really for that and for the quality of the products that we deliver to them. I think we have an opportunity to build on that really strong relationship with those customers, with potential add-ons to it that would come through our business then.
Mm-hmm.
And so we could use acquisitions to bring in some of those tuck-ins or whatever you want to call them.
Right.
I mean, I'm interested in the rate of growth of defense in Europe, obviously, as well-
Yeah
... because, relatively, it's much stronger than it is here, and there's-
Yeah
... more potential there. In the future, we have 3,000 staff in Europe and 10 manufacturing locations already, so we can use some existing resources to leverage that, but it may be that an acquisition might give a new relationship or access to a customer that we want in Europe, too. So there could be potential there. Nothing's fixed yet at this point. These are all conceptual, and that's-
Right
... that's what really Rob's job is over the next nine months or so, is to get us in a better shape.
Do you have any financial hurdles you can share with us with respect to M&A?
Do you want to do that?
Yeah, when we talk about first, for instance, size of a deal, too, we're not looking at transformational types of deals.
Mm-hmm.
But we also try not to shy away, unless there's a specific strategic technology that we want-
Mm-hmm
... from the very small ones.
Yeah.
Some of the sweet spot might be in a deal size of, you know, $100 million-$250 million, a company large enough so they've got systems and processes-
Right
... in them. When we look at the financial criteria, we look at a whole variety of criteria. We look at accretiveness, we look at operating margin, expansion or dilution, we look at return on invested capital compared to weighted average cost of capital, and when do we become neutral on that?
Right.
It's not one particular criteria, but it's really a collection of several different financial metrics that we do, and obviously, the pricing is gonna depend on the nature of the asset that we're looking at.
We expect our capital deployment to be balanced in the future as well. I mean, it has been in the past where-
Balanced between?
Between all aspects of dividends, repurchase, transactions, and investing in our organic growth in the business.
Okay. And you said buybacks as well, so that, that is gonna continue to be part of the-
It is. I would say our primary focus right now is on organic growth, capital expenditures, R&D.
Mm-hmm.
We have tremendous opportunities in the market right now, so that's first and foremost. We do wanna complement that with M&A in the right spots, too, so really it's focused on the growth, but we are committed to our dividend policy, and I would say share repurchases fits more on an opportunistic type of aspect, secondary to the growth.
If you were to wind up sitting here today in the second quarter, if there were to be upside to the outlook for the year, where, where's it most likely to come from, in your view?
So when we look at sales, I would say upside opportunities are if there's acceleration in defense markets. So defense markets, if there's pull-ins, that's an opportunity to be upside on the sales.
Right.
If we look at earnings, I would say one of the mixed opportunities really is our commercial aftermarket activity is very robust. If it continues at that very robust level, it can
Right
... help there. We get great additional margin in our space and defense business, so if that's picking up-
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
... we'd certainly see a margin benefit from that one as well.
Great. Well, we're at time.
Mm-hmm.
I want to thank you for coming.
You're welcome.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Gautam.
Thank you all.
Thank you.