Good afternoon. Thank you for coming to our investor day presentation. Appreciate it. Last year we did it at the Harvard Club, I'm really glad we could host it this year at the NYSE. This is kind of a fun place to do it. I don't know how many people have rung the bell downstairs before or, you know, I've only been here twice, and I used to be an investment banker. I probably took 40 companies public. We're gonna get started. Marc J. Gabelli, our Chairman, our Co-Chairman's here. He's next door. He's probably gonna come in and say a few words, we have several board members here as well, like Hendi Susanto is here somewhere, and also Robert LaPenta Jr. is here.
Feel free to introduce yourselves to them afterwards if you have any questions or, you know, feedback. Tony Bennett, one of the Gabelli analysts for the military space is also here. Between Hendi Susanto and Tony, we're they do a job of understanding the story. Thank you, Anja Soderstrom, from Sidoti, for coming. she does a wonderful job covering us, so great person to refer to and their firm. They've been really helpful, really, you know, driving the stock, helping us introducing us to good investment teams. Thank you all for coming. today I'm joined by William Drafts, our President and General Manager. William is down in the Orlando facility, which is really our corporate headquarters.
I'm up in the D.C. area and kind of, I know I spend about three weeks a month on planes, usually going to investor conferences it seems these days. That's not where I wanna spend all my time. I'm also get down to Orlando. We're gonna get started, and please interrupt if you have questions. It's a little bit longer presentation than normal. We just wanna make sure that we try to go into a little bit more depth, make it worth your while for coming, but also, wanna address your questions. If we don't have an answer, we'll get back to you. We'll take some notes as well. Okay.
To start off just a safe harbor statement, we ask that you look at all our filings. We did file our 10-K March 26, 2026. It has obviously a lot of the risk factors that we think are appropriate for the firm and the space we're in. And just a reminder that, you know, any forward-looking statement we make today is just that. It's a, it's an estimate. We're not required to make updates to all those statements. We do ask that you know, refer to all the documentation that we publish with the SEC. Okay. Really quickly, I think most of you are pretty familiar with M-tron and the story.
You know, M-tron is a very unique story, I think, especially these days, and it's kind of at the crossroads of where a lot of the industry is going. I think personally, I've been in the defense space since 1986. This is probably the most interesting time in, certainly in the defense industry in my short history, I guess, with it. The past quarter itself, like Q1 of this year, was really revolutionary in terms of how the Department of War was addressing the markets. We're really a beneficiary of that, but it's not by happenstance. It's 'cause there was a lot of hard work that was done earlier to position the company well for these market changes.
This is our Chairman, Marc J. Gabelli. Do you wanna say a few words, Marc, while we get started?
Just thank you everyone for being here. There are some new faces. We had an LGL Group meeting just before this, and thank you for those that have come for M-tron itself. I think we have Cameron and Bill.
Yeah
handle the formalities. The basic outline, as Cameron said, is you have a very strong balance sheet and cash generation, but the business itself really hasn't changed. The important thing now is for Cameron and team to start to continue to diversify the business and ultimately grow its organic business profile with the key customers and an orientation towards diversified defense. Thank you, Cameron.
Thank you, Mark. Appreciate you coming. Okay. Okay. Some of the highlights. We're very aerospace and defense-focused. It's now 70% of revenue. We moved into that market in the 2004 timeframe. That's when M-tron and PTI actually merged, and they both made a conscientious effort to get out of the commodity markets and go more into customized markets with long program tails. That's really been really incredibly important to our success. After we did a rights offering last month, now we have about 4.3 million shares outstanding. No debt, we're cash flow generating, as Mark said. We're actually putting a fair amount of cash on the balance sheet. We have raised about $70 million over the past 6 months, right, through the warrant offering and the rights offering.
We have just around $94 million if you add up, you know, the balance sheet from Q1 plus the rights offering proceeds. Very well-positioned, and that helps us tremendously in the market. It really strengthens our position with our customers. Also last point here, broad employee ownership. Actually, every employee in the company received stock when we went public. We went public through a spin-out from LGL Group, you know, it just presented earlier in the day. It's been really great to see not only the dedication of our employees but also them kind of enjoyed some of the rewards of what they're building.
Then lastly, we'll go through some of these profile points, but obviously, I think we're pretty uniquely positioned in some high-growth niche markets, and we'll get into more depth on that. Okay. Here are the investment highlights. You know, I highlight these almost every call. Strong revenue growth and cash generation at this point in time. We are, you know, the cash flow from operations is probably, you know, $11 million-$12 million a year. Our CapEx has gone up a little bit this year, but it's still relatively de minimis given the growth potential ahead of the company. We have very attractive end markets and long-term contracts or programs. The distinction there is that in some cases, for some markets, we have 2, 3-year contracts.
In other areas, we're getting annual POs for one-year production. We know that the system that we're producing for, we've been essentially locked in. You know, we've been qualified. They may have one or two vendors and that program is probably gonna run 20 years. It could be in the avionics industry or it could be in the defense market, but both those markets have some similar characteristics there. We have a very unique capability, kind of advanced manufacturing in the U.S. Obviously something that the Department of War is very concerned about. They're trying to strengthen it. I was with Assistant Secretary Kandanaze. It was at a conference he was attending, and just hearing about the programs they're putting in place to strengthen the U.S. industrial base is really encouraging.
Bill and I fight that, particularly Bill, every day just trying to find people to hire. You know, it's like our biggest problem. Well, I think we have at this point very compelling financials. Also tacking onto that a good inorganic growth story, we'll go into more detail about the kinds of things we're looking at there. Lastly, we have the production capacity and the management team ready to do much more than we're doing today. If you look at our facilities in Florida, they probably can handle, and also South Dakota, we probably can handle $100 million of revenue kind of through that plant. We'll get into that a little bit later in the presentation. Okay.
Next slide is just some of the highlights I think if you're trying to figure out, like, why M-tron's performing the way it is and what makes us unique in the industry. The first one on the left is that we are very vertically integrated and we're in the RF space. There's a lot of vendors in the RF space. Most of them rely on number of suppliers, you know, for all types of things. Might be outsourcing test, might be, you know, machining, plating, all types of processes. Over the years, particularly since COVID, I think, we started bringing more of those processes in-house, and it gives us a tremendous advantage. We don't always, you know, use our in-house capabilities. You know, we'll figure out what makes the most sense for the particular contract in hand.
What that lets us do is shorten our lead times for delivery, so we're very, very competitive on that front. It also improves our margins. You know, we're capturing more of that margin, and that's helped drive our gross margins from the mid-30s up to where they are now in the mid-40s. The other thing we're gonna highlight is just the superior customer base we have. I think we have over 70 customers, on, you know, you'll see them on the customer slide, in our primary markets that have been with the company more than 10 years. A lot of loyalty, but also just a recognition in those firms of our capabilities, and that helps us win more business, you know, within the Raytheon or whoever it might be.
Lastly, we've had strong market performance, so, you know, very good metrics over the past several years. I think it's a great stock to buy for that reason, you know, if you look at it. The last slide I'm gonna talk about is just the team itself. We have a really high-quality board. Several of our board members are here today. They come out of the defense industry as operators or investors in strictly defense, as well as the investment world. You know, several members of the Gabelli Asset Management team. With Marc and Hendi and David M. Goldman. Bel Lazar runs a competitive power amplifier company. It's longtime operator in the industry.
John Mega was one of the original founders of L3, operated a lot of the radio and satellite parts of that business, knows our industry extremely well. Ivan Ortega, who was actually the CEO of Amtron at one point in time. Lastly, in the management team, you know, this is just the executive management team, but we have a deep bench. Bill and team have built a really nice group down in Florida. Very extremely dedicated. You know, everybody's really is there, you know, almost six days a week I'd say these days, right? Most people are working, you know, Saturday mornings as well, or Saturday afternoons. Lot of e-experience in manufacturing and design.
Linda, who's our Executive Vice President of Finance, handles all the accounting teams, and she does a lot more beyond that, but that's her primary role. She's been with the company 20 years, but before that, she had a lot of manufacturing experience, which she brought to the business. Bill, well, you know, Bill, why don't you step up? Why don't you give them a little bit about your background? Bill has been in the industry quite a while as well with a number of other companies, and just having that experience base helps us kind of maintain, you know, and move the company forward. My experience is a little bit more varied, so I'm more a little bit more of a generalist.
I started out in the defense industry, doing a lot of balance assessments, which kind of drove military procurement. I spent 12 years as an advisor at Bain or investment banking, before moving over to, like, company management. I've run 3 businesses to date that were defense-focused. You know, 1 in data storage, 2 in cybersecurity, and now M-tron Industries. Okay. William Drafts, why don't you give them a little bit about the history of the company?
Absolutely. Thank you, Cameron. My background is I'm a design engineer that made the choice of either staying technical or going management. I went management. I've run a couple companies and Amtron's by far the funnest company I've run. Great team, great products, great customers, great mission. We're having a lot of fun down in Florida and South Dakota, it's been going on for a while, right? We've been doing this for over 60 years. We were in space back in the early 1970s before space was the thing and cool. If I were to add a couple bullets to this slide, I would say 2025 and 2026. Next time we give this presentation, you'll see some solutions-based things going on.
We have some super exciting solutions that are in development right now that with the customers are being tested. We're iterating. They'll be in production in 2027 and 2028, and they're very high frequency master reference oscillators and our new e-Vibe OCXO line with a PLL that has a great radar application. I think the key to this slide is we just keep innovating, right? That's what we do. We solve problems. Customers bring us the absolute hardest things to solve and through iteration and through working with the customer tightly, we become an extension of their engineering team and solve the most challenging problems. What is M-tron overall? We have really 3 product families. We have filters, and within filters, we have numerous types of topologies.
Each one's a very different technology, each technology has its advantages and disadvantages, either in frequency or in selectivity or in insertion loss. When a customer comes to us for filters, we can basically choose the right technology for them, and it's all within our own control. The customers love that. Oscillators, same thing. Different oscillators for different solutions. We take those great products, including crystal resonators, and bolt them into solutions, and that's really new for us. We entered the solution market back in 2020, and we've just continued to grow. Our customers love it because, again, they have a retiring force that they call it the gray tsunami, where all these RF engineers left the industry.
We've been able to get some people in, and we're becoming an extension of our engineering team and actually solving the whole problem for them, meaning not just a component supplier, but a solution supplier. Sales-wise, growing nicely, $56 million last year. Same basic breakdown between R&D, excuse me, aerospace and defense and avionics with, you know, roughly 65%-70% and 20%-25%. The rest is test and measurement space, both important for us, but certainly not the big lion's share of our revenue. Same thing, we're really a filter company that's trying to diversify product-wise and become more of an oscillator house, and you'll see that definitely in this year's numbers and going forward with some of our newer products.
Of course, we always want those solutions that start becoming meaningful in this pie of product revenue split. EBITDA margins, CAGR, you know, I think these are all, you know, just world-class numbers. Backlog, almost, you know, 2 years of backlog, which is fantastic. We'll obviously see a little bit of slump in backlog going forward because it is lumpy, as Cameron mentioned, but certainly doing everything we can to try and streamline that out. We talked about each product family. You know, filters, they separate. You're in a contested, crowded electromagnetic spectrum, basically think of your cell phone. All of a sudden your cell phone stops working. It could be lack of signal.
Well, there is signal there, it's just that the filter on your front end has too much insertion loss, the signal can't make it through. If you used our filters, you'd probably make it. Oscillators, same kind of thing. You're setting a standard, it's very important that standard never varies over temperature, vibration, shock. Oscillators are used in all kinds of applications, which we'll go into. Resonators are actually the very heart of the company. Our original name was Piezo Technology, Inc., these are Piezo technology devices. What that means is it's a slab of quartz just right on the ground. You cut it, you slice it. If you strike quartz, it makes electricity. Oppositely, excuse me. If you put electricity into it vibrates.
What that means is it just helps you create a very specific frequency that doesn't, it doesn't have a lot of other frequencies. In your filter, in your oscillator, you just want an exact frequency, that's super important. I know I'm talking a little engineering speak, but this will be the end of it. Solutions. Obviously, you take all these great things and other people's products. If we don't make it, if there's an RF switch or something that's in there, also in there, we will add that to it and basically just solve the customer's solution need. Focusing on oscillators, again, they're a reference frequency. They can't change over temperature, vibration, humidity, anything. They have to be dead nuts, right?
They are used in a lot of comms, and comms is our biggest market. Every radio has a frequency standard. It determines what's going out your cell phones. Same thing. There's 1 million different frequencies in the spectrum all around you in the air, and your device has to be able to select one, and it has to be able to produce one. If you produce something different, well, then your whoever you're trying to communicate is not gonna see the signal. That's certainly important. This world's best-performing vibration immune OCXO to the right, top right, is one of our most recent products, and it is getting traction. It is the definition of hockey stick. You don't see hockey sticks very often.
In my 40-plus years of doing this, I've probably seen 2, this one's a crazy hockey stick. We are really ramping up on this. It's a great product. The market really needs an oscillator that can be on a vehicle, on an airframe, whether it's a drone or a helicopter or plane, and its frequency does not change with all that rattle and vibration. That's super important. Great product there that you'll hear a lot more about later this year. Of course, EW systems, they need the oscillators to be stable and then some filtering in there as well, we're talking about oscillators. Control systems, that's, you know, pretty secondary market for us. A little bit more commodity, we don't see a lot of opportunities there.
Filters, we talked about a little bit. It has to be super selective. You can't have a lot of insertion loss, which means the signal loses its strength as it passes through your filter. So, you obviously want it to be very selective. So those things are super critical in these applications of communications, electronic warfare systems, and radars. Those are our big markets for all of our products. In a nutshell, this slide says a lot, but really when we meet the customer and they have an opportunity, we really try and be an extension of their engineering department. Engineers meet with engineers right away. If you guys have any friends that are engineers, you know we're different. Usually, we're not social. We talk engineering speak.
If you read Dilbert, which is a hilarious cartoon, we think differently. We're always trying to problem solve. My wife goes nuts because we'll go to the grocery store and I'll say, "If they just move that over there, it'd be way better." She's like, "No, it's not a problem to solve. Let's just get our stuff and get out of here." That's what we do. When engineers get together and are solving problems, and the customer's asking for things that really may not be physically possible, we'll say, "Well, if you make this trade-off, then you're gonna get the best solution." It starts this iterative dance that goes for months and sometimes years.
Finally, at the end of the day, you have the best solution that nobody else would have spent that much time and hand-holding to get in there. It's really a marriage. That's one of the biggest differentiators of our company is we're willing to commit the time. We're willing to do that iterative dance. We're willing to do all the modeling, all the fast fail prototyping, right? We, as Cameron mentioned, we're very vertically integrated. If I have to machine something, I don't have to wait eight weeks to go out of house. I walk to the machine shop, I say, "Hey, Fred, could you do this right away?" He goes, "Boom," and I got it the next day. Super advantage there. Other things, bore population, laser welding.
I don't think any of our competitors have a laser welder, and so on. We can test it. We have all these test capabilities in-house as well. All those things give us a huge advantage. New products. What that leads to is because this new product engine just keeps churning, 30% of our revenues each year are from products that were developed in the last four years. We use a four-year window because from the time we do that iterative dance for a year, then we finally get a solution, they test it, they put it on the airframe, they go into LRIP, and they go in full rate of production, it is four years. Our sales cycle is very long, but that is the negative.
The good thing is now I'm on a jet strike fighter that's got a 4-year run rate, it's going to be in production for 40+ years. I've got a design slot that's 40 years of continuous revenue. It's certainly, in my opinion, worth the fight, worth the aggravation, but you got to pick your winners, right? If you spend all that time and you lose the program or the customer uses the program or whatever, you really got to pick your battles. That's very important we do our research on the front end, as Cameron mentioned, make sure we're on the right program. If the program has multiple bidders, we're on all the bidders so that no matter who wins, we're on the airframe or whatever the application is. Other key points on the slide is the number of products.
We're just, again, that sales filter at the front end is generating higher revenue per product. That's exactly what you wanna see, which leads to higher ASPs. We're adding more value. We're not a commodity supplier. As we keep adding that value, our ASPs, we can command a higher ASP because we're just bringing more value to the customer. This is just a great slide showing all the hard work that the team's been doing. This is Cameron's slide.
Yeah. We're gonna share duties today.
Yep.
So yeah. Bill gave you a great overview of some of the products we make. If you have questions, we really wanted to speak to kind of how are we differentiated, and I think we are. One of the proof points of that is that, you know, over 50%, I believe, of our aerospace and defense design slot wins or design wins are, you know, we're sole source. Very unique position in the industry. We have, you know, frankly, a lot of competitors. There are a lot of competitors, but in the filter space or the oscillator space, but we stacked up very, very well over the years. The next thing we wanna talk about was just some of the markets we're after.
Some very high growth markets, especially, you know, these days, you read the newspaper every day. The U.S. defense budget, you know, the request for this coming year, $1.5 trillion of procurement, up 42% from the prior year, an unheard of scaling, you know, if it passes. Also they've been talking more recently about what are the investment areas that it's gonna go into. It's in a lot of RF spectrum analysis. It's in autonomy. It's in radar and building new ships and things. It's in areas that really we have a very strong focus on. That's really been helping us build our backlog. We've had a really good bookings year. Had a good bookings year last year, I do think it's gonna be probably accelerating, right?
We're now competing for some of these really long missile contracts, for example, that are seven years and seven-year procurement cycles. You think about some of the other markets we're in. Obviously precision-guided munitions, radar, EW, drones, and communications in general. Those are all kind of the military markets we serve. Commercial aerospace is our next biggest market, that's really come back strong. Over 16,000 aircraft in the backlog. That's supposed to take 15 years to build, and then there's another 43,000 supposable aircraft that they need for them just to handle the passenger traffic over the next 20 years. An incredible demand there. Also we're active in the industrials markets, we play in several different areas there.
Test and measurement is one of them. You know, downhole oil drilling sensors. You know, there's some other areas too. We do a little bit of telecom still. Those are all kind of lumped into the industrials market. Okay. Plenty of growth there. The next thing I wanna talk about was just some of the change in the defense market. Been a lot of change over the past year. I think when Secretary Feinberg or, you know, Undersecretary Feinberg joined, pretty much right away, he realized that there's a disconnect, right, between our needs and our capabilities.
He and Assistant Secretary Duffey almost immediately started working with the larger primes, you know, the Raytheons, the Lockheeds, and others about retooling and kind of rebuilding our defense infrastructure and starting to scale to handle our strategy, right? If you looked at the missile stockpile, they talk about that a lot, right, on the news. You know, how many missiles and precision-guided munitions have we used in Iran? We were, earlier we were saying we were sending too many to Ukraine. We're kind of exposing ourselves if we're gonna have an Asia strategy as well as a Middle Eastern strategy. Those things have really led to a lot of changes in the Department of War.
One is retooling how we do contracts, making them much, much longer in length, and they call that the demand signal for the Raytheons and Lockheed Martin to make the investment they need. That's one of the changes. There have been much quicker procurement cycles, and they're trying to move to more of a software procurement or a solution procurement model. A lot of new companies, you know, defense tech companies coming into the market that approach it from that way. They're building products, iterating very, very quickly and rapidly, much quicker than, you know, than the large primes were doing in the past. And there's big implications for defense suppliers, essentially. Now we're being asked to look out several years of production and build for that anticipated demand.
Right now, you know, the next slide's gonna show you. This is a CSIS report, it's on the web, so it's accessible by anybody. Really good study. You know, The Wall Street Journal has also done some studies on this, but this is really just talking about precision-guided munitions. It talks about the cost for some of these, you know, exquisite systems, as they call them. These are some of the more strategic systems that the U.S. has right now. It talked about the estimated pre-war inventory, and then this was an assessment done about a month ago. What's the impact of the Iranian conflict?
You know, you've heard about people, you know, shipping stores from Korea and other places in Asia to the Middle East for this conflict. This is creating a huge demand for increased production. We're definitely part of this. You know, if you look at some of the announcements from Raytheon and Lockheed, they went through the various systems they've already received contracts on. There are, you know, there are other contracts obviously in the works too that'll be announced over time. We're not on all those programs, but we're on our fair share.
We were asked, you know, probably 9 months ago, 10 months ago, to start, and this was because this was common knowledge that, you know, Secretary Feinberg started this negotiation in February, kind of like, you know, a week or 2 after he joined. We were asked, "How can we scale to support this?" If you look at the production facilities at the bigger primes, it's, you know, very manual. It's gonna take them some time to build out their infrastructure to handle this increased demand. For several of these systems, they've either been contracted to double or even quadruple production. You know, PAC-3, for example, on the Patriot side with Lockheed, is being asked to triple. The Tomahawk production is, you know, woefully low. Other areas like AMRAAM is probably gonna double.
You know, there's, you know, there's various. It's coming out piecemeal, to be frank with you. We're seeing our fair share of this, and I think we're gonna probably increase the content we're delivering today. The one thing I did wanna mention, though, that, you know, do not expect a big uptick in 2026 from this activity. This positions us very, very well for the future, but there is a lag in the industry. It's not an inventory-based system. You know, it's really a just-in-time system. We're being asked, you know, if we win these contracts, to really up our production for late '27, early '28. Okay. There's three or four slides in the presentation. I'm not gonna go through them all in detail.
This presentation will be online, so you can certainly go through it, and it's a good reference for you. People often ask us, you know, how we're deployed, what types of products we make are in different types of systems. We included this. We included, I think, you know, precision-guided munitions, radar. This is a really exciting area for us right now, and I'll talk a little bit about this in a second. How are we being deployed in radar? EW, and commercial aircraft, and these are just some examples. You know, if you have follow-ups, we're happy to have calls with you guys. Just, you know, send in an email to ir@mtron.com. Just to talk about the radar market, for example. We've been involved in radar for quite a while.
It's an area we wanted to penetrate further, we started really kind of upping our design work in this space several years ago. As Bill said, it's a very iterative process. You know, we get our salespeople, once they qualify something, all of our salespeople are engineers at heart. You know, they were engineers at one point in time. We bring our engineers in to work with theirs to work on the specs and to design a product that meets their needs. If you look at the U.S. radar systems, for example, almost every large fire control radar is being redesigned. Because of the different types of targets, whether it's hypersonic missiles, traveling much quicker than other types of missiles, or it's drones loitering, could be very small.
There's a refresh in general taking place in this space. One area that we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth in is there's a new class of radar also being developed, you know, by newer companies, these defense tech companies. They're developing mid-range phased array radar, which are much less expensive. They're designed to quickly lock on to very small targets and to manage. It's really for counter-drone activity. If you read about Ukraine or the Baltics, they talk about this drone wall they're developing, right? That this is from this type of radar system. There's also been a lot of announcements in the U.S. about border control radar. You know, also 'cause there's drones from Mexico, from cartels and other potential adversaries.
U.S. airports are all gonna have these types of systems, right? There's a lot of infrastructure to protect. We're seeing tremendous uptick in this, in this market, and this is one of the areas where we have a really unique hold on it because of the products we developed, and it's, you know, this e-Vibe product I think is very unique in the industry. Okay. Okay. Some of the growth drivers. These haven't changed yet, although some of them have been accentuated. The, the weapon system replenishment market is coming on stronger than ever. You know, that's recognized. I think the U.S. strategy has frankly changed over the, over the past year or two. I think if you look back 20 years at U.S. military strategy, we're extremely technically advanced.
Most of the military procurement was designed to help the U.S. fight a very short war with overwhelming firepower and technical superiority. Now there's a recognition that, first of all, we're gonna have to potentially fight two different conflicts, but also there are other adversaries who have been making big investments. Like, you look at Ukraine and Russia, two extremely sophisticated combatants. Look how long that conflict has gone on. There's a recognition, right, that the amount that we're producing is just not enough to meet the potential demand. That's, as Elbridge Colby has come into that strategy position, they've made some significant changes there. Modernization programs we talked about, like specifically in radar and some other systems. The backlog of aircraft is really driving a lot of growth.
It's gonna be 1 of our strongest growth areas this year, and we have a nice backlog there going forward. We are expanding into new markets, so actually 1 of the areas, I guess the area's highest growth in our backlog this past year has been space. I think there's been a lag in space, honestly. I think part of it was because they were trying to figure out the Golden Dome architecture. Also, we play in some markets in the space market, but not everywhere. We're not in LEO. We're in MEO and GEO satellites and a lot of ground stations. That market is changing too. People are going to multi-band or that's a requirement now for communications. Lastly, you know, we have a strong R&D and manufacturing base.
Our R&D teams are answering almost twice as many requests for quotations that we were, you know, a year or two ago. The volume of opportunities is really increasing. That's helping, as William Drafts was talking about earlier, the ASPs are going up, and also, you know, the size of the contracts are going up. That lets us be much more selective about what work we take on, and it helps us, you know, develop, you know, better margins because we don't have as many processes on the floor. Okay. I didn't wanna say a lot about the TAM. It's obviously a very large market. We're a relatively small player. We have a lot of opportunity for growth.
We've been taking growth now because some of our programs are expanding, but we're also winning a, you know, pretty good market share from several of our competitors. We talk about the competitors on most calls, but very few have the breadth of product that we have. Usually they're specializing in filters or oscillators, and it might be just 1 type of filter. Just having that broad relevance really helps us. We have a great rep force, and I think we're, you know, they want to cover just a few companies on their line card, and we're, you know, we're providing them a lot of product they can push through their channel. Bill, why don't we talk a little bit about the sales model, if you would? Yeah.
Thank you, Cameron. As I mentioned before, it's really important to get engineers involved early in the process. The last thing that you wanna do to an engineer is have them talk to a salesperson or somebody who doesn't understand the technology. They're gonna vet them out right away and just go, "Get me somebody who knows what they're talking about." That's exactly what we do. All of our reps have an engineering mentality. They have intimate relationships with the customer, and they know, they got their basically finger on the pulse of programs, and they'll hear a rumor. A lot of times these programs are black, meaning, you know, it's got some code name like Firewater or whatever.
We'll have to try and vet that and figure out how does that tie to the defense budget. That's a lot of time we spend there 'cause that's not easy. All these guys are out there. They're absolutely the tip of the spear for us. When it gets to a point they qualify it, then we send a CAM, which is a degreed engineer, as Cameron mentioned. So it's a customer account manager to the site, to the customer, meet them, and then you start engaging engineers. Usually those are Zoom meetings, generally not in person there. As Cameron mentioned, generally speaking, we're a source-source provider.
We do have some competitive situations, and we're always competitive on the bid, but it's that, you know, just the level of effort that we put into it. We really spend a lot of time on the risk section because nobody likes risk. We spend a lot of time on our proposals really identifying all the risks and then what we're doing to mitigate them. We've been told by customers two things that every supplier wants to hear. One is, "You have the best proposals I've ever seen." That's number one. Two, once we start designing the product, then we ship the samples and they test them, they say, "It's the best product we've ever seen." When I hear those two things, I usually hear them two or three times a year, that's music to my ears.
It tells me my team's doing the right thing. We're listening to the customer. We're doing exactly what we need to do to meet the specs, and we're developing, you know, proposals that identify risks and how we're gonna mitigate them and go through this challenging tunnel that we have to go through to meet the specs. We do have a long heritage of developing, you know, great products. We're not a commodity supplier. Obviously, everything we do is bespoke. We really focus on that market and, you know, we don't have the cost structure to be a commodity supplier. That won't be in our roadmap. It is important to note that Cameron mentioned the one-stop-shop. That can't be understated.
We have reps with extensive line cards, and their line card has, you know, 15 or 20 different principals. Could be cables, capacitors, but they're all RF-related. When the rep goes in there, he'll say, "Hey, do you need this? Do you need this?" When he gets to M-tron, he goes, "M-tron, they've got filters. They have oscillators. They have solutions. They have crystal resonators." Within those, we brand label products. We'll do a make-buy. We don't make everything we sell. It's not a big part of our, probably 10% of our revenue is brand labeled, but we're always engaging brand labeled suppliers. We've just signed on three in the last year that we're super excited about. We're starting to get some traction.
Hopefully we'll have some press releases on some design wins there. Same thing, the customer does 1 PO and it's easy for them. It's like going to Walmart, right? You load up your cart with 10 different things. They come to M-tron Industries, load it up with 10 different things. It's a real value to the customer as well. Of course, we're aligned to long-term defense programs. That's where I was talking about the sales funnel and how you have to really study and choose your battles wisely, 'cause if you choose the wrong program or the wrong customer, you're gonna spend all that time on a loser.
We spend a lot of time upfront, management team, everybody gets involved to make sure that we're picking winners, and our track record's been pretty good so far. Why do we win? Obviously world-class service. We actually pick up the phone. I know everybody says that, but how many times have you been disappointed by a vendor? I mean, especially at home, you know, your window cleaning, lawn work. I mean, it's just everyone has an excuse why not to do something. It is very frequent that we will call a customer after we submit the quote. We follow up, and we'll give them a couple days to digest it, and we'll say, "Hey, how does our quote or proposal compare to our competitors?" They'll go, "Competitors? Nobody's quoted yet." I love to hear that.
If we're the first in there with a quote, that gives the customer more time to digest, and they're ready for it. Frequently, the other guys are 3 or 4 weeks late. Shoot, by then they've awarded, 'cause they got timeframes. We really work hard to give that world-class service, which means first to give a quote, first to follow up, first to deliver prototypes, first to deliver LRIP, and continue on that trend of being first. The vertical integration we talked about is a big part of that, as well as the team dedication. Unrivaled product development, we talked about the 30% of revenue coming from new products. If you were to come to our plant, which, hopefully you will be in the near future at our annual meeting, you will see vertical integration that is really unrivaled.
Of the 4 technology companies I've run, I've never seen anything like it. You know, I've been at companies that outsource just about everything and they're the final value add. That's not us. M-tron is. We do everything. We cut crystals, we lap, we polish, we ash, we deposit metal just like Intel does with physical vapor deposition machines. We have 4 CNCs with a 5th one coming in in 2 weeks. We have a full pick-and-place line. I know these are all engineering terms that are boring you, the bottom line is we are super vertically integrated. Design capability, simulation, unparalleled, and of course, we talked about all the years of experience on our team and how they're really versed in everything. All right. Cameron?
Thanks, Bill. Okay, really quickly. Yeah, this is our customer slide. We don't publish names of every customer we have. You'll see that all top 10 defense primes are customers. We do a lot of business with them. Our largest customer is about 35% of revenue. That's not because it's not really concentrated, to be honest with you. We have, you know, over 10 programs with them. They were 3 separate companies that actually merged, just kind of an artifact of the industry. You'll see, you know, really prominent names in all these different sectors that we focus on.
What's really encouraging is just because of that customer support level and, when we get reviewed by our customers constantly, you know, we're considered, we're an approved supplier, has very good standing in all these different organizations. We have over 70 customers have been customers for 10 years or more. Okay. Okay. Our footprint, we do manufacture in the U.S. We have a facility in Orlando. We have another facility in Yankton. We also have a facility in India where we do some assembly, that's also registered to produce ITAR products, and that's pretty unique. There's a push in the defense sector, right? To have things onshored, you know, we're one of the few vendors that's totally onshored.
More importantly, if you look at the size of our facilities, we're also well-situated to kind of cover the growth of the company. We do think we have room for about $100,000 of production in the facilities. If you come down, and I know Anja was down there recently and a few others here in the room have been there recently, we do have space around the edges of our main facility where we've had different processes over the years. We can put more machines in there. We're running, you know, a full first shift and, like, a skeleton crew for the second shift. To get to that kind of number, you know, we would have to hire and get to a full second shift. Okay. Okay.
Next I just want to talk about some of the areas for growth. One is our customer relationships are critical. Getting in the door for new programs. We're already an approved vendor, makes it much easier to do business with us. We also have a very good reputation for delivery on time and also high-quality products. If you look at our design engineering team, they're continuing to develop new products, and that's really driving the new program growth that Bill's talked to. Without that, you know, eventually, you know, things would slow down a lot. But fortunately we're gaining ground in those areas. Lastly, we have a really good opportunity in front of us on the M&A front, and that's, we're obviously well-capitalized at this point in time.
We've been pretty active in the market, looking for about a year and a half. We have an active screen. We're working with several advisors to help us look at companies in the market or companies that would be a good fit. I'll go through a little bit of the strategy on the M&A front. One of the outgrowths of that is those 3 partnerships that Bill had talked about earlier, where we found some companies that had really unique capabilities but weren't at the stage yet where we could acquire them. You know, they weren't profitable enough or there was more risk in the technology, you know, than we wanna take on as a company. We have formed, you know, value add partnerships where they're already revenue producing.
In one of those situations, we're doing all the manufacturing as well, so very, very high margins, which is great to see. Our customers love it because they have less people to go to for this, a bigger breadth of products. Okay. Okay. In terms of investing and how we're investing for organic growth, the number one investment we're making is this headcount. Right. You know, people ask us, "Well, what would limit you? Or what are your challenges for growing?" It's, you know, we have enough equipment. I mean, we obviously, we do buy more when we need to, or we have bottlenecks. Our CapEx has gone up a little bit this past year.
The number one thing to do is just hiring enough engineering talent and then people on the factory floor with the skills and the, you know, the detail level really capable of producing these products. If you go around, I mean, almost every product's being developed under a microscope, you know, not an easy job by any means. For touch labor, we have several different channels where we're bringing people on board. From an engineering standpoint, we have relationships with different universities. We're also forming new ones. We already work with UCF, you know, University of Central Florida, which has a good RF program. Valencia is a local college where we're getting talent for solderers and technicians. We're forming some relationships with other engineering schools around the country that have this RF pipeline potentially for us.
'Cause it's one of the biggest challenges in the industry is just finding design talent, engineering talent. There are just less and less RF engineers being produced. We're at this point, we're finding electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and really training them in the kind of the art and the science of this. That's working well. The other thing I'd mention is that being situated in Florida is actually, it's a pretty attractive situation because you have a lot of people leaving the big firms. Maybe they were working in Rochester up north at L3 or somewhere else. They're 50, 55, you know, they wanna move to nicer weather. They're thinking about retirement. We're an attractive alternative. Some people come down, they just are consultants with us, and that's perfectly as well, okay as well.
I wanted to talk about this because this is, you know, I think an area of a lot of interest, but also something we haven't delivered on the execution side yet. We're doing a lot of work around this, and we're also further developing our team to do this. You know, M-tron has the potential to do bolt-on acquisitions, if you wanna call it that. We've been looking primarily in the RF component space and subsystem space. We do wanna move upmarket to do larger and larger subsystems. We're not trying to consolidate the industry. We're trying to actually diversify our product portfolio, diversify our revenue streams and our capabilities. Finding companies in adjacent markets that we wanna get into would be very helpful.
Part of the reason there is that it takes, you know, 3 to 5 years to get from a design win to a full rate production, it takes a long time to build up significant portion in a market. In radar, in space, in some other areas, maybe test and measurement, that would be very attractive, and that would be a very attractive opportunity to find a company that has 10, 15 contracts already, right? That's the primary column on the left-hand side. The middle one is something that, you know, we haven't done anything on yet other than we've talked to a lot of companies. I think if people look at M-tron, it's a very clean vehicle, frankly, right? Well-performing company, profitable, has a lot of cash on the balance sheet, clean stock, no debt.
You know, what's the opportunity there, as some of these defense primes come under pressure to divest? Is there a business unit there that makes sense, being under the M-tron, you know, label? Could be even be bigger than M-tron. If it's defense-related, it's in our core market, it's a well-performing company. That might be an attractive alternative for someone to merge with us. Then we are looking at just carve-outs. Like, if you look at the large primes, almost every single one has a RF component capability. Most of those areas are under-invested in, we sometimes compete with them. If they're gonna sell them, I'd rather have them sell them to us than to a PE firm that's gonna become a competitor.
The last column on the right-hand side is the area, minority investments and strategic investments. We talked last year about the Connectivity Fund, and that was kind of the germination of this idea. The team that we were working with, they're still moving forward trying to do that, but they were trying to raise a formal fund. I think we've kind of modified our approach. We have been looking at investments in this area, and this is really to get insights into markets, into new technologies that will be relevant for M-tron as we develop and make initial investments so we gain more knowledge, we build relationships. Maybe we do an acquisition of the company later on. The idea there is to really do it through partnerships. We might syndicate, you know, part of the investment.
We might do it with another partner. There have been a few other corporations who have expressed interest in this with us. We'll see where this goes, but we are looking at several investment opportunities. All the ones we're looking at are in our RF kind of space that we're very familiar with. Mm-hmm. You know, the RF is expanding. It's going into agriculture and lots of other different industries. IoT is essentially, you know, RF-based. It provides a lot of opportunity that, you know, might be end up good end markets for M-tron as we develop. Okay. We did our earnings release last week, Thursday night. Happy to talk through questions you have on the financials. These are the metrics since that we did the spin-out.
You know, obviously, we've made a lot of progress from then as a company. Our revenue base is now in the $14 million-$15 million range, depending upon the quarter. We've got good growth prospects ahead of us. The margin structure is now solidly in the mid-40s% range. We did have a little bit of a blip last year at the beginning of the year in Q1, and, you know, this year's Q1 was much better. Part of it was tariffs and the initiation of that, and that, you know, frankly, was very distracting, took a lot of resources internally, as well as costs. Also we had some new product introductions.
When you do introduce a new product that has, it's a new technology, it's a more difficult process, you're not gonna be as efficient, you know, the first runs that you do with it. You know, your 50th product is a lot less efficient from, you know, using crystals and other materials as your, you know, 2,000th product, right? You're gonna get all those things down. So that's been moving up as well. We're now at the point where we're producing quite a bit of cash and putting it on the balance sheet. We have good cash generation and strong EBITDA margins, and I think those will improve.
If you look at our margin structure, you know, on the gross margin side, it's gonna bounce around a little bit quarter to quarter, and that's usually based on product mix. We do have some products that are, you know, gross margins in the 30s and others in the 50s, and there's a balance there in terms of what we ship each quarter, that, you know, is a strong driver of our gross margin. You know, a point or two either way is not unusual for us. In general, it's gonna be going up as we do more automation. Recently we've done some work with machine language learning, for example, to help us understand a process.
We're doing a lot of instrumentation of our product lines right now, tracking labor materials much more closely and having a better handle on when, you know, processes are awry, for example, and making quicker decisions. It's really kind of driving better decisions as a company. We're gonna see the benefit of that over time. On the EBITDA margin side, I do expect that to increase slowly as we just gain scale. Right now we're making a lot of investments in engineering that's needed to fuel growth. I think on the G&A side, you'll see that come down over time as we scale as a business. You know, it'll come down as a % of revenue. Okay.
Here are just the statistics of the past quarter and showing the, you know, the quarter-on-quarter results. I think they're very, very healthy. You know, we had 15% revenue growth year-over-year for the first quarter. That's a little bit not confusing, but You know, I want to make sure I understand that. Last year, the first quarter, tough quarter for us. If you look at the quarter-on-quarter growth, you know, we grew about 3.2% since the December quarter. That probably gives you a better metric of what we'll do for the year. I think, you know, we're in the 10 to 12 range, you know, for the year. I do think that will be accelerating over time.
Gross margin was very healthy, as I mentioned. EBITDA margin also bounced back a little bit as we had some more manufacturing efficiencies. I'll leave you with a couple things. One is the long-term growth model. I do think we're seeing acceleration in the industry, so our long-term revenue growth model is gonna go up a little bit. A year or two ago, I think I had this at 10%. To be honest, you know, coming into that year, that was an uphill climb. We achieved that number, which was great. We definitely have more wins that are back now than we did, you know, several years ago. I think that this will move over time.
We're right now in the crux of trying to compete and win some of these large contracts. I think we'll have a lot more visibility, you know, in probably 2, 3 months where we'll be for this year and also several out years. I do expect that visibility to increase quite a bit. Okay. Those are really the, you know, the substantive slides that we had. Just wanna thank you for coming. Open to any questions you have. Several people in the room from the team, so Chris Nosik, does our financial reporting, is also here. He can help with the financial questions as well. These are several of the conferences we'll be at over the next several months.
One thing I encourage you to do is the big show for us every year, the trade show, is the IMS Show, the International Microwave Symposium. Every competitor we have will be there. You'll be able to learn a lot about the industry. I encourage you to go there. Please stop by our booth if you do. If you have questions, we can show you some of the products we talked about today. You'll also get to meet, you know, our sales team and you'll see how solid they are. We're at several different investor conferences. We'll be at the Sidoti conference a little bit later in the year. We're gonna go to the IDEAS Conference in June.
This year we're also trying the Planet MicroCap Showcase in Las Vegas, in June as well, so looking forward to that. Anyway, that's what we had for you today. Feel free to ask questions. Yeah, please.
On one of the prior slides, you had the 3 investment choices.
Yeah.
Maybe they're not mutually exclusive. Buy something, maybe reverse merge, invest.
Yeah.
In the context of having raised a rights offering.
Yeah
Can you talk a little bit about the preferences, meanings, and maybe some timing?
Yeah. We're primarily focused on the left-hand side, right? Right now, several key team members have been doing the diligence and looking at the markets and, you know, we have a group that helps us produce a, you know, portfolio of companies to look at. We screen those pretty rigorously. We've also recently brought board some more corporate development talent, and we have another open req, you know, for a corporate development associate. If you guys know anybody who wants to get involved, just, you know, more analytic firepower to help us, you know, do more diligence and process more companies. I spend a lot of time talking to investment banks.
Now that we have more capital on the balance sheet, we're obviously a much more relevant discussion for a lot of these banks, right? We're starting to get better deal flow. That's where we primarily spend our time. We do, you know, we do look at some of the larger opportunities as well. For the most part, it's trying to find corporate spin-outs. There are also some very good stories, and you're seeing people, you know, go to market, like the IPO market for defense companies has really opened up recently, right? This is one way to get there that might be very attractive if it's a good combination with us. It's not our primary focus area, but it's a possibility.
Lastly, I would say we do look at investments quite frequently. You know, sometimes we don't invest, but we do a partnership anyway. It's usually a revenue-based partnership. But I think we will be doing some investments this year. I anticipate us making a bolt-on acquisition hopefully in the next 6 months and getting to a more regular cadence as we build out the team and the capability. Hopefully making an investment or 2 a year. The investments are gonna be relatively small. Yeah, please .
You had a slide before that showed all the different programs, and you were like, "We're not on all of these.
Yeah.
Who is on the programs you're not on? Specifically, are they different oscillator manufacturers or is it a different technology?
Yeah, good question. Almost every single system there has, you know, oscillators and filters in it, right? There are competitors of ours that we've lost to. On the Patriot system, for example, we're on some variants but not others. I don't think we're on the THAAD battery system.
There's actually 1 design on the THAAD.
Yeah. One phenomena you're seeing. Yeah, I mean, I can go through them. I'll list them, yeah.
Yeah.
On the filter side, do you wanna kind of just talk through some of them you see them?
Yeah. Well, I think what's important to note is a lot of those decisions were made 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Yeah.
We messed up. I always ask the same question to Rex. I'm like, "Why aren't we getting this business? You know, they're making one of these.
He said, "Well, here's the story." You know, something happened, and we just didn't have the same focus we have today.
I feel a lot better now when I see a new missile being developed that we'll be on it than these, you know, 30-year-old designs that, you know, we messed up. Filter-wise, you know, our big competitors would be like NIC.
K&L
K&L.
Yeah.
The Microwave Products Group. Those would be the big ones for sure.
Yeah.
Each one has its own story.
What I love to see is one of our competitors get bought, which there was a ton of consolidation back in 2024. Every one of those competitors now, they've almost disappeared, which is absolutely fantastic. These big companies like Kyocera or Amphenol buy this company, they try and absorb it. They ruin it. They lose their sales channels. They lose their relationships.
Yep. Mm-hmm.
Pretty much then they start losing sales, and then we start getting phone calls.
Yeah.
Every time we see an acquisition of a smaller competitor, we do a call to action all the reps and say, "Find out every design win they have, and start calling on that customer and tell them that, 'Hey, they just got bought. Your service level's gonna drop. The prices are gonna increase, especially if a PE firm bought them, and everything's just gonna go downhill. So start sampling parts. Let's get designed in." That's worked. We've taken that business.
Yep.
Super effective.
Yep. On the oscillator side, there are another 5 or 6 competitors. You know, one is Quantic, which just went public. It was merged with 4 other companies, so, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens there by Arcline. NIC is one. I mean, there's some, Bliley is another. I mean, there's a bunch of them. In general, Bill's right. Like, you know, 15 years ago we're not the company we are today. Also, a lot of these systems are now being recompeted, so we're actually now very actively engaged in getting into some of the systems that we weren't before. Then the other phenomena that's taking place, just as the systems become more sophisticated, is that now it used to be they were all bespoke and manufactured.
They have subsystems that they're trying to put into multiple missiles, right? We're on some of those subsystems, that means that we're on some variants of a certain missile, not others, you know, depending on what they use for a guidance system or, you know, communications, that kind of thing. Okay. Vishal, you had a question. Yeah.
When you mentioned that I remember the, at least a couple of years ago, the customers were, like, getting rid of their RF division.
Just losing it through attrition, right. Yeah.
RF capabilities.
Right.
Is that trend still happening? That gave you a lot of business.
Yeah.
It is. It's just you have the NVIDIAs and the SpaceXs and any other sexy engineering company.
Yeah
taking all these new grads out. As people are retiring and hitting their sixties, we actually hire several of them as consultants. We have several of them that left big companies that are consultants for us, which has been fruitful. They look to us now to outsource the engineering to us, it's a great trend.
Yeah.
It's still going on.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
We're also putting more of a bear hug on these young students, right?
Yes.
Than we used to do. That's why we're trying to develop relationships with professors, become a valid pipeline. We have an intern bay, you know, where they get to work hands-on with the technologies. We have, you know, three or four that are there now, you know, for the summer. Yeah. Hopefully they'll stay. Mm-hmm.
for l ike, we have at least not seen listed like Enduro or like the new-
Yeah.
At least for now.
Yep.
Kratos, which is developing very low cost,
Right.
My question there is it because you don't have a presence there? Or is it something else going on like?
Yeah.
What is the important technology-wise for those kind of?
Yeah.
Because they feel, at least I feel like it's really drone versus drones.
Right.
The electronic warfare.
The short answer, Vishal, is that we're actually on a lot of those systems. We work with those companies. Most of them are more sensitive about allowing us to publish their names. One thing you see too is if you look at, you know, like our revenue splits, and we track every program, right? A lot of those companies were doing $a couple hundred K a year with us, you know, a year or 2 ago, and now many of them are over the million-dollar mark. The one that we talked about that's doing that interesting radar application, they're moving from like $120K up to about $5 million-$6 million, you know. It's, you know, there's quite a growth in those areas, and we've been very careful to make sure that we, you know, are maintaining those relationships.
We're developing them. In covering our bases, you know, depending on how the industry goes, grows.
As the new form of drones develop.
The radar which tracks those, does that remain same or does it?
The radar is changing, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, one thing is that now you need to develop much less expensive radar, right? Like you heard about the, I think it was the THAAD fire control radar. I don't know if it was $500 million. It was a big number. You can't lose too many of those, right? Nor can you afford to put many of them out there. Now they're trying to develop systems that are a eighth or a tenth of the cost, but they don't see as far. They're posting them in all types of vehicles. One of the systems that we supply, they even nail them to trees, you know, like in Ukraine or in, you know, Lithuania or something, you know. It's kind of interesting.
Are you on low-cost radars too, or like?
We are, yeah. Yeah. There's more growth, frankly, in that sector. We are also competing for some of these larger redesigns of the bigger systems. You know, SPY-6 is one that everybody talks about. We'll see where that comes out. There are other systems also being redesigned. Anja, did you have a question?
Well, yeah. You mentioned the CapEx increase. What's most of that coming up to then?
Good question. We did a pretty good job, I'd say, over the past several years of like scrubbing our equipment, making sure we don't have stuff that's brittle or older. Now we're at the point where we've been doing a lot of automation. We've been bringing in equipment that is capable of running on its own. It has an operator doing overwatch, but it doesn't require an operator for every operation. Some of those systems have now become bottlenecks as we've expanded our production. We're acquiring some of those bigger systems. We talked about the CNC machine as well.
We got, what is it, a fourth horizon system that we can basically set it and forget it, let it run all night and produce parts for us. It's mostly equipment and test equipment. We also need a lot more test equipment just to handle the larger volumes. Okay. Yes, please.
Yeah. Bill, you mentioned that the company was really a filter company that's turning into an oscillator house. Why is that the case, and what does it mean for the business?
Yeah. I wouldn't say it turned into an oscillator house, but the filter revenue, for whatever reason, just grew much faster.
As we grew, I think when I started, the filter revenue was probably 55%, and it climbed as high as 72% or 73%. Now it's in that mid-60s again.
I think you'll see that lower as we go forward because we are finally diversifying our product revenue. That's not easy to do because designing a filter and designing an oscillator, completely two different things. You know, filters have a COGS cost structure of maybe 60/40, you know, excuse me, 70/30, where it's 70% labor, 30% materials. Oscillators are completely flipped. It's 70% materials, 30% labor. It's just a different animal and so you really gotta change a lot of the processes, the people, the technology, the techs. It took us a long time to really get into it. I think it was more of the filter just outran them, and now the oscillators are gonna start catching up.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, Chris.
You mentioned during the presentation that R&D and balance were up about 2x.
Yeah.
How much of that is from primes versus defense tech? From your perspective broadly, do you see the defense tech companies as establishing positions and threatening-
Yeah
incumbents?
Yeah, good question. I don't know the split on the RFQs. I do see the revenue splits, and they're definitely becoming much more meaningful as they start to scale. There's also a lot of pressure, frankly, from the Department of War to, you know, force some of these primes to become more nimble, more like the defense tech companies, and to the extent they can't, you know, to split off divisions. You saw L3Harris, you know, with their Rocket Lab, you know, transaction. There'll be other ones like that. I don't know, do you have a better feel on the quotes part?
Yeah.
the momentum, right? You have these companies who have been building a platform for 20 years, for some startup to come in and build an F-35, the entrance barriers are just.
Yeah
too high. We still see the majority of our RFQs.
Yeah
are definitely the primes. That said, we did a call to action. You know, the Andurils and everybody like that, we absolutely are in touch with all of them. You know, when this quantum thing came up, we did the same thing. Last fall, we said, "Hey, quantum could be RF. What are we doing here?" We've got all these feelers out, and it doesn't take too many of those to hit to really move the needle. You know, we're really in touch with all those applications and customers.
The one thing I mentioned is that on like the drone side and the counter-drone side, those are obviously areas where there's a lot of competitors, a lot of newer competitors. It seems like the counter-drone market is a little bit easier to pick the winners, you know, than the drone side. Like on the drone side, we've had a large contract this past year. It was Program of Record. It was canceled because there's so much iteration going on in the department that they're making different decisions, you know, every 6 months. Just a kind of a word of caution, I guess, if you're doing your diligence on those kinds of companies. Mm-hmm. Yeah, please. Mm-hmm.
Generally on the aviation side, is there anything with the oil prices going up we've seen some turbulence?
Yeah
in the aviation?
Yep.
How does that factor into your guide and that type of business?
Yeah. I mean, it hasn't yet. We'll see where it goes. I mean, it's hard to predict how long this is gonna go, but obviously it could have an impact on air travel if, you know, fares double.
We could just surcharge them.
Yeah
Right.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's. Haven't seen anything yet. It's a very long process, right?
Yeah.
We're early on. We deliver our parts for planes that probably won't come out of production for a year and a half to two years. It'd be a while before we'll see that this does continue on.
Yeah. The commercial air aviation industry has a little bit different dynamic. I mean, they do have inventories, unlike in the defense world. There's a lag, so that works positively and negatively, kind of depending where you are in the cycle. Yeah. Please.
Get you into new areas or will you be doubling down on areas within the program that you're on today?
Yep. Definitely not the same area and same product, right? We are looking at ones that take us into some new markets or strengthen some markets, and then almost every case we've looked at, it's a diversification on the product portfolio side. We had a report about one year ago we published, but we can talk about it. You know, there's a number of different areas where if you look at what we build into our modules, we do acquire parts, as William Drafts was saying. We'd rather own them and capture that margin and be relevant for our, for our investors, our customers.
Okay. Okay.
Is there like-
Yeah.
Is there an API, like, number of defense programs you are on? Like, I know you're 40 plus.
Yes.
The duration of those or the number of On the commercial side, maybe number of aerodyne models. Is there something KPI like that you track?
Yeah. We don't publish it regularly, but we're in well over 40 programs of record. One of our larger defense procurements is not a program of record anymore, but it's still growing tremendously. It's kind of odd. On the commercial aircraft side, we're basically in every Boeing and Airbus commercial airframe, and we're in about 16 different applications on those planes. The way the industry is structured, they're basically using the same subsystems in all their different airframes. They find something that's really reliable, it's been qualified, they're not gonna change it unless there's, you know, the changes are on the engines or on the carbon fiber and the wings and things that, you know, impact weight and fuel usage, stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah.
What are the couple of programs that you can say that would be the most impactful to the growth rate of the company in the next quarter or so?
Well, we'll see what happens in the missile area, right? That's an area we're competing in right now, but that obviously could drive a lot of growth, and that drove a lot of the growth we saw a couple years ago when we were growing 20% a year. This year, avionics is one of the, you know, commercial aircraft, is one of the strongest growth drivers for our revenue base, and then also, counter-drone radar, you know, in the short term at least. You know, that's a market that's not going away. It's only gonna get stronger. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, please. Mm-hmm.
You had mentioned earlier, the goal or perhaps kind of the base case to have one bolt-on acquisition.
in the next six months.
Yeah.
Given the cash-light nature of the company, there still would be a lot of cash in year-end.
Yeah.
What would success look like for M-tron for acquisitions over the next 12 months?
2 to 3, you know, for the next, I would say 24 months.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, with the idea of the capital raise, I mean, one is, we're talking to a lot of investors. It's kind of hard to get near our stock kind of given just the share count, so this was a way to put more shares into the market, which is great. It does give us a very, you know, very strong balance sheet. It helps us a lot with our customers. You know, they see that we're very well-financed. There's very little risk in doing, at least financial risk, in working with us, especially as they ask us to expand. Now we have a meaningful amount where we're starting to get much better deal flow than we did, you know, a year ago. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Last question back there.
Defense has been, you know, kind of a hot area for venture, growth equity investors.
-public market investors. Over the last year, you know, You guys have been hunting for acquisitions. Has your acquisition strategy had to change as you've seen multiples go up?
Yeah.
What has been the response?
It depends what kind of company you look at. If you're on the defense tech side, like you're more solutions-oriented, the multiples are very high, especially on, in some of the newer areas. You know, they're venture-type multiples. Those are probably not the types of deals we're gonna do. We're looking at people that have solid earnings, that can contribute to our EPS. We can do a creative deal with. In the RF side, I'd say there's probably two classes on the valuation side, depending upon the size of the company.
If you're a founder-led company and you're in the $10 million revenue range, you know, the multiple there is gonna be, you know, less than, you know, if your company has broken out and kind of built more infrastructure, then you're probably asking for 15 times EBITDA, you know.
Just to clarify.
Yeah.
You said you can buy at less than 15x EBITDA?
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Is there anything you can do on the cost side, to increase the gross margins or something like that where effective multiple rate would be lower after the years?
That the effective rate would be lower?
Effective multiple, like, it's lower because you were able to increase the gross margins or something.
Yeah. Yeah. No, we're doing a lot to increase the gross margins. It's kind of where we spend probably most of our time.
It's a real strong focus.
Yeah.
It is. Everyone knows how important it is, and anytime a product closes with unfavorable margin, we have a team look into it. What went wrong? Labor variance, product material variance, yield variance. You know, get to root cause, fix it, make sure it doesn't happen again.
Yeah.
It's a cultural thing for sure.
We talked about our ERP upgrade. We brought on board an ERP manufacturing planner recently. We're also getting through that cycle with the newer ERP, but it's designed around manufacturing. We're doing a better job internally of kind of like forecasting our production, which helps us do better planning there. We're doing a lot on, you know, installing barcoding and different types of software to track, you know, labor and materials better. The purpose of that, right, is what's instrument the factory, so we can identify, you know, when we have a problem earlier and also understand what are all the bottlenecks, where do we have to focus our expansion, you know, to kind of meet our needs. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate you guys attending.
If, We'll be around for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes before they kick us out. There is probably some lunch in the back room on the left-hand side if you're thirsty or hungry or anything like that. Thank you for coming. Yeah.
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