Good day and welcome to the NN Inc. Investor Update conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Danahy, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at NN. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm Mike Danahy, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis. I'd like to thank you for attending today's update regarding our business outlook, long-term strategic vision, and recent refinancing. This morning, we posted a presentation on the Investor Relations section of our website, which highlights the topics we will be discussing today. If anyone needs a copy of the presentation, you may also contact Lambert & Company at 616-258-5788. Before we begin, I'd ask that you take note of the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements contained in today's presentation and in the risk factors section in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2020. The same language applies to comments made on today's conference call, including the Q&A session as well as the live broadcast.
Our presentation today may contain forward-looking statements regarding sales, margins, foreign exchange rates, cash flow, tax rates, acquisitions, synergies, cash and cost savings, future operating results, performance of our worldwide markets, the impacts of the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic on the company's financial condition, and other topics. These statements should be used with caution and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside the company's control. The presentation also includes certain non-GAAP measures as defined by SEC rules. A reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures is contained in the tables in the final section of the presentation. Our presenters this morning will be President and Chief Executive Officer Warren Veltman and Tom DeByle, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This slide presents the background and experience of our senior executives who were named to their current positions in September 2019.
Reviewing the agenda for today's call, Warren will provide an overview of NN's business, recent developments that have brought us to our current state of our business, and the status of our business transformation efforts. Tom will provide a detailed update of our ongoing efforts to drive improved profitability, the path to achieving our 2025 goal of $600 million in revenues and 16%-18% adjusted EBITDA margins, and our recent refinancing transaction. Warren will then provide his concluding remarks, at which time we will hold a Q&A session. At this time, I will turn the call over to Warren Veltman, President and CEO.
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. If you return to page five, we can start with a view of the new NN following the sale of Life Sciences in October 2020. NN is a global provider of highly customized solutions emphasizing our strengths in precision manufacturing, highly engineered components with extremely tight tolerance, and best-in-class product quality. We operate out of 28 production locations in five countries with our dedicated team of 3,500 employees to serve our 1,150 customers worldwide. Our business is comprised of two segments: mobile solutions and power solutions, which we consider to be highly complementary. During 2020, we generated $428 million in sales and $46.5 million in adjusted EBITDA. The breakdown of our revenue by end market is presented, but most notably, 72% of our sales are independent of ongoing production of passenger vehicles that utilize an internal combustion engine.
Turning to page six, we dive deeper into our segments. Our mobile solutions business represents our largest segment with revenues last year of about $256 million and adjusted EBITDA margins of 15.7%. Our expected top-line growth for mobile solutions is 6%-7% per year through 2025 organically. Operating primarily under our Autocam brand, we provide critical components to the automotive industry, including components used in internal combustion as well as battery electric and hybrid electric vehicles, and general industrial components. As you can see from a small sampling of our mobile solutions customers, we sell primarily to tier one suppliers within the automotive industry, diversified industrial manufacturers, and some automotive OEMs. The key competitive advantages we maintain in the mobile solutions business surround our ability to provide our customers a partner that excels with world-class product quality, unmatched speed to market, and advanced precision engineering capabilities.
Our core capabilities include high precision turning, grinding, and milling, in some cases machining to tolerances as low as one micron, heat treatment, ultra finishing, laser welding, gear manufacturing, sub-assemblies, and extensive in-house tool design and engineering capabilities. Our high precision, highly engineered approach to meet our customers' needs has helped us become an essential partner in the industries we serve. Turning to page seven, we will review our power solutions business. We are excited by the opportunities of the power solutions business, particularly as we think of some of the key megatrends that are driving growth in our business. The growth in smart grid technology and the increased infrastructure spending required to effectively power the ongoing transition to electric vehicles will provide strong tailwinds to growth over the coming decade. Our power solutions business generated revenues last year of about $171 million and adjusted EBITDA margins of 15.7%.
We expect our organic revenue growth in this business to be 8%-9% per year through 2020. Testament to the growth potential we see in the business. Our power solutions group has brand recognition with the PEP and Brainin brands and provides critical components in the commercial and residential electric, general industrial, automotive, aerospace, and defense, and medical markets. In reviewing the sampling of our end customers, you can see many of the biggest names in power, industrial, and aerospace markets. These customers come to us for our critical expertise in essential processes such as precision stamping, metal machining, precision cold heading of electrical contact, cladding and plating, precision injection molding, and rapid prototyping, which are essential and emerging technologies served by the power solutions business.
These two segments are highly complementary in their overall operations and markets, and we have just begun to take full advantage of those synergies. It might be a good time to review how we came to our current position and the challenges we have addressed to get there. Page eight of the presentation summarizes some of the key events that have shaped our business since Tom and I assumed our current roles in September of 2019. Our initial assessment of the business concluded that our biggest challenge was an unsustainable capital structure burdened by limited liquidity and excess leverage built up through acquisitions and elevated levels of capital investments to support our growth. Given these challenges, we immediately implemented a cash improvement plan to save $32 million annually by eliminating our cash dividend, reducing costs, and reducing capital expenditures.
Our high leverage at over 6x EBITDA continued to cause a drag on our business as customers, suppliers, and rating agencies raised concerns about our long-term viability and ability to service such high debt. These concerns were hurting our business in tangible ways through tightened credit terms from suppliers and reduced new business awards from customers, further inhibiting our ability to repay our debt through internally generated cash. Consequently, we made the decision to explore various strategic alternatives in order to reduce our overall debt. As we initiated the process, we did so with an understanding that all options would be considered, from selling individual assets to complete business segments to selling the entire company. While this review was being conducted, like every other business globally, we faced the new challenges of the pandemic, which had a significant impact on our business and that of our customers.
To quickly address these factors, we implemented further COVID-related cost reduction initiatives, resulting in $16 million in annual savings and over $30 million of additional cash saving measures, including further reductions of capital expenditures and tax initiatives resulting from the CARES Act. As we discussed on our last call, some of these cost reductions were temporary, such as the suspension of the 401(k) match and employee gain sharing, and expenses totaling approximately 1.3% of sales were reinstated in 2021. By late summer, we concluded our strategic review and came to the decision to sell our Life Sciences businesses. We considered many factors in this decision, but from a practical standpoint, this was the only potential transaction that would generate sufficient proceeds to meaningfully reduce leverage while providing a solid financial foundation for the remaining businesses to grow and prosper.
At the closing of the sale in October, we were able to substantially deliver. However, we still had a short-term capital structure characterized by the near-term maturity of our remaining term note and a mezzanine preferred issue with a rapidly escalating redemption premium. We acted decisively to address this with our recent refinancing transaction, which Tom will address shortly. With these actions, we created the new NN, a company with a solid core business and a winning formula. Turning to slide nine of the presentation, you can see our value proposition, which frames how we win in the market. We provided our customers highly engineered solutions with close tolerances, state-of-the-art engineering capabilities, and a focus on quality and speed to serve mission-critical needs in the automotive, power distribution, general industrial, and aerospace and defense markets. To our customers, we are more than just a supplier.
We are a valued partner to help them find solutions to the complex manufacturing and logistic challenges of their business. Page ten of the presentation summarizes the driving force behind our business, our people. Over the past 18 months, we have placed a deep emphasis on investing in our team and cultivating a culture of long-term success. We have instilled a founder's mentality among our people based on the book of the same name. This founder's mentality is centered around three fundamental behaviors. First, create a sense of insurgent mission to create focus and purpose. Second, create a frontline obsession and focus on every detail of the business. Third, establish an owner's mentality with a bias towards action and the elimination of bureaucracy and waste.
This essentially means empowering employees to identify and implement innovative solutions and to provide training and education to ensure they have the competence to make and implement those solutions. To that end, we have expanded our successful training programs in mobile solutions to the power solutions group. We've implemented the Shainin System for problem solving, expanded leadership training, and established apprenticeship and co-op programs to develop the next generation of talent. Finally, we have refined our approach to business development within power solutions and have linked our business development teams directly with operations to fully align sales objectives throughout the group and to better service customers by utilizing our technical strengths to collaboratively identify process solutions. Page 11 of the presentation summarizes the large and growing markets we have targeted to achieve our 2020 growth plan.
We have established a $600 million revenue target in 2025 based upon significant growth opportunities in the markets we serve while reducing passenger car ICE-dependent applications to 21% of total sales. While this might seem like an aggressive target, we are addressing markets with total size exceeding $40 billion, which are growing in many cases at mid to high single-digit compound annual rates. The real question is, how are we planning to address these markets? Turning to slide 12, you can see the four phases to our sales growth and profitability initiatives. While we expect that product offerings for ICE-dependent applications will be significant cash generators for years to come, we will shift our investment and growth focus to ICE-independent components within automotive and aggressively address the transition to electric vehicles. Second, we will execute on our three-pillar approach to growing our business organically.
Third, we expect revenue growth through a disciplined acquisition strategy relating to complementary technologies and targeted customers and end markets. Finally, continuous improvement is always part of our plan to drive improved margins and profitability. Page 13 summarizes aspects of our evaluation of the transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles within the automotive industry. As you can see, we believe NN is well positioned to handle the transition and capitalize on emerging trends in electric vehicles. First, I would note that a broad range of automotive components we provide are agnostic to the propulsion system. Components for power steering, braking, sensors, and safety systems are necessary for cars with an internal combustion engine, a hybrid vehicle, or an electric vehicle.
Our capital equipment is also flexible, not dedicated solely to the manufacture of ICE components, so we can reconfigure production to meet demand for hybrid and electric vehicle components as the transition continues. We also see significant benefits to the power solutions business from the transition, given the electric connection points within a battery electric vehicle and the increased demand for charging stations that will drive increased long-term investment in the electric grid as well as power distribution. Finally, our strength and precision engineered components will be critical for the long-term success of electric vehicles, which are often even more dependent on these components for their operation. Turning to slide 14, we have outlined our three-pillar approach to growing our business. The first pillar surrounds what we term wallet share expansion, or more simply, leveraging our customer relationships to expand the addressable needs within our existing client base.
In some cases, our clients may not even be aware of our total suite of offerings, so our customer service, engineering, and product development teams must work together to educate the customer and drive innovative solutions to meet their needs. The second pillar is customer revival and cross-selling. We look to revive past customer relationships to create opportunities to reengage. Again, this often involves a collaborative educational process for these clients. Finally, we are initiating specific efforts to cross-sell within and across groups and platforms. This means leveraging the strengths in mobile to sell into power solutions and vice versa. The third pillar is targeting strategic customers that we believe will be winners in the modernization of the electric grid infrastructure or the transition to electric vehicles. This may mean expanding deeper into our core markets by targeting upstream and downstream within the supply chain.
All these efforts will leverage our industry knowledge, relationships, and experience to achieve success. Page 15 of the presentation highlights the emerging megatrend in the smart grid. Certainly, we have been involved in aspects of the smart grid since the development of smart meter technology, but we are also targeting expansion throughout power distribution channels, including the integration of renewables into the smart grid. These opportunities extend from residential to commercial and industrial power applications. While considering the ongoing transition to electric vehicles, the infrastructure currently in place may not be sufficient to meet that emerging demand. Recently, the Biden administration announced a framework for an infrastructure investment plan and emphasizes green energy development and incentives to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.
While we have not fully analyzed the details of the plan, we are optimistic that the targeted infrastructure investments will ultimately include needed upgrades in smart grid technology to accommodate the emergence of electric vehicles. Turning to slide 16, let me highlight our disciplined strategic approach to acquisitions. First, I would point out that we are not aiming for large transformational acquisitions in our approach, but rather smaller bolt-on acquisitions in the likely range of $20 million-$40 million. When considering potential transactions, we have three key criteria of focus. First, we will look for complementary technologies where we can leverage our core competencies and drive synergies. Second, we would have interest in acquisitions where we could acquire strategic customers in existing or adjacent markets, such as smart grid or electric vehicles or charging station infrastructure as examples.
Finally, we expect to evaluate acquisitions that will allow us to expand our geographic footprint. This may be as simple as expansion in low-cost countries or more strategic, such as expanding into markets with faster adoption of emerging technologies or areas where we can leverage infrastructure through our existing mobile solutions locations. That concludes my strategic overview of how we are approaching long-term strategic growth of the new NN. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Tom DeByle so he can provide a review of our strategy to improve overall profitability as well as our recent refinancing transaction. Tom?
Thanks, Warren. Please turn to slide 17, which highlights some of our key profitability improvement initiatives. As Warren mentioned before, over the past 18 months, we have taken decisive action to improve our overall profitability and conserve cash.
These efforts are ongoing and will ultimately enable us to achieve our 2025 financial targets. We continue to identify opportunities to enhance efficiencies and drive synergies across mobile and power solutions. This started with the consolidation of the management team responsible for the two groups. It continues with better integrating our engineering strengths into the sales process as well as integration of the back office SG&A functions across the groups to gain synergy. Next, we continue to pursue facility optimization. We look to streamline underutilized facilities, continue expansion into low-cost countries, and rationalize underperforming facilities. In each case, we are making changes with an eye towards maintaining the needed capacity to meet future growth needs while remaining disciplined on capital investments. Finally, we are leveraging systems across the organization to drive revenues and enhance overall efficiency.
Let's go to slide 18, and I can walk you through the path to achieving our 2025 goals. From a top-line perspective, our growth from $28 million in revenues in 2020 to our goal of exceeding $600 million in revenues by 2025 represents an annual growth rate of 7.5%. We believe this rate is achievable based on our current sales recovery and growth rates of our target market. We also expect to benefit from the impact of megatrends on our overall business. From an adjusted EBITDA standpoint, the midpoint of our 16%-18% margin goal represents a total of just over $100 million. As you can see on the waterfall chart, there are several components to how we get there. The biggest piece is the variable margin resulting from the increase in sales.
Our continued operating efficiencies and cost reductions will also have a positive impact on our profitability. Finally, we expect to incur some increases in fixed costs in SG&A to support the growth. Turning to slide 19, we can walk through our recent refinancing. This transaction creates a more stable long-term financial structure with the resources and flexibility to pursue our 2025 growth strategy. It also brings in long-term strategic partners that support our vision to effectively serve our customers and drive value to our shareholders. With the new financing, we were able to shift our capital stack from a short-term mezzanine focus to a longer-term focus to support our growth. We used a new five-and-a-half-year, $150 million term loan and $65 million preferred issue to completely repay our previous obligations.
We accomplished this by also adding a new five-year, $50 million ABL that remained undrawn, allowing us to fund our ongoing operating initiatives. We were able to reduce the overall cost of our debt and preferred equity from an all-in cost of more than 15% to approximately 12%. We have also effectively avoided the scheduled increases in the redemption premium on the previous preferred, which was punitive in nature. For example, you can see from the chart in the upper right how dramatically the redemption premium would have escalated over time. Our overall goal with the refinancing was to lengthen the time horizon to better match our five-year goals by reducing the overall cost of financing. We believe we now have the financial flexibility to pursue our growth plans and focus on execution over the near and intermediate term. With that, I'll turn it back to Warren.
Thanks, Tom.
On page 20, we highlight our path to success in 2025. We are excited by the opportunities for long-term growth in our business, which will drive us to our $600 million annual revenue goal. This growth will be driven by growth in both of our operating groups as we pursue opportunities driven by megatrends in smart grid development and investment in electric grid infrastructure and the transition to electric vehicles. We will also remain open to pursue opportunities in other existing or adjacent markets where NN can utilize its core capabilities. We have aligned a sight on our adjusted EBITDA margin goal of 16%-18% and a long-term capital structure that will support us as we move along the path to accomplishing these goals.
The founder's mentality we have instilled in our team will be a key driver in our ability to grow, while also focusing on increasing efficiency and maintaining a disciplined approach to cash use and potential acquisitions. All of these efforts are beginning to bear results as we continue to see the resumption in our growth from the depths of the pandemic, and I am happy to report to you today that on a preliminary basis, we have achieved a 9% year-over-year growth in revenues for the first quarter. Finally, I would note that the presentation is part of our first-ever virtual non-deal roadshow, which we organized on our own to specifically highlight NN's existing growth opportunities, exciting growth opportunities to our existing institutional investor base. We expect to do more of these both virtually and hopefully soon in person.
We plan to do these throughout the year in coordination with our sell-side covering analysts, so I encourage each of them to reach out to Mike Danahy to begin the scheduling process. That concludes our prepared remarks, and I will now turn the call back to the operator for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please go ahead.
Morning, Tom. Good morning. Thanks for the detailed overview of the long-term plans.
I wanted to start with just in terms of the growth you expect over the planning period, do you see it being relatively linear, or some of those megatrends could cause that to be more front-end or back-end loaded? Yeah. Dan, I would tell you that we are seeing certainly the benefit from the pandemic recovery here in 2021. There is going to be a slight acceleration early in the period as a result of that, but then I would say more linear growth once you get outside of 2021. Helpful. Just a quick clarification on the EBITDA margin goals. You alluded to exiting fiscal 2020 with about 15.7% adjusted margin in each of the two segments. I assume that is pre-corporate while your goals include corporate. Is that correct?
That is correct. Yeah.
Okay. Yep. Just making sure we understand the implied operating leverage.
Maybe, Tom, the annual CapEx expectations underpinning the organic growth. In the past, pieces of Autocam and others have been somewhat capital-intensive. Maybe just talk to the capital intensity and how that relates to the cash generation over the period.
Sure. We plan on spending, as we said in our last earnings release, about $22 million in CapEx. What we had talked about before in the prior year is we put in a lot of the capacity for the businesses to grow, and we have that excess capacity right now. We plan on about $22 million each year going forward and do not anticipate the large CapEx spikes that we had experienced in the past.
Very helpful. Lastly for me, just in terms of M&A, thank you for the detail.
Are there financial acquisition criteria, multiples, sort of accretion targets that you can speak to and size of potential deals? Are deals kind of on the table today, or is it more likely a year or two away after cash generation starts to kick in a little bit more meaningfully? Thanks.
Yeah, Dan. I see us actually building our pipeline and engaging more near the latter part of this year, the beginning of next. We do want to see a couple of solid quarters of results here, continuing to deliver the balance sheet. As it relates to multiples, it's hard for me to speculate on that. I think it depends on the nature of the business and what it brings to us as it relates to what we would be willing to pay. Certainly, we want to keep some sort of a semblance of leverage.
One of the reasons that we did the structure, the current refinancing structure that we did, is because of our concern on overall leverage, specifically how that would be viewed from a customer perspective. I don't take that too lightly, I would tell you. It's been clear to me over the last six to eight months that our customers have held back on some business opportunities for us because of the situation that we were in from a leverage standpoint. We were sensitive to that when we did our restructuring, our refinancing, I should say. I think now we're in a good position to sit in front of our customers and tell them we're confident that we have a solid balance sheet and a solid structure, certainly that will support us for an extended period of time.
We do not want to do anything to jeopardize that understanding or view from a customer standpoint. We will go forward with that in mind.
All right. Very helpful. I'll jump back with any follow-ups. Thank you.
Thanks. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then one. Once again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star, then one. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Warren Veltman for any closing remarks.
I appreciate everybody's time this morning. As I concluded my statements, these are really exciting times for NN. Our whole team is looking forward to a change of focus from deleveraging and balance sheet.
We think that we've made a significant accomplishment here organizationally over the last 18 months, and we're very excited about turning our focus to customer service and growing the business on a long-term basis. With that, I thank you once again for your time this morning. Have a good day.
Thank you, sir. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.