Welcome to the 45th Annual Raymond James Institutional Investor Conference. We thank you for being here. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the head of research at Raymond James. I am not an industrials analyst. I'm not a machinery analyst, and you should all you should all be thankful for that. We do have a new analyst joining us in April. His name is Tim Thein. You might have recognized him from another firm. And, he's on garden leave. So I'm pinch hitting, and it's my pleasure to introduce Oshkosh. We've got Mike Pack, CFO, who's going to present for about 15-20 minutes. We'll move to Q&A, and Pat Davidson, Senior VP of IR, here as well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mike.
Great. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm glad to see so many faces here, and appreciate everyone's interest in Oshkosh Corporation. So, Oshkosh Corporation, we view ourselves as an industrial technology company, driven by innovation and a strong purpose of serving everyday heroes in our community, whether it's firefighters, construction workers who work at great height on a daily basis, refuse collection professionals, or mail carriers, and now more recently, those individuals that take care of our airports with ground support. Our products, we're highly focused on building purpose-built vehicles. And as I said, innovation's truly the lifeblood of our company. Sorry, I'm going to close this. If I could hear him better than I could hear myself.
So innovation is our lifeblood, and we have electrification, autonomy, and intelligent products, key new product development initiatives going on in all of our three business segments. I'll talk a little bit about those as I get further into the presentation, as I cover our segments. And just to demonstrate the level of technology we have in the company, we have over 800 patents that are active today, and we have over 250 in electrification in the electrification space alone. If you look at our business, we're in a time of very strong market dynamics across all of our businesses. We've also been bolstering the company through programmatic M&A. We have a strong new product development pipeline, and a record $16.8 billion backlog in our company. So all of these things really have us converging on a path of accelerated growth.
If you look at where we finished, we had a very strong 2023, finishing at with our in the fourth quarter with our revenue up in the quarter by 13%. Our EPS was up by 57%, to $2.56. And that's all in the heels of a very strong year, where we delivered $9.98 of adjusted EPS, over $6 ahead of where we were in 2022. And that's just the beginning, because as we look at 2024, we see strong dynamics continuing into 2024. At our initial guidance for the year is over about $10.4 billion of revenue, growth of nearly 10% in our operating income and adjusted earnings per share expectation in the range of $10.25. So solid growth.
What I thought I'd do next is hit on the dynamics on each of our three segments, because each has some really exciting developments and been in some cases a bit unique to each other. So starting with Access. Access is our largest segment. The brand that's most familiar to folks is JLG. We make aerial work platforms for people working at great height, as well as telehandlers and a number of other products for working at height. If you look at Access, we're seeing very strong demand dynamics in that business, and it's really being fueled by a few key factors. First of all, there's aged fleets. Our customers are primarily rental companies, so they're focused on refreshing those fleet ages.
We see strong demand tailwinds driven by the industrialization or re-industrialization or onshoring that's taking place throughout the country. In fact, if you look at the level of industrial onshoring, we have three projects as a company alone. If you look at these industrial projects, there's a lot of JLG equipment at them, and we're certainly not alone. There's a large number of mega projects that are taking place throughout the country. And where this has really read through for us is giving us unprecedented visibility in our access equipment business. Historically, our access equipment business will operate with like a 6- to 9-month backlog. So the unique aspect right now is we just exited 2023, and we're essentially booked for 2024.
So we have 12-15-month backlogs that we're operating with, which is just a very different scenario, which allows us to plan, and it's certainly exciting. We're continuing to see growth opportunities in that business. We've talked a lot about the move into agricultural telehandlers as a growth opportunity. They've been using agricultural telehandlers in Europe for many decades, and now we're really seeing the opportunity to grow that in North America. We're also adding some capacity in our access business in Jefferson City, Tennessee, that will help out with that telehandler capacity over the long term. Switching to our vocational segment, we're really excited about our vocational segment. We're in a strong growth mode. There's really three key businesses that are the largest pieces of it.
Over a third of the business is fire trucks. Our fire truck business is, we're booking. About a third of the vocational segment is our fire truck business, namely our Pierce fire truck business. We're booking fire trucks out into 2027 now, so we're seeing very strong demand dynamics in that business. Other large business we have is in the refuse collection space with our McNeilus brand refuse collection vehicles. And more recently, we joined the airport support ground support equipment industry with our acquisition of JBT's AeroTech business, which is going to contribute about $700+ million of revenue at double-digit margins to our business in 2024. So, a lot of excitement taking place in vocational. All the businesses in vocational have significant electrification initiatives. We have our Volterra fully integrated electric refuse collection vehicles.
You've heard, you've seen, probably a bit of press about that. Republic Services, one of the largest waste collection providers in the United States, is buying 50 of those in 2024 alone. So they're already have a few of those prototypes out on the street. But we're very excited about the electrification and that great use case in refuse collection. We have electric fire trucks, and ARFF trucks as well. Those ARFF trucks are airport rescue firefighting vehicles. So, what we see with electrification in vocational is it's not going to be overnight. We don't expect to see 90% of fleets electrified by 2030. But what we see is this is a very long-term dynamic tailwind for this business. So, a lot of excitement there.
And again, the AeroTech acquisition, we've now had that business since August 1st, seeing great opportunities for synergy, not only on the cost side, from a materials perspective, but also from an engineering collaboration perspective. A lot of the same electrification and connected product focus areas that they've had and that we've had, we're able to join forces on those and not duplicate efforts. Switching to our defense segment. Our defense segment's a very dynamic time at this point. Historically, we've been in the tactical wheeled vehicle business. It comprised our $2+ billion of revenue in the business. We are going through a transition. So one of our larger programs, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program, domestic production will be winding up by the end of this year in 2024.
Winding down.
What did I say?
Winding up.
Thank you. Thanks, Pat. Winding down. So then, that will be transitioning out. We'll still be delivering a number of international units over time in that business. If you look at our other programs, we still have another number of other core programs in what we call our core defense program or business. We expect that core defense business to still be $1 billion+ of revenue at sort of high single-digit operating margins over time beyond the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program. At the same time as JLTV is winding down, there is a ramp-up path. That ramp-up is the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle for the Postal Service. So, it's a great program. We're going to be delivering up to 165,000 units to the Postal Service.
We're going to start at low quantities this year, so it's really not going to drive revenue and profitability this year. We're going to see a very steep ramp-up as we move into 2025. And as we exit 2025, we're going to be at full-rate production, delivering over 15,000 units a year, and well north of $1 billion of revenue. So the way to think about defense is you have $700-$800 million of JLTV revenue that will be sort of wrapping up at the end of this year, and then we have this well north of $1 billion revenue of Postal that will start ramping up at scale in 2025 and continue to grow into 2026.
The great thing is, you know, as we move into last-mile delivery, we see other opportunities in that space, and of course, we expect that the margin profile of last-mile deliveries will be stronger than our tactical wheel vehicles. Just a couple other items to hit on, before we move to Q&A. Thought I'd touch on capital allocation. We have a strong balance sheet, and we view ourselves as programmatic acquirers. This is on the heels of a period of time where the company had not been particularly acquisitive for more than a decade. We've done a number of acquisitions over the last few years. Most notably, this past year, we deployed about $1 billion of capital to the combination of AeroTech and Hinowa. I talked a bit about AeroTech already.
Hinowa is a nice specialty equipment business based out of Italy that's a part of our Access equipment business that's been a long-time partner with them. Pat has a slide up here that shows a bit of the history of some of the M&A activity that we've had taking place. I would say it's also important to note that we've continued to take a hard look at our portfolio, and those businesses that can't contribute strong double-digit margins over time, we have divested of those. Particularly, you look at businesses where they don't value technology to the same level as some of our other core markets. Those are areas that you might have seen us take some action. We'll continue to look at our portfolio of companies as we do over time.
Also from a balance sheet perspective, and we do expect to or from a capital allocation perspective, we have been continuing to grow our dividend. We've done that for the 10 straight years at a double-digit percentage, really to give indication that we expect to be a strong cash flow generator over time, that demonstrates our confidence in that. We do expect to deploy about 65%-75% of our capital to growth-oriented initiatives. So that would be your internal research and development and organic growth opportunities, as well as M&A. Importantly, though, we expect to continue to have a solid balance of shareholder returns to shareholders, with dividends and share repurchases comprising about 25%-35% of our capital that we'll allocate. And certainly, in years that were more acquisitive, like this past year, you'd expect less buyback activity.
But, you know, our targeted leverage ratio is 2x or less, and we're, we're well under our targeted leverage ratio, which means we, we certainly have, have capacity to still be buyers of our stock. I guess that final thought, we do expect to be a strong cash generator this year, that we're going to see a nice step up from last year. I will say that our CapEx with some of our organic growth initiatives has been a bit higher the last couple of years with our Postal Plant capacity expansion at our Jefferson City, Tennessee facility for telehandlers for JLG, as well as our new plant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which will be used to produce a combination of some fire trucks and related components, as well as our electric refuse collection vehicles.
So, expect to have another higher CapEx year at about $300 million this year, which is as well ahead of maintenance CapEx. We should see a step down in that as we get into 2025. So with that, very much appreciate the opportunity to share a bit about Oshkosh, and we can open it up to Q&A.
Thanks, Mike. And great job handling the presentation without slides for.
No problem.
For a few minutes. That was.
I had no idea what was going on, but,
Maybe just picking up on the portfolio changes. Hinowa, you talked about AeroTech. You divested your snow and rear-discharge concrete mixer businesses. When you think about the portfolio, going forward, are you at an optimized level? How do you think about the portfolio? Any major changes that you think you still need to make going forward?
Now, we like the mix of our businesses right now. Again, we're going to continue to always look at those businesses, but we do expect to be programmatic acquirers as we move forward in the future. We have an always-on M&A approach. So I would anticipate you'll continue to see bolt-on acquisitions. I would say our AeroTech acquisition at around $800 million was a bit higher in value than some of the others. Still, we still view it as a bolt-on, but probably a little bit bigger on the end of a scale. But we see opportunities in the airport ground support market. You know, we entered that with AeroTech. It's fairly fragmented outside the United States, so there could be some roll-up opportunity in that space.
Certainly, we have interest in increasing our lifecycle and aftermarket services opportunities, maybe some opportunities there as well over time. See us in the specialty equipment area at Access with our Hinowa acquisition. So, as we look at specialty equipment, we see it as an opportunity that may have a bit different cycle dynamics than pure construction in Access, that it can help as you go through construction cycles. So, I see a few areas you could certainly see we've done some acquisitions or investments in the technology space as well. So there could be some opportunities there as well. So we'll continue to look, but the goal is to make smart moves and continue to look at whether we're the best owner for some of our core businesses as well.
How, how should investors think about the cyclicality of the overall business and whether any of your segments kind of naturally counterbalance each other over a cycle?
Yeah. So I think ultimately, if you look at defense, we talked about sort of the core defense business being $1 billion plus, and then you add in Postal. We'll be repricing a number of the contracts there, so I would expect a meaningfully higher margin profile there. So in general, that'll be a good solid foundation for the business going forward. I think it, again, not particularly cyclical. If you switch to our vocational segment, vocational, not particularly cyclical. We're booking fire trucks out into 2027, so we see good solid stability there.
In Access, which is our business that tends to be a bit more cyclical, we've been highly focused on really optimizing that portfolio to ultimately be able to, and I would add into there as well our agricultural telehandlers, that we see there's an opportunity to continue to deliver stronger margins throughout the cycle there.
Hi. Can you talk about the competitive and market share dynamic right now in the work platforms business? If the market's growing strong, as you say. So are you? What, what does that mean for pricing, and are you growing faster than market?
Sure. Yeah. From a, we remain the market leader for Aerial Work Platforms, so we're continuing to see strong demand there. Certainly, we've had significant price increases to combat inflation, and we're delivering very strong margins there, expect to do so again this year. So that's indicative of strong pricing discipline. From a demand perspective, I think the one place that we probably have seen a bit of share decline is in the telehandler space, and that's frankly why we're adding some capacity. We're typically the first-call market leader for equipment, and frankly, if we had a bit more telehandler capacity, we'd be delivering more of them. So that's one of the reasons we're adding a bit of capacity. But strong overall dynamics.
Thanks. Hopefully, I can squeeze in two. The first, just building on the, the Access question. So you guys have a strong position in that business. But when I think of selling into kind of a rental market, that sounds kind of a tough business to me. So kind of can you talk about how you've established a strong position in what I kind of would view would be a tough, tough market dynamic?
So I would say that, you know, our rental company customers have been great customers. They have, you know, I think they're providing us, we have better access to, or better visibility. I think, you know, ultimately, we're delivering strong margins and seeing the growth. But one of the areas that, again, with that, certainly, it's less about the rental companies and more about market dynamics, that if you have slowing market conditions, that can create cyclicality.
So our focus for the businesses, as I'd mentioned earlier, that we can at when volumes are lower, if we're selling into more specialty equipment applications, selling more into repair maintenance applications, as well as now we're expanding our telehandlers for North America into telehandlers for agricultural and applications, and with that, different cycle than construction and really a different end customer. So to the extent that we continue to focus on these areas, I think the long and short of it is we see an opportunity to deliver double-digit margins throughout a cycle, even at the trough. I think that's a lot of the things we're doing is really to focus on that resiliency throughout the cycle.
A second, if I could. You talked about margin targets. Do you have when you're acquiring, do you have ROE, hurdles as well that you think about?
Yeah. We're typically, as we're looking at M&A, we're looking at ROICs that, over a 3- to 5-year horizon, that we're in the sort of mid- to high teens, as a baseline.
As Pat has taught us over the years, you're a relatively capital-intensive business, and you've had a recent period in which you've had to invest in new product development and so on and so forth. Can you talk about, you know, capital requirements going forward, aside from some of the capacity expansions that you're doing, you know, to increase telehandler capacity and so forth, and why you're actually going about increasing telehandler capacity, for example, where it might not be better to keep the market tight for tighter for longer?
Sure. First of all, just from a capital intensity, if you actually go back over the last decade, you know, at a time when our maintenance CapEx was probably $100 million or slightly less, we were typically only investing a bit north of $100 million for quite a while. I think the last three years has definitely been different in that. And it's really these capacity additions. So that's why you saw last year $325 million a year, nearly $300 million two years ago in 2022, and this year is going to be around $300. I would expect going forward that we should, and that's saying we're going to step down to maintenance CapEx, which is probably in that $130-$140 range now, but I do think that we'll see it step down meaningfully as we go to 2025.
In terms of the capacity expansion at Access, I think it's, you know, it's a good opportunity to clarify. So number one, we're the market leader, and we're not going to concede share to others. And frankly, we've not been able to meet our customers' needs, based on what they want from us. So I think that's one reason. Number two, the capacity we're adding is quite economical in the grand scheme of things. The reason being is we're really converting an old defense facility, or it's not an old. It's a former defense facility. It's actually a very nice facility, in Jefferson City, Tennessee. So largely depreciated. We're converting that over to telehandler production. And the actual investment we're having to do to get that capacity is fairly minimal. So it's not adding an extraordinary amount of fixed cost to the business going forward.
We also talked about ag telehandlers. Right now, as we've launched those ag telehandler models, we're selling them as fast as we can produce them. We need to produce more of them, and we'll see more demand there. So there's a few dynamics. I think the other important note is we did trim capacity during the pandemic. If you look at it on a global basis, we shuttered our Romania facility, which was just not in the optimal location, so that we lost capacity there. We also lost some capacity in Belgium, prior to the pandemic. So, if you look at it over history, net net, we're not necessarily going to end up being higher than where we've been historically.
I'm curious, with the loss of the JLTV contract, if that has changed the long-term strategic emphasis of defense? I know you have Postal lumped into defense, but it's obviously different than building tactical wheeled vehicles. How has that perhaps changed the long-term positioning of defense for you?
Yeah. I would say, in general, if you look at that core defense business that's left, it's going to be a smaller business but more resilient. So I think focusing on continuing to deliver those core products, which, you know, ultimately, we have the investments in place. We expect better margins, strong return on invested capital on it. I think we're strategically looking at some adjacencies within defense. You look at the Robotic Combat Vehicle. You look at our Stryker MCWS program. So there's some programs that start getting into the combat space where there tend to have better margins, where we can compete well. So I think ultimately, that's the focus. It's to run it well as a smaller business, deliver stronger margins, and compete in places that it makes sense.
And of course, with last-mile delivery, we see a huge opportunity there, not only with the Postal Service, but also with other customers over time. I think there's one right behind you.
How significant do you think the learning curve is on the Post Office contract, and not just the EV side, but on the ICE side as well?
From a learning curve perspective, I, I think ultimately, we've been delivering vehicles that, that go over the road for, for many decades. So we're familiar with the homologation process. A number of our engineers have also have automotive backgrounds, including our Chief Technology Officer has been, a number of, of large, automotive OEMs as well as other, equipment manufacturers. So, we feel very good about the, about where we're at on the program. We've been through, largely all the testing. We have prototypes that are out in the field, and, and we're ramping for we're ramping up production. You know, the facility is, again, so you know, what Don Bent, one of our, long-time, great, great employees who also set up our JLTV facility, set up that facility there as well. So we, we feel we feel as though we're, we're well positioned, and we'll hit the ground running.
I think that the other piece of it, too, is there's the way the program steps up, you're at pretty low-rate production, really to match our customers' needs in fielding the units, but then it ramps up fairly quickly in 2025. So we're not at full-rate production immediately. There's sort of an 18-month ramp-up period of time, too. So that's certainly always de-risked a ramp-up.
and Pierce, you talked about having trucks out to 2027.
Yep.
I heard competitors peers talk about, "Hey, pricing's up 35%-40% versus pre-COVID." How much visibility does that give you, you two margin expansion there?
Yeah. I would say that, if you look at vocational in general, historically, the fire business has been sort of a mid-teens business, leading into the pandemic, that, you know, there is strong pricing there. You see a nice step up with the benefit of pricing coming through this year. We were at just shy of 10% operating margin last year. We expect to be in the range of 11% this year. I would expect in 2025, consistent with what we talked about at the point of the AeroTech acquisition, that we'd be at 12+. And we see further growth opportunity from there. So we expect that the margins are going to continue to expand.
In the long term, we view that Vocational really will have our, you know, our best through-cycle margins of all of our businesses.
Mike, maybe just close with, when you talk to investors and analysts, what do you think are the least appreciated or least understood parts of the story that you want to convey?
Sure. Yeah. I think ultimately that the amount of technology that we're launching and the leadership that I think there's a reason why you see us as the number one share positions in a lot of our products. Our products that we sell and manufacture aren't commodities. That technology, that after-sales support, are critical. I think the great dynamics we have in Vocational, that being a long-term growth story with great secular tailwinds, you know, that the ramp-up of the Postal contract and just the transition of Defense is going to be a strong growth and margin story over the next few years, and Access is continuing to deliver. So, in summary, I think that, you know, that the business has a great future ahead of it.
Well, thank you very much. There's a breakout session downstairs. Appreciate it.
Sure. Thanks.