Very excited to have the CFO of OSI here. Alan, thank you for joining us. For those of you that don't know me, my name is John Godyn, Citigroup's Aerospace and Defense analyst. We're gonna have a great discussion on the business, trends in defense, et cetera. The best way to kick it off is there may be people who aren't familiar with the business. Just giving us an overview of the structure of the business, the key divisions, and the trends that you're seeing would be just a great starting point.
Sure, happy to do so, and thank you for having me. So at OSI Systems, we're three divisions. We're a security business, we're an optoelectronics business, and we're a healthcare business. So starting off talking about each of the businesses and maybe how they fit together. So our security division is our largest business. It represents over two-thirds of our revenue, even a higher percentage of our profit. In security, what we do is security detection, so we tend to be the number one player in the world in security detection, looking at both cargo and vehicle inspection at ports and borders, trying to stop things like drugs and cash and weapons and explosives. And then we're also big in aviation at the airports.
Many people know us from airports because we all go through airports on a regular basis, our brand being called Rapiscan. And we've got a nice business where we sell the product, but we have an increasingly growing recurring revenue stream in the business, too, which I'm sure we can talk about a little bit later. But the security business is great for us. We also do quite a bit of events, such as the Olympics, which is taking place right now, and the World Cup, the Super Bowl we recently did as well. We also have a healthcare business. It's the smallest part of our overall business, but we sell to hospitals. We sell to medium and large hospitals, principally.
We sell patient monitoring equipment and cardiology equipment, and about half of our business there is recurring revenue in nature. And then what ties it all together is our third business, called Optoelectronics. So unlike security and healthcare, where we sell to the end customer, in Opto, we sell to the leading OEMs. We make sensors, detectors, and other electronic components. We sell to many of the aerospace and defense companies who are here at this conference, this week. We sell to technology companies, industrial companies, automotive companies, medical companies, really a very diverse customer base.
The nice thing about Opto is, in addition to selling to these third-party companies, many of the key components that go into our security products and many of the key components that go into our healthcare products are manufactured by our Opto division. Through that vertical integration, we can enhance the margin, we can control the supply chain, and we can be faster and more responsive to our customer needs. Our Opto business represents about a quarter of our revenues and has been generating, you know, good profits, good cash flow, and the like. That's kind of the big picture of OSI Systems.
No, that's fantastic. Appreciate that. I wanted to dig into security a little bit more. We've had, you know, the history of the company is that the last few years, International has been driving an outsized amount of growth. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, and then how the growth drivers are transitioning a little more toward domestic.
Yeah, yeah, great question, and we're so excited about the future outlook for our security business. Yes, it's done phenomenally well for us the last several years and really the last decade, but we think the future is even brighter. As you mentioned, a lot of the growth over the last few years has been driven by international growth, namely in Mexico. We received two big contracts with the Mexican Army and the Navy, or two big customers. It's actually three contracts totaling about $900 million in aggregate, and that generated significant revenues for us in our fiscal 2024 and our fiscal 2025. Took us to new levels.
The beautiful thing about that is, as we've been delivering on those revenues and converting backlog into revenue, our bookings have been so outstanding that our backlog has actually generally been increasing over that period of time. Again, driven a lot by international growth, big opportunities in the Middle East, other parts of Latin America and Europe. But as you correctly point out, although the international funnel continues to remain strong, we think going forward, there's gonna be a shift to even stronger growth here domestically in the United States. And we think a lot of that's gonna be driven by border initiatives with CBP, Customs and Border Protection. The One Big Beautiful Bill appears to be a nice windfall, you know, coming for us.
We expect to be getting substantial orders at the borders from CBP on the one big beautiful bill. There's many different categories that fall into that, and we tend to be a preferred supplier of this particular customer. Then in addition, we see tremendous opportunities with Golden Dome, by virtue of an acquisition that we did about 18 months ago that we think places us in great position. So we're really excited about the U.S. opportunities, as we move into our fiscal 2027 here in July 1st, not too far away, and we think that'll sustain us for multiple years to come.
Yeah, there's a few things there that you mentioned that I'm excited about, that I wanna unpack. Maybe a good place to start is the One Big Beautiful Bill. What was in the bill? What kind of awards do you expect? Maybe talk about your award history a little bit and your chances of winning some of these awards. I'd love to just kind of understand that arc a bit.
Sure, sure. So some real exciting areas. So within the One Big Beautiful Bill, there was money allocated for what they call NII, or Non-Intrusive Inspection scanning equipment. That's exactly what we do. It's right down the middle of the fairway. So there's been about $1 to 1.1 billion allocated for this, and there's initiatives, so a lot of momentum within the current administration of wanting to get this done sooner than later.
Mm.
So we think that's gonna result in some substantial bookings for us, you know, in the near and medium term for us. When we look back, you know, the last big awards that CBP did, we got 40% to 45% of the overall awards.
Okay.
So we think we're, you know, well-positioned to continue to do well on the future awards, as well. You know, in addition to that, there's more money going to Border Patrol,
which is quite significant.
Mm.
There's some money going to biometrics that we think we're well-positioned for as well. And finally, there's money going to some of the games, both the Olympics in Los Angeles coming up and the World Cup as well. And, you know, we tend to be the pre-eminent provider for these type of games. We did the Paris Olympics, we did the World Cup in Qatar, and we've done many other games as well.
Yeah, that's fantastic, and, and that's quite a win rate. Can you talk a bit about the competitive dynamics, the, the landscape out there? When... You know, who, who's getting the other 55% awards historically? And I don't know, maybe your hit rate even goes up from here from what it was.
Yeah, we're certainly hopeful that's gonna be the case. You know, it's a limited number of competitors that we tend to go against in these areas. Historically speaking, the biggest competitors on the kind of the cargo side, which is what would take place with One Big Beautiful Bill, would be Leidos and a company in the U.K. called Smiths Detection, and there's also a private company that got a small amount of awards as well. So it's a finite set, but yes, we are hopeful that we can expand our share there.
Yeah. And technologically versus some of those competitors, you've done things a little bit differently, right? I think, you know, you've approached the product in a little bit of a broader way, combining different technologies. Maybe you can talk a bit about that.
Yeah, that's been a big differentiator for us. So some of our competitors in the past have chosen to focus on a particular technology, and they may do very well with that particular technology, but that's the technology they need to sell and push to the customer. We've taken a more expansive approach, and we say: "We wanted all the technologies." And this could encompass what they call low energy, medium energy, high energy. So we have all the different technologies, so we can see what's right for the customers. We approach them for what solution they need. So rather than having to push a single technology, we see what's right for them, and in fact, we can also do combinational technologies. We can combine our low energy backscatter with our high energy X-ray and put it into a single product.
We think all of this has allowed us to capture, you know, a very, very significant market share in the cargo and vehicle inspection space.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, when you talk about technologies like that, I can't help but ask about AI. Is there an opportunity here to insert-
Sure
... AI, other value-added services? Maybe you could talk about that.
You're absolutely right. You know, the future is AI. We think we were an early adopter in this regard. We bought a small company about 4 to 5 years ago in AI, so we got a little bit of a first-mover advantage there in our particular industry, and we've been incorporating AI into our products. We're gonna continue to do so. We believe it really is the future, and we want to be at the forefront, and we're investing some significant R&D in that regard for product development, as well as, you know, some of the cybersecurity protections that go along with all of our products and the AI. So yes, we absolutely believe that that's gonna be pivotal to what's going on, and that's what we're focused on.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The other thing that you mentioned a few questions ago was Golden Dome.
Yes.
I wanted to just focus on that for a little bit. It's a very topical point at this conference. We've had a lot of different defense companies that we cover talk about the opportunities for Golden Dome, talk about the fact that there could be awards in the next, you know, few months, medium term, however you want to think about it. I'd love to understand your Golden Dome exposure, what you guys do well, and why you think that you're gonna be a big player there as well?
Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people talk about Golden Dome, and how real is it? We think it's extremely real for us. You know, so about 18 months ago, we acquired a company that does RF, radio frequency, technology. That's been a very, very successful acquisition for us so far. When we bought them, Golden Dome wasn't even on the horizon, so this is just a plus. But the technology that we acquired is so perfectly suited for Golden Dome. As you know, there was a recent large IDIQ for $151 billion. We're on that IDIQ, along with a number of companies, but we think we're extremely well-positioned to win business, and we think that business can be won in the near to medium term, at least the starting points of it. So we're extremely excited.
You know, the technology that we do is called Over-the-Horizon Radar. We think we're relatively uniquely positioned for that, and as a result, we think we, you know, might be receiving some substantial awards in that regard, so we're extremely excited about that. Gearing up for that, we've expanded our manufacturing capacity into a new location in the Texas area. We started that process in November. We'll be completing it, you know, throughout the course of calendar 2026. So we're extremely excited about what Golden Dome and the RF technology in general means for us. We've seen substantial growth in this business, and we think the Golden Dome will only take us to a whole another level.
Yeah. Well, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. Just focusing on security and just some of the existing dynamics, there's been a very interesting kind of margin opportunity there-
Yeah
... as you shift from product to services. Could you expand on that a bit? Because it does seem like that's inflecting here.
... Yeah, we're really excited about the margin potential. So we, you know, we have two main revenue sources. We have our product revenue and our service revenue, and our service revenue has - our product revenue has grown quite substantially, but our service revenue is growing at an accelerated rate right now, and we saw that throughout, you know, throughout calendar 2025. And the service revenues for us carry north of 10 percentage points higher of margin. So as our service revenues increase, our overall operating margins increase as well. So we're, we're quite excited about that. Countering that over the most recent near term has been - we've had substantial revenues from Mexico -
Mm.
- which carry a little bit higher margin, so they've presented some more difficult comps. The final difficult comp for Mexico ends this quarter in March. So as we enter our fiscal Q4 here in 45 days, and then in our fiscal 2027, just substantial opportunities for margin expansion for us by virtue of stronger service revenue growth, as well as a lot of these new programs that we're talking about domestically. So very excited about the margin expansion opportunities.
Yeah. So domestic programs, margin expansion, service revenue margin expansion, and lapping Mexico headwinds-
That's right.
And that's the algorithm. Sounds very interesting. Could we just... You know, that, that's for this year. Just taking a step back-
Mm.
You know, the idea of monetizing the product with service revenue, and then even, you know, other approaches that you've had, you know, this idea of security as a service. Maybe we could just talk a little bit philosophically, you know, what are the approaches to market? What are the right ways to value maximize, you know, as you're negotiating with customers?
Yeah. So great, great, great question. Though our basic business model has always been to sell the product and get nice margin on the product, and then get recurring revenues for the next decade while the product is out there at higher, you know, at a higher margin, we've also challenged ourselves over the years to say: How can we expand the revenue potential, and how can we expand the margins?
And we said, "Well, maybe there's a customer set out there that doesn't have the money or the capital to buy the equipment upfront, or if they do, maybe they don't have the operational expertise." And this led us to the idea of what you referred to as security as a service, another version of SaaS, or we sometimes also call turnkey, where instead of selling the equipment, we manufacture the product, we place it at the customer site, but we generally own it. It sits in our balance sheet. We staff it up with our people. We enter into long-term contracts, contracts ranging from 6 years to as much as 15 years, and then we charge a fee per scan or a fee per site per month. So now we have this great long-term recurring revenue at substantially higher margin.
We were the first company to do this. We're still actually the only company to do this, which is fantastic. You know, there has been some companies that have taken an equipment company, combining it with a service company, but it hasn't been as successful. We're the only ones to do the whole thing together ourselves.
Mm.
From this, we've gotten a tremendous database as well, so we have access to the images that we have, and we were able to develop a proprietary software called CertScan, which has been a, a big differentiator for us in many of these programs that we've won. Now we're taking CertScan out also as a standalone product. We talked about our SaaS, security as a service.
Yeah.
We also truly now have a software-as-a-service offering through CertScan as well, that we've recently launched and will be growing, so very, very exciting for us, but another opportunity for recurring revenue at substantially higher margins.
Yep, yep. The higher margin piece there just sort of-
Yeah
... you know, caught my attention.
Yeah.
Can you just talk about how you price these services and, you know, why these services come on at higher margins?
Sure. So while we've never specifically spoken about the exact number of margins, we've always said that the margin is substantially higher than our, our corporate average.
Mm.
When we go into pricing, it, we figure out what it may take for each win. In some cases, the customer actually may pass on some of that cost onto their customer, if you will, so they might be less price-sensitive. But when we talk about the big volume that we're doing, the absolute operational expertise that we have, it's made a substantial difference to allow us to receive nice margin. Of course, we wanna get returns as well because it requires some upfront CapEx.
Yep
... which we're happy to do, you know, every day of the week, but we wanna get the returns on that as well, which leads to higher margins.
Are these multi-year contracts, or what kind of visibility does this give us?
Yeah, it gives us great visibility. You know, the average contract for us is probably 8 to 10 years. I think the smallest one we have is 6 years, the shortest one, and the longest one being 15 years. So it gives us really great, you know, revenue and margin visibility.
Yeah. And just one more on this topic, but you know, different contract types, different products, they resonate with different types of customers. Can you talk about, you know, international versus domestic? Who prefers which structure?
Yeah. So throughout the world, all customers seem to like to buy the product-
Yeah
... so that's not an issue. But when we talk about security as a service, it tends to resonate more with international customers than U.S. customers, and the reason being, one, from a funding perspective, you know, the U.S. has the funds. Certain international countries, they may be a little bit more challenged, either financially or operationally. And in addition, you know, you might have to deal with things such as unions and the like in certain regions, which, you know, may change a jobs perspective. When we move into these international countries, you know, one of the great value propositions is that we're hiring local people, so we're bringing on, you know, all new people in that country.
We might put an expat or two over there for experience, but we're basically hiring local people to do this, which is, you know, a nice sell-side story as well.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned Mexico as just a big win in the last, you know, few years on the international side. Can we talk about international a bit more broadly and step through the other regions? Because you've had-
Yeah
... historical success outside of just Mexico.
Oh, that's absolutely right. You know, Mexico's been great for us the last few years and really the last decade. We've had other contracts in Mexico, too. But we really are strong, you know, throughout the world. One of the biggest regions for us is the Middle East, and you name it, you know, half a dozen countries over there we're extremely strong, particularly on the ports and borders, but also on the aviation side of the equation. We're very strong throughout the EU and in the U.K., other parts of Latin America, both Central America and South America. We're strong in Asia, not necessarily China, but everywhere else within Asia, we have strength. India has been a fast-growing region as well. We have operations over in India.
We've been doing business in India for well over three decades and the like, so a very strong region for us. So outside of China and parts of Africa, I would say we're really strong throughout all regions of the world.
Yeah, and obviously in the Americas, border, controlled border dynamics are-
Yeah
... are playing a big role. Talk a little bit about the demand drivers in some of the other regions. Is it tied to infrastructure spending? Is it more than that? You know, I'd, I'd love to understand what's going on in the Middle East and, and India.
Yeah, so unfortunately, it's hard to turn on the news these days without seeing something going on in some parts of the world.
Yeah.
So everybody is hyper-focused on security. And, you know, although there's sometimes some volatility in defense, you know, defense right now is very, very strong. There never really seems to be a period where there's too much volatility in security, because security as a percentage of defense spending is very, very small, but no countries ever want to be caught without doing security. So a lot of the drivers, it depends upon the particular region, country, and customer, but with some of the conflicts going on that we've seen in Russia, Ukraine, or the Middle East, those things generate more and more demand.
But throughout all areas, they're trying to protect their borders, and they're trying to protect their ports, many times from whether it be drugs, explosives, weapons, or other illicit contraband, there seems to be a great need. So in many places in the world, it's not a replacement cycle because they simply don't have security there, or if they have security, it's very manual. And moving to an automated security through non-intrusive inspection has been very attractive, and these dynamics just continue to increase really throughout all regions of the world.
But it's not just aviation assets, it sounds like. Sometimes I speak to investors, and they think of security businesses in that way. It sounds much broader than that.
It really is, and even sometimes our own employees in other divisions get confused by that, too, because we all go to airports all the time.
Mm-hmm.
So you see our Rapiscan, which is our security brand, at the airports, and everybody thinks aviation. Aviation's very important to us, and we do very well there. But the bigger part of our business, and the faster-growing part of our business, and the faster-growing part of the market, is for what we call cargo and vehicle inspection at ports and borders, and critical infrastructure.
Okay.
That really is the biggest part of our overall security business.
Got it. And we've heard from other companies that we cover that critical infrastructure spending in some of the regions that you're talking about just continues to grow, right? So I'm not surprised-
Yeah
... to hear that there's a security overlay on that as well. One thing I wanted to learn a little bit more about is just the recurring revenue stream, right? You've talked about the transition to service revenue, and I think that's powerful, and I'm sure that ebbs and flows as you have different contracts, but I'd love to just understand, you know, the embedded kind of compounding algorithm in there. How does over the course of an eight or 7 to 10 year contract, you know, how does that exactly work? Do you have escalators? Do you not?
Yeah.
I'm just trying to map that out.
Yeah. So, you know, today in security, our service revenue is about 30% of our overall revenue.
Okay.
We have goals to make that significantly higher. With some of our competitors, that percentage is higher. Now, part of the reason that some of our competitors' percentage is higher is they haven't had as much product revenue success we have.
Mm.
But nonetheless, we think it's a tremendous opportunity. So the basic algorithm for a product sale is you sell a product, and then we get the recurring revenue after it rolls off of warranty for the life cycle of that product, which generally 7 to 10 years-
Okay
... probably closer to the 10-year period in most products. And then throughout that, there are inflation clauses and the like for increases in that revenue. But as our install base increases, which it has been doing, you know, markedly, the service revenue goes up substantially, too. So when we look at our service revenue, we think there's really multiple areas for service revenue growth for us. It's from our install base, it's from the turnkey, the security-as-a-service revenues-
Mm-hmm
... it's from the true software as a service for the CertScan products, and then we also have a number of initiatives in training, and training carries very substantial margins as well. So between the four of these, we think that algorithm will lead to much higher service revenue growth and become a bigger percentage of our overall revenues, and therefore, given that great recurring revenue, and it's at nicer margin, will lead to overall operating margin expansion for OSI Systems.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And maybe you can talk about a little bit about the replacement cycle when things get to, you know, the end of a 10-year contract. What does that look like, and, you know, is there a bow wave there that you can tap into?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we always think that the best customer you have is the customer you have. And we have a very high retention rate of our current customers. So when a product is coming to end of life, hopefully we've done a fantastic job, not only with the product, but servicing that customer over that entire period. And the evidence has shown that we have a very high renewal rate, so to speak, or a new replacement of our customers with new products.
Mm.
Very important. But yes, we do see, we do track when that's gonna be occurring for each of our customers. Much more so on the aviation side, because the cargo and vehicle inspection, so much of it has been delivered over the last, you know, decade or so. So we still have a few years to go before those replacements start happening. But it really provides us a great, great pipeline of opportunities on the replacement side. But the bigger pipeline of opportunities is really on brand-new opportunities, where they're really not doing any security scanning today.
Yeah. I wanted to go back to some of the bigger picture themes, you know, One Big Beautiful Bill and Golden Dome, and just double-click on that, if you don't mind.
Yeah.
You know, with these bills, sometimes we see this dynamic where, you know, money's allocated but not spent. It sounds like you feel that there's real urgency to deploy the money, and you feel like you have line of sight on that. And, I was hoping you could just unpack that a little bit and just give us some color on it, on how you see that dynamic.
Yeah, really good question. You're right, sometimes money is allocated, and it just seems to be there forever. And we've experienced that sometimes in the past as well. With respect to these two programs, though, the One Big Beautiful Bill and Golden Dome, our understanding from all of our intelligence and the sources that we're talking to, is that there really is this urgency to deploy it. You know, they allocated the money in the One Big Beautiful Bill in order to spend it. The current presidential administration has a great deal of urgency in order to do this during their administration.
But the one nice thing, and it's important to note this, is while there's always disagreements amongst, you know, Republicans and Democrats on a number of different things, one area of agreement is the need for non-intrusive inspection on our borders. So both sides of Congress are very much in favor of this. So it's not necessarily a political issue, which is great, but there is a great deal of urgency in order to deploy it. So therefore, we believe we've already been seeing a lot of RFIs, and we believe we're gonna be seeing significant, you know, purchases taking place from the One Big Beautiful Bill.
But we also believe that's gonna be happening on the Golden Dome as well, based upon all the activity that we've been seeing, and we think we're extremely well-positioned for that. So we believe as we, you know, start to enter our fiscal 2027, which is just a few months away, being a June 30th year, we're gonna have, you know, tremendous opportunities winding down this fiscal year-
Mm
...or our second half of the year, and then as we start out into our new fiscal year for tremendous bookings.
So, when we kind of map that narrative on your booking activity, we saw a little bit of a dip recently, and you can kind of expand on that.
Yeah.
But that was, I think, primarily because of the government shutdown. You know-
Yeah
... government reopens, activity kind of returns.
Yeah.
On top of that, you see some big themes that you're attached to. So you would say that you would probably end the fiscal year at very elevated booking levels. I don't wanna-
Yeah
... steal your thunder, but maybe you can kind of elaborate on that.
Yeah, I mean, and that's certainly our hope. Yeah, our December quarter bookings were a little lighter than we've seen in the past, and that is a result of the government shutdown that occurred in October and November. So-
Okay
... it was mostly principally related to the United States. So we believe our second half bookings here for fiscal 2026 have the opportunity to be quite substantial, but we don't think it ends there. We think as we move into fiscal 2027, there's gonna be substantial continued orders, both on an international basis, more from the One Big Beautiful Bill, more from the Golden Dome. So we feel our opportunity pipeline and our opportunity funnel is quite substantial, and we're very, very excited about where we'll be.
Yeah. You're, you're in a special place. Before we move away from Golden Dome, I just wanted to understand the margin characteristics of that business, because it's not a huge business for you yet. If we saw kind of some sort of explosive revenue growth over the next few years-
Yeah
... are we worried about a margin headwind? Sometimes defense, proper defense businesses kind of come in at lower margins, and I'm just kind of curious what you're willing to share there.
Yeah, so a little bit premature, as we don't have the wins just yet, but based on what we see and what we believe, we believe we're so uniquely positioned in this, that we don't anticipate a margin headwind. I'm not sure whether it'll be necessarily margin accretive, but we think it'll be pretty much at the margin levels that our Security division historically operates, or possibly higher. So it could potentially be a little bit margin accretive for us. So we're excited about these programs.
Yeah. And, you would be... I guess it sounds like you would be a component supplier into some sort of solution.
That's correct.
Okay.
It may be two different avenues. It may be some, you know, direct, you know, to the U.S. government, and may be some through some primes.
Through a prime. Okay, got it. That makes a tremendous amount of sense. I think that's a good segue into talking about the M&A strategy in general.
Yeah.
Obviously, this was a huge win, right? Particularly-
Yeah
... if you're able to get Golden Dome awards on the back of it. But broadly speaking, how have you thought about M&A? How did this business kind of, you know, pop up on your radar?
Yeah.
Is there more M&A to come?
Yeah, so first off, we think we have tremendous organic growth opportunities ahead of us, but we would love to turbocharge those organic growth opportunities with the right M&A.
Sure.
It's very important to say the right M&A. We don't feel that we're not compelled to do any type of acquisition. M&A is in our DNA. We've been doing acquisitions, you know, over the past couple of decades. Generally speaking, smaller acquisitions, bolt-on acquisitions, that might fill a technology need, that might fill a channel need. We buy them at what we believe to be fair, good prices. We get a lot of synergies. We extract synergies right away, and on almost all the deals we've done have been accretive, almost immediately out of the gate and have done well for us.
Sometimes we've done a little bit more substantial ones, where we bought one of our competitors called AS&E, a publicly traded company in Boston, and that's been another grand slam for us, where we took their great products and technologies, combined it with our organization, and now has led us to have the number one position on the cargo and vehicle inspection space. As we look forward, I think we'll do, you know, potentially more of the same.
Mm.
You know, we'd like to be a consolidator in the industry. Both with, you know, from a technology perspective, but we also believe we can expand out doing stuff that may not be straight down the middle of the fairway, but is very close, much like the RF business that we did about 18 months ago. That's been we took their tremendous technology, but they were a smaller company, a little bit capital-constrained, didn't have the same sales reach and government-type contacts that we had. And we took their great products, we put it into we combined it with our sales channel and some of the operational expertise, and we've seen tremendous growth right out of the gate, tremendous bookings right out of the gate, and the opportunities to do things like Golden Dome.
We believe we'll do more M&A, you know, along those, you know, type of lines, but only the right deals.
Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense, and, I should have asked it before the M&A question-
Sure.
But it sounds like you're gonna have, you know, if everything that you're describing plays out, quite a lot of free cash flow to allocate. And it doesn't necessarily mean it has to go to M&A, but maybe you could talk about free cash flow, free cash flow inflection, and what the priorities for that free cash flow may be.
Sure. So we really believe we are at an inflection point, as you say, on free cash flow. As we go throughout calendar 2026 and into 2027, we think we're gonna be generating very substantial free cash flow, and that's gonna come from, of course, the strong profits, but also a release of some working capital. Our accounts receivable and DSO has been a little bit elevated from these contracts that we had, that we talked about in Mexico. And Mexico's been a great customer for us. We've been dealing with Mexico for a couple of decades, and Mexico has always paid us everything they owe us, sometimes just not exactly on time.
As these programs have been getting to the wind-down stage on the product side, though we're gonna have a nice service revenue tail for the next 10 years, it's now the time that the cash is gonna be coming in. So we expect our DSOs and our accounts receivables to normalize, you know, sort of throughout this calendar year, which is gonna be a source of tremendous, tremendous free cash flow for us. And we'd like to put that, you know, free cash flow to good use. Historically, our capital allocation strategy has included M&A, stock buyback, and any residual cash, you know, paying down debt, and those three haven't necessarily been mutually exclusive.
Yeah. It sounds like you have plenty of cash for, you know, quite a lot there. So, that's fantastic. We might have a handful of minutes left. I want... We spent so much time on security, which was fully appropriate, but I wanna talk a little bit about Opto and healthcare. Maybe just first kicking it off very general, Opto, just give us an overview of the business and what the outlook there is.
Yeah, we couldn't be more excited about our Opto business. It's, it's one that sometimes goes under the radar, 'cause it's easy to understand our security products, maybe easier to understand healthcare products, but harder to understand a sensor or a detector or some other electronic components. But our Opto team has done a wonderful job growing the business. I think in the first couple of quarters, we grew 12% revenues each quarter. We have a very diverse base of customers. Once we get engineered into a customer program, we tend to be there through their product life cycle. Sometimes that's a couple of years, sometimes it's a couple of decades, which has been fantastic for us.
So, again, we sell into, you know, defense companies and aerospace and medical and technology, industrial, automotive, just a great customer base. And hats off to our sales team. What we've been doing there is we've been mining more business out of existing customers. So, for instance, some of the primes or the industrial companies that might be at this conference, we might be working with them on particular programs, but they're vast. We've now been getting more programs out of some of these customers, as well as gaining brand-new customers. So the Opto division has done great. In addition, it's seen some growth just by virtue of the strong growth that we've had in our overall security business.
So as our security business grows, it helps on the Opto side, too, who's a primary, you know, provider to our security business.
Yeah. And, you know, international versus domestic dynamics in Opto, maybe you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah. So first, kind of just talking about our global footprint, then I'll talk on the commercial side.
Mm.
So on the Opto side, yes, we manufacture here in the United States and Canada and Mexico, but we also have a lot of low-cost manufacturing in places like, like India, Indonesia, Malaysia. So as a result, when we're talking to our customers, you know, if they want low-volume production, we can do it right here in the United States, but if they want some improvements in, in price and the like, we can move it over to, over to Indonesia or Malaysia, or we can move it more locally to, to Mexico, and we can share in some of those savings. So it's been a strategy that has worked really well.
We don't have a location in China, and that's turned out to be fortuitous for us because many companies have been trying to move away from China, and we've been a little bit of a beneficiary of that-
Yeah
... gaining some customers who might want to near-shore it in Mexico, or maybe they want to keep it in the Far East, where we might be in Indonesia, or Malaysia. So it's been very helpful for us. In terms of where our overall customer base is, it really is very, very global. In Opto, we're probably about half United States and half international in terms of where our customers are.
Got it. No, that's a helpful context. Just reflecting on everything we've talked about in security and Opto, and I will-
Yeah
... ask one question at the end on healthcare.
Yeah.
But I wanted to slip one in on-
Yeah
... supply chain.
Yes.
Because you've talked about how you have global manufacturing footprints. You know, some of what you're doing on the product side can be very technical as well. Maybe you could just talk about managing the supply chain globally.
Yeah, we have a very sophisticated and complex supply chain. Our team's doing an outstanding job. Fortunately, we haven't had any major supply chain issues. Being vertically integrated has helped as well. Like many companies, we're not immune to tariffs, but tariffs have not been a material item for us, and hopefully that will continue. But we really do have an outstanding supply chain team who's made it, I don't wanna call it a non-issue, because nothing's ever a non-issue, but it has not been significant for us.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, you know, healthcare, maybe you could just give us-
Yeah
... a sense of what's happening in that business and what the outlook there is.
Yeah, so we're extremely excited about our healthcare business. A small business for us. It's less than, you know, 10% of our revenues and a smaller percentage of our profits, but we have meaningful change going on right now. We brought on a, a new president of the business. This month marks the kind of the one-year anniversary of that new president. Over the last six months, he's changed out a high percentage of the leadership team and has brought in really A-level talent, you know, throughout the organization. And, and whether it's supply chain, whether it's production, whether it's quality or regulatory or commercial, many, many new faces, and we're really looking at things from a, from a whole new perspective.
We are investing very significantly in R&D to bring out some new platforms, particularly in patient monitoring, and that's now beginning to get closer to when that will get rolled out. So as we move into some future years, we're really excited about what healthcare can bring for us. The healthcare business has the highest contribution margins of any of our divisions, so every incremental dollar that we sell in healthcare, I'll call it a little bit more valuable than what we would sell in security or in optoelectronics, 'cause you bring a higher percentage right down to the bottom line. So as we get that top-line momentum going in healthcare, it can really meaningfully contribute to the bottom line of healthcare. Now, again, it's a small part of our overall portfolio, but we're encouraged by what we're seeing.
Yeah. Can I, can I slip one more in on balance sheet? We talked about free cash flow, but just remind us, what are the balance sheet metrics that you manage to leverage, et cetera?
Yeah. So our balance sheet is in outstanding shape. Very, very clean balance sheet. Our net leverage is, you know, very modest. We've been a company who has historically had net leverage being very modest. Not to say we wouldn't lever up for an acquisition if we saw a path to rapidly de-levering. So for instance, when we bought AS&E, that publicly traded company in Boston a few years back, you know, we levered up to, I think it was 3.75, and then we de-levered very, very rapidly from there. And, you know, we've been below 2, you know, most of the time. So very, very strong balance sheet. And I think we'll continue to manage it that way. For the right opportunity, we would, you know, lever up again, with a rapid path to de-levering.
That's fantastic. Alan, we've got, you know, maybe a minute left. I just wanna give you the floor to make any kind of concluding statements, points you really want to leave with investors.
Well, thank you. First off, you know, the questions you've asked have been fantastic, right on point. Maybe you should have a new career in facilitating. You're fantastic. But we're really excited from an OSI Systems perspective. You know, we think, you know, the outlook, you know, with some of the domestic opportunities are really exciting for us. We lapped the final tough comparison on Mexico this quarter, so as we move into our fourth quarter, and more importantly, as we move into fiscal 2027 and beyond, with the opportunities for substantial recurring revenues at much higher margin, you know, it's just great opportunities for top-line growth, coupled with operating margin expansion, substantial free cash flow generation, and significant value creation. So, we think we're at an exciting time here at OSI Systems.
Fantastic. Thank you for joining us, and thank you everybody for plugging in and listening to OSI Systems.
Thank you.