Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for tuning in, and thank you for joining us here today in person. It's nice to be back at the CSI conference. My name is Stanley Elliott, for those of you who I've not met. I cover a mix of industrials and machinery names here at Stifel, among other things. Very pleased to have MSA Safety here with us today. From the company, we have Nish Vartanian, Chief Executive Officer, and we also have Ken Krause, the Chief Financial Officer. I think what you'll find here through the presentation is a nice mix of end markets, a nice market outgrowth opportunity, and nice level of profitability overall.
We'll keep this as more of a fireside chat sort of format, but before we do, I'll turn it over to you guys for some introductory comments.
Sure. I'll just give a quick company overview and then turn things over to Ken to give a business update as to where we stand today. Just a reminder on Safe Harbor. I know you're all familiar with that. Quick overview on MSA Safety. You know, we're a mission-based company. Our mission hasn't changed for 108 years of protecting people's lives and the environment. We continue to do what we did 108 years ago, and that's leverage technology to protect workers and try to make workers more effective and efficient, get them home safely at night. Revenue about $1.4 billion. The margins over 43%-44%. 100% free cash flow conversion's target for us on an ongoing basis.
We do a nice job funding R&D. You know, when you think about the R&D funding, we've spent about $300 million in R&D spend over the last five years. Our New Product Vitality runs around 35%, so that equates to about $450,000 of revenue at greater than 50% margin. We get a real nice return on that R&D spend, where we're able to take some share and get better pricing for our products and good uptake there. Good diversification in the business. Sales by geography in the Americas and international and also by product category. While we're dedicated focus on safety, we have pretty good diversification from a geographical standpoint.
We sell into 140 countries and by product category. You know, when you look at the markets and how those products break out, you know, typically, we're number one or number two in the product areas that we compete. Firefighter safety, protecting the firefighter from head to toe, that represents about a third of our business. When you think of the fire service business, that's not your traditional industrial-type business, right? It's municipal, funded along with some federal funding. That works on its own economic cycle. I don't wanna call it recession-resistant, but certainly, it runs on some different cycles, so it's able to balance out our portfolio as we go forward. Gas detection, we have both fixed gas and flame detection, so that's where we install these products.
They look for, listen for gas leaks and protect the environment and facilities. Portable gas detection, which you put on individual workers for use in industrial environments, confined space entry, or other applications. Industrial PPE business that also represents roughly third of our business. We're a global leader with industrial head protection, number three in fall protection, which is a fairly large category. Also in that industrial PPE is some air purifying respirator products for us that we continue to do quite well in. Leading positions in pretty attractive markets. The second large market for us is oil and gas.
You know, some people like to call MSA somewhat of an ESG play because we protect people's lives, but you also get some exposure when it comes to oil and gas, which is kind of a nice benefit in this environment. Our ESG strategy, we really deliver value for all of our stakeholders. You know, when it comes to our people, we recruit, retain, motivate our people around our mission, and that's protecting people's lives. It resonates real well across our workforce, for both men and women in diversity. You know, we have approximately 47% of our workforce are professional women, of our professional workforce is female. So we do a real nice job from a diversity standpoint. Three of my eight reports are women.
Ten board members are female, one of color. We do a nice job in our community and working through our community and in donations. We donated about half a million dollars of firefighting product to Ukraine to help with that situation, which obviously was very popular with our European associates and obviously focused on our environment. One thing that we've done in that area was an acquisition of Bacharach, which Ken will give you an update on that. From a corporate level, he has got oversight on how we're doing with that acquisition and the integration. You know, really, we have had a lot of recognition over our history with Western P.A. and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as being a top workplace.
What we're particularly proud of is we're starting to get some national recognition from Forbes and Fortune as being a strong workplace and some recognition for the work we do. We're pretty proud of that. I'll give Ken the slide to give us an update on our year-to-date performance.
Well, thank you, Nish. Before I do that, on the ESG side of the house, it's really interesting. During the Bacharach acquisition, we were fortunate enough to enter into some long-term financing. One aspect of the long-term financing included our credit facility, and in the credit facility, we incorporated metrics associated with diversity of our workforce, safety and lost time incidents. It's really good to be able to reflect our commitment to ESG and our capital structure. Transitioning here into the year-to-date performance, couple of things. One, demand remains very robust. Demand is strong. We're seeing good demand. It's good to see it not only in some of our businesses in fire service and gas detection, but it's especially good to see it in the hard hats.
The hard hat business is really a leading indicator, and we oftentimes will see that business turn sooner than other businesses, whether it be rebounding or decelerating. We're actually continuing to see good levels of demand here as we start the month of June. Secondly, our margin profile remains; improving margins remain a focus for us. We continue to drive improved margins across our business. If you've been following us, you'll know that our target is 30%-40% incremental margins. It was good to see that come through in Q4 of last year, as well as to start the year here in Q1. We continue to see good margin performance. Supply chain is our biggest challenge, quite frankly, at this point.
Electronic components, and the team is doing an exceptional job at really getting in front of it and trying to be proactive with some of the redesign work. Our team of highly talented engineers is working closely at reengineering some of our products and opening up the supply base a little bit more broadly. That should help us. Here in the H2 , we should see some products start to get approved and hopefully provide us even more leverage as we go forward. The only other thing that I would talk about here or wanna highlight in terms of current trends is just the FX environment. We are seeing a much stronger dollar today than we had experienced there a year or so ago.
As a result, you know, the first quarter, I think our revenue headwind, our translation headwind associated with FX was just south of 2%. We're seeing that creep up here in Q2, maybe another point or point and a half of currency headwind coming into the business here in Q2. Our margins are protected. It's really a translation of the revenue back to the U.S. dollar, our reporting currency. As I said, our margins are managed, as we do a lot of local manufacturing for those local markets. So there is some product being shipped out of the jurisdictions, but a lot of the business stays within a specific jurisdiction. When we look at the long-term outlook, we remain committed to our mid-single-digit growth outlook and targets.
We do see an opportunity to drive that a bit higher here if the inflationary cycle stays where it is, if we continue to see the number of price increases that we've been seeing in our business here in 2022. That certainly will be a driver of growth for us as we go forward, assuming the cycle stays in the same manner that it is with the inflation. The other thing that really comes into play is our track record around acquisitions. Acquisitions have an opportunity to drive growth for us. This year, we'll probably see 2%-3% of acquisition-related growth coming through our business.
That combined with the pricing and the normal growth that we would see in our portfolio, we should see a growth rate of high single-digit, low double-digit growth here for 2022. The margin performance, you know, we did take a step back in 2021 with margins, a slight step back to be under 18% for the first time in a few years. It really was associated with some of the resets we had in our business coming back from the pandemic. We feel like we're positioned well here in 2022 to see margin lift again and improvement. Cash flow. Cash flow is a big focus for us. We've been deploying capital successfully for acquisitions, but also maintaining the balance with the dividend.
We've been in the market recently buying some of our shares back as well to offset dilution. I've talked about that a few times here in the month of May and then here in the early part of June, trying to offset dilution that we've seen associated with employee stock ownership and stock compensation. In summary, just in terms of investment in MSA, I think what we've done is a really nice job at really pivoting the story at MSA while remaining focused on safety. We're a purpose-driven company with a focus, a laser focus on safety and protecting, helping people protect themselves as well as their assets and the environment with the recent acquisition of Bacharach. Innovation has really been core to us.
You know, Nish talked about that statistic that I've been speaking about here, more recently. There's been about $450 million-$500 million of revenue driven by $300 million or so of investment in R&D. Really strong returns. Not only is that investment driving growth, it's driving good margin performance. Just about every product that we launch is accretive to margins. We're really fortunate enough to be able to price that innovation and pass that along in terms of higher prices. Continue to maintain a focus on margins. We're not done yet. You know, margin improvement has been tremendous over the last four or five years, but we think this business should be a business that generates 20% operating margins.
With 45% or so gross margins, the business, we feel like, is positioned to generate 20% operating margins. We've got a number of initiatives from shared services to other things that we're working on when it comes to margin improvement, but we're optimistic in our ability to improve the margins. The track record of acquisitions and balance sheet kind of speak for themselves. We maintain a very focused on keeping our company and maintaining an investment-grade balance sheet. The acquisitions last year where we deployed $400 million of capital, we've since de-levered down under two times net debt to EBITDA. I wanna say our current leverage ratio is around 1.5-1.6 times net debt to EBITDA.
It positions us well to weather any downturn one might see in the economy, but also positions us to go after and continue to acquire bolt-on assets to this business model. With that, I'll turn it over, Stanley, to you for any questions you might wanna walk through with us.
Perfect. Great, guys. Thank you very much for the overview. You know, it was interesting looking at the book-to-bill to order rates. It doesn't look like that you've really seen any material deceleration within order trends, you know, particularly given some of the macro headlines have been a little squishier here lately.
Right. Yeah. You know, the fire service business has been particularly strong. You know, we announced that we booked our largest business, piece of business ever, largest purchase order ever, with L.A. County Fire Department, a $23 million order, converting that from a competitive account. You know, and hopefully down the road, you know, L.A. City could go along with that, which would be a little smaller than the county. It's nice to see that business come in to us. The fire service pipeline is fantastic.
You know, we look at the backlog and the backlog position today for the breathing apparatus and the fire service and then the AFG funds, which will start to come in the summer. We're really bullish on our fire service business for the balance of the year and into 2023. That business should be quite healthy. Then, of course, oil and gas is quite good. You know, we've seen a typical uptick when oil and gas bounces back. The first thing to come back is head protection, right? You're putting hard hats on workers that come back to the oil fields. Then what follows that quickly is portable gas detection, which we've seen that trend continue. Then, of course, fixed gas and flame detection comes along later in the cycle.
We expect to see that happen. You know, when you look at those two markets, those will be strong, we believe, into 2023. The backlog is healthy and high quality. We won't see cancellation of orders. You know, as fire departments place orders, they're willing to wait as that's a 15-year investment for them. And then on the fixed gas and flame detection, those products are specced in and have a good understanding of our delivery capabilities. It's a good high quality backlog to have, as we go through the year.
How has labor been? I mean, you had some issues in certain product lines in terms of finding people. Has it gotten any better? I mean, demand is obviously there. You know, the order book is strong. How has it been finding workers for in the facilities?
That's a good point, Stanley. The only area that we've had issues with labor is in our New Hampshire facility. In our, you know, just north of here, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, there's an extremely low unemployment rate. It's around 2%. Turnout gear, we make the clothing for firefighters in that facility. We've had challenges with filling that labor force. The good news is we are, as we track the leading indicators of getting more applicants and hiring more people, we're starting to see that improve. We're also doing some self-help things to look at some subcontractors to do some workforce in different parts of the country to bring those subassemblies in to help us with that. We're working around that.
In other parts of the business, in different parts of the world, labor really hasn't been an issue. We've done a nice job with headcount in our facilities throughout the U.S. and around the world.
You know, you mentioned the L.A. opportunity with the SCBA, with the new G1. I mean, that certainly will tie into some of the things on the new product side that we could talk about here in a minute. You know, maybe explain kind of what's happened within that marketplace, the investments that you've made, how that's repositioned the business, and maybe how much longer you think you see on this replacement cycle.
When you think about the fire service market, we launched the G1 breathing apparatus in 2015, and we really moved our market share from around 20-25% to 45%, maybe a little bit higher. We've had a nice movement in market share with the G1 breathing apparatus. Part of the strategy and what's fit in there is, you know, we have good strength within the channels of distribution, great brand awareness. We made the acquisition of Globe Turnout Gear back in 2017, which only strengthened our position within the fire service.
When you think about our products and our exposure in the fire service, between the turnout gear, the clothing, fire helmets, the self-contained breathing apparatus, thermal imaging cameras, and of course, portable gas detection, you know, 95% or more fire departments in this country use one or more MSA product. The classic example with L.A. County, L.A. County used our thermal imaging cameras and our turnout gear. We built that relationship. We converted them to our fire helmet and continued to work the relationship. Then, of course, when they made their move to breathing apparatus, we did a real nice job with relationships and going through that product evaluation and winning that business. That's our strategy is to get into those accounts where we have good relationships and continue to broaden our product offering within those fire departments.
You know, the longer term, Stanley, what will happen and what will transition is, you know, because we've improved the market share position of the G1 breathing apparatus, longer term, there'll be a G2 breathing apparatus. What we'll do is make that backwards compatible, down the road and be able to go back into fire departments and have them upgrade to the latest NFPA standard breathing apparatus, while their cylinders are still in service, and then they can at a later date replace their cylinders. We'll have a long-term strategy to continue to hang on to that market share, drive revenue, improve our margins, because when you sell that without a bid and do it as an upgrade, you're not bidding, you're just selling those as upgrades, you're in a much better position.
As far as the replacement cycle for breathing apparatus in the fire service, we think the market's very healthy. You know, our market share position has changed. We've to where it's increased significantly. When we look at the pipeline, the opportunities are full with some significant opportunities as we go forward. We think that business will be healthy with the investment we've made in the product from an R&D standpoint, and then also, you know, with our market position improving. We've made other investments such as a company called Fotokite. Fotokite is drone technology. A lot of departments are using drones, which require a licensed pilot to fly drones. That's one drawback. You have to get the licensed pilot on the scene.
Second drawback is it takes time to set them up and get them up in the air. The third drawback is if the wind's blowing more than 10 miles an hour, you can't get a drone up in the air because they'll blow into buildings. Fotokite, a company out of Switzerland, came out with technology where they have a tethered drone system. They have FAA approval where anybody can fly it, because it only goes up 300 feet in the air. A fire department's able to get on a scene, deploy the drone up, so now you get a 360-degree view as to what's happening on the fire scene. The first arrivals on the scene, typically four firefighters in a truck, they can't get eyes all around the building.
This is a quick way to get eyes as to what's happening on the fire scene and then give them information to do some work. We've made investment into Fotokite, so that we're working with them from a technological standpoint because we've launched a new to world product called LUNAR. LUNAR is a thermal imaging camera which also has GPS in it and other functionality where it does ranging from one firefighter to another, so you don't get separated or you know where the firefighter is. The one piece that's missing is what floor the firefighter's on. From a GPS standpoint, you know where the person is on the building, but you don't know if they're in the basement or on the 10th floor.
What we believe we'll be able to do with Fotokite is get technology tied to them in our LUNAR, so we can triangulate to find out exactly where that firefighter is. Those are some of the things we're trying to do technology-wise to make firefighters more productive, more effective and obviously safer.
Yeah, certainly cutting edge for an industry that hadn't really invested a whole lot other beyond just the product and incremental changes at that. Along those lines, I mean, you hosted a technology day several weeks ago. You highlighted some of the things that you're doing in terms of adding asset connectivity, worker connectivity in some of your other products as well. You know, what are some of the highlights from that event that you could share with the audience?
Go ahead, Ken.
Yeah. No, it's interesting, Stanley. I'll provide a little bit of texture there, and Nish can add onto it as well. You know, I think something that was some clear takeaways from that day was the fact that we've got an incredibly strong pool of talent. First and foremost, the people that we have working at MSA, we have done a tremendous job at really going after identifying, attracting, retaining and investing in our people. What an incredibly talented workforce. Secondarily, I think what was interesting was the amount of technology that's not only in gas detection, which we're all pretty well aware of, but also the technology that's throughout all of the products.
All of the software that we've been able to incorporate into our product portfolio is quite impressive. Greg Martin and the team have done a nice job at really shifting the dynamics. You know, it wasn't so long ago where a high degree or a high portion of our engineers were more traditional mechanical engineers. Today, it's completely been flipped, and we've got a higher degree of software electrical engineers in our portfolio of engineers, and it shows. The results are really clear.
Whether it be the SCBA with what we're doing with LUNAR and the Connected Firefighter, the MSA Grid, or the ALTAIR io 4 which we showcased, or the FieldServer Gateways and some of the things we acquired through the Sierra Monitor acquisition, where we were able to go in and acquire Gateway technology, FieldServer technologies, or even in the fall protection side, where we're able to innovate and provide workers with the ability to remain tied off at all times and but to smoothly pass one another without requiring them to disconnect. Because we know that once you disconnect, the risk is increased for the person to get hurt or to fall or just to be sacrificed.
Really all the things we're doing across that portfolio I think were pretty impressive to see, and it provides us as a management team a level of optimism for the future. We're really excited about those innovations and what we can do for the market and our customers around the world.
Help us with the pricing trends. I mean, you've been very aggressive this year, you know, really even the last year pushing price. Have you seen any pushback from your customers? How easy is it for you to push price, especially in a situation where the inflation continues to move against you?
Sure. We got out ahead of the curve when it came to pricing. We were pretty active. In North America, we had a price increase in January 2021. We did it again in July, and then a third price increase in November 2021. Now April, we have another price increase coming through. We had one in April. We've been pretty aggressive from a pricing standpoint. While customers don't like it, they understand it, and the beauty of our product, it's mission critical. We have an awful lot of long-term users of our product. They're not going to upset their workforce because remember, workers are wearing our product.
They're not gonna upset their workforce, because we've bumped up our price on a hard hat a dollar or two, or we've bumped up price on gas detection a bit. You know, really, employers don't wanna deal with that, especially in this environment. We've been pretty effective in getting price. You see that in the margin profile of the business and we continue to get aggressive on it. You hear some groaning on it, and you worry a bit about, you know, demand destruction or if you have some problems with some municipalities possibly, so we keep a close eye on that. So far, we haven't seen any issues whatsoever.
It's interesting. I think what I would say is it's not aggressive, it's appropriate in terms of the inflation that we're seeing, not only on the material side, but also on the labor side. We're trying to really just make sure that we're pricing these products to reflect the value that our customers are seeing. As Nish indicated, nobody likes to see a price increase, and I haven't met a sales guy yet that likes to introduce a price increase. However, it's necessary based upon the inflation that we're seeing in our end markets.
You had a target out there, incremental margin 30%-40%. I mean, pricing obviously is very good. You, you're richening the mix with all of your new products. What levers do you have to pull to protect those margins if we get a downturn? You know, most of the consternation we've heard at the conference thus far has been around residential affordability, not really your market. I get that. You know, what sort of levers do you end up having to pull if we do see, you know, markets within the industrial or that bleeding over into a slowdown in the industrial landscape?
Well, we continue to work actively. You know, the European market, we don't expect this to grow from a revenue standpoint this year, right? We're all concerned about a recession in Europe, so we're preparing ourselves for that. We continue to do some things from the self-help standpoint. We've moved our gas detection manufacturing to Ireland. We have a facility that was pretty successful in Galway, and now we've moved the portable gas detection and then the legacy MSA fixed gas detection into that plant, which we acquired when we purchased General Monitors about 10 years ago. So that helps us, and that's some self-help. We're also continuing to work on a shared services center in Poland.
That shared services center really helps us to leverage, you know, our back office functions in a single location as opposed to multiple locations. There's some cost savings there that we continue to execute on. There's some opportunity that we have in the business to continue to improve the margins. You know, we talk about getting our margins up to the 20% level. It's both from a gross profit standpoint and improving ourselves and getting value for the product in the marketplace, and then also doing some self-help along the SG&A lines and leverage some of the capabilities we have. As we rolled out SAP, about 90% of our business is under SAP, and we do a nice job of leveraging that and pulling some costs back into corporate.
We've done some of that with Bacharach, with the recent acquisition, and been able to do some things from a cost standpoint with that business. We continue to look for those opportunities to drive efficiencies.
We're coming close to the time, but you have to ask about M&A, right? I mean, historically, you've got a very good track record of buying businesses that bring technology, bring margins, you know, bring additions to the portfolio, a willingness to take leverage up three, maybe even a little bit higher than that, and then quickly de-lever. You're kind of in that sweet spot right now from when you started to do some things of that nature. What does the landscape look like? You know, preference, where would it be focused? The Bacharach refrigeration asset that you purchased about a year ago, a little over, you know, certainly falls into a new branch for you all. How are you thinking about the puts and takes within the M&A marketplace right now?
Yeah. I would say there's the three main areas of focus here. First is around technologies, around talent, software engineering, things like that. That's not your more traditional acquisition, but that's more focused in a specific need for MSA, to fill a need that we have at MSA. The second area is investments in our core businesses, our gas detection business, our fall protection business, where we have a distant third market position. We're continuing to look at how do we bolster those opportunities and bolster our position in those specific areas. Third, it's how do we expand the addressable market? How do we go after businesses like Bacharach, which helped us expand our addressable market? As we think about the future, you know, I think it's clear.
Our focus is growing. Our focus is continuing to expand our margin profile. We feel like that if we do realistically think we can get to $2 billion-$2.5 billion in terms of overall revenue, we need to continue to focus on expanding the addressable market. That's a focus for us. While it's a focus, when we think about expanding that addressable market, we're also mindful of what our core competencies are. You won't see us move too far to the right or too far to the left. It'll make sense, and it'll be well in line and in tune with what our core competencies have been at MSA.
Well, perfect. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much. Nish, Ken, appreciate it. Everyone, thanks in the audience. Y'all take care. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Stanley. Appreciate it.