Good morning, and thank you all for joining us. I have the pleasure of introducing to you Powell Industries, trading under the ticker POWL. Here representing the company today is Executive Vice President and CFO, Michael Metcalf.
Thanks, William. Good morning. Thanks for attending this morning, and this is our second time presenting at this conference. We had a great experience last year, so we're back this year. It's been an exciting year for Powell. A little bit of history about the company. We're 75+ years young. We grew up on the Gulf Coast in Houston, Texas, and have expanded over the decades internationally, Canada and the United Kingdom. Through the third quarter, we're roughly $750 million of revenue. We are really focused because of where we grew up, our history, we're really focused on core industrial work. That's right in our wheelhouse. It's, you know.
The legacy oil and gas, the new technologies in oil and gas, hydrogen, carbon capture, as well as utilities, light rail, traction, Chicago Transit, Long Island Rail Road, wherever we're distributing high amounts of electricity, that's where Powell plays very well. And we've got roughly 2,500 to 3,000 employees around the globe. So what is it that we do? We make electrical distribution equipment from the breaker to the switchgear and incorporate it into a power control room. So to give you an analogy, if you go out to your garage or in your basement and open your power control box with all the circuit breakers, we do that, but on an exponentially larger scale.
What you're seeing on the right-hand side here is a large offshore module that's essentially your circuit board in your house, but this is running an offshore platform. So on the left-hand side, you've got the circuit breaker itself. We have two circuit breakers. We have GE. We bought GE's medium voltage circuit breaker back in 2010 , and Powell has its own medium voltage circuit breaker. That's those circuit breakers, those medium voltage circuit breakers go into what's called switchgear. That's the middle picture. So it's metal cabinetry that will house the circuit breakers, both low voltage and medium voltage switchgear, and then ultimately it gets integrated into a power control room or a module on the right-hand side.
As I said, we play in the zero to 38 kV range, so low voltage, medium voltage. We don't do any high voltage. But when it leaves the high voltage line, it gets stepped down to medium voltage. That's where we play. We are very good in engineer-to-order applications. So where there's a high degree of electrical complexity and configuration, that's where Powell plays very well. We have a very loyal following within our customer base, particularly in the industrial base, petrochemical, oil and gas, hydrogen, things of that nature. With respect to where the power's coming from, whether it's coming from a solar field, a wind farm, a coal plant, LNG turbines, it really doesn't matter.
But when that power comes off those power generation drivers, it gets stepped down to medium voltage. That's where Powell comes into play. So where it gets stepped down, switching and connecting and distributing load, zero to 38 kV, like I said, we will apply our know-how and our configuration to industrial applications. In the basement of this building, there's probably medium voltage switchgear that's stepping down to low voltage and powering this building. Like I said, we do transit applications in New York City, out on the West Coast, Chicago. CTA is a good customer of ours. So we really have a wide breadth of our applications.
The other application that I'll get into is actually the asset management, and this is a growing field for us. We see a lot of potential growth in this field. It's the preventive maintenance and predictive analytics of our equipment while it sits in the field, whether it's getting dirty, whether there's electrical discharges that shouldn't be happening. We have the hardware to determine where that's happening and give the maintenance operators a little bit of advance notice to make sure they maintain the equipment properly. Now, across the globe, there are two electrical standards. You have the ANSI standards, North American standards. That's where Powell grew up. It's arguably a more robust electrical standard.
You'll find it in wherever there is a U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia, some of the Latin American countries, and the rest of the world is on IEC, the international standard. Our U.K. facility is specifically addresses the IEC applications and demand, whereas the rest of our market, or rest of our divisions address the ANSI standards. So if you were to go to a an industrial facility, a utility, things of that nature, you will see a what we call a power control room. Other, our competitors might call it an e-house, things of that, nomenclature such as that.
But you could have, in a large industrial facility, you could have anywhere from 20 to 30 or more of these power control rooms sprinkled across a several hundred acre industrial facility, distributing the power across that industrial complex. Inside that building, there are probably upwards to 100 lineups of switchgear, i.e., going back to the analogy I made on the circuit board in your house, there's different circuits for your refrigerator, for your stove, for your furnace. It's the same idea, but these are exponentially larger, and each circuit is driving a different pump, motor, et cetera. We have a facility right off of Galveston Bay.
It's right on the water 'cause these modules and these power control rooms are sometimes so large they can't be shipped by rail or road by truck, so they have to be put on a barge. And what you're seeing on the right-hand side is a two-story module that will be shipped to an offshore facility via barge. If you went into one of these facilities, this is what you would see. You'd see rows and rows of switchgear with relays and controls. Inside the cabinets, as I explained earlier, are the actual circuit breakers. So these pieces of equipment are distributing power to different elements of the facility of the utility generation station.
Highly, highly configured, each piece of equipment is configured to the particular application that it's being, it's driving. So you couldn't, for example, pick one of these things up and put it in a, in another location or another industrial facility because it's been specifically engineered for this particular and configured for this particular application. A growing impetus for Powell is within our automation group, and we have, as I mentioned earlier, we have the hardware, we have the sensors that we put into each lineup of switchgear that can measure abnormalities in electrical distribution, humidity, dust, et cetera, and they feed to these boxes sitting on the front of each lineup of switchgear. We have that, we sell that, very good. It's a small business today. It's one we wanna grow.
But what we don't have is the ability to take that data that's sitting on that box on the outside of that lineup of switchgear. And keep in mind, there's hundreds, and when you have thirty buildings, there could be thousands. We don't have the ability to take that data and put it in the cloud, and we don't have the ones and zeros to be able to put the data on a maintenance operator's iPad to say, "Hey, you better go look at building number fourteen, lineup switchgear number seventy-two, because there are some electrical abnormalities, and go look at it before something bad happens." What we have is the hardware today, and we aspire to get to that next step from an automation standpoint. This is where the industry is going. All right, our end markets.
You know, we grew up in the industrial end markets. Our products are very robust. They've been designed to be very, very safe because of the applications that they're driving, and we've built a great reputation in the industry, in the core industrial end markets, in LNG, in petrochemical, in hydrogen, carbon capture, and your traditional refining and legacy oil and gas markets, but where we're also growing is within the utility market, metals and mining, pulp and paper, and you know, more recently, over the last couple of years, within data centers, and I'll talk about that in a few minutes.
So as we exited COVID, you know, we have always been tailored to catering to the core industrial applications 'cause that's where our products are best fit. And, you know, over the last couple of years, we've seen a really big resurgence in LNG, but we're also seeing. Coupled with that, we're seeing a lot of activity within the hydrogen space, some of these new energy transition fuels that are requiring our products, and our products fit very well into some of these applications. carbon capture, biodiesel, renewable diesel, all areas where we're beginning to see, in addition to the legacy oil and gas, beginning to see some of these nascent technologies become more mainstream.
Now, if you understand Powell and what Powell does, I get the question quite often, you know, "Who are your competitors?" And really, for what we do and what we offer, we really don't have one peer that I can point to that's a competitor. You know, this Venn diagram is the best way to illustrate where it is we compete and who we partner with. These guys on the left-hand side of the Venn diagram, the ABBs, Eaton, Schneider, Siemens, the big guys, we compete with them in every campaign that we try to win. So if it's an LNG facility, carbon capture, utility application, we're competing with these guys. On the other hand, we are also using a lot of their equipment. So we don't make low-voltage breakers, for example.
We have a great partnership with Eaton. Eaton, we at some campaigns, we'll partner with Siemens, for example, and go in together. So it's a strange relationship. We are competing against them on a routine basis. ABB, we're always competing against. We don't partner with them too well. We don't play well with them, but the other three, we partner pretty well with. But when we compete for a campaign, our value prop is we've got the entire integrated solution. These guys, they have the kit, they have the medium- and low-voltage switchgear and breakers.
They will still have to buy out HVAC and battery systems, things like that nature, but they will have to go to the guys on the right-hand side, the building manufacturers, and go find somebody to build one of these buildings or multiple buildings to put their gear in, and then they will send Eaton or Siemens techs to integrate it. Now, bear in mind what I said about the magnitude of these things. These buildings are huge. We have a competitive advantage being on the water. We have land-based building applications. So these, they're a little more constrained with respect from a quality perspective and a logistics perspective, who they pick, and it creates a little bit of a competitive advantage for us.
But that's kinda how the channel today works. Now, as we sit here today, and we actually rolled our strategic priorities out a couple of years ago, prior to the COVID pandemic, and Brett, our CEO, grew up in this business, understanding where Powell has grown up, really focused on core industrial oil and gas. Brett recognized the importance of driving countercyclical growth in the business, i.e., utilities, predominantly, and then growing some of the more nascent applications in automation and services. So, you know, to touch on the automation, I mentioned earlier, it's that there is a drive within the industry. You look at what Rockwell's doing, what Hubbell's doing, what Eaton's doing, what Schneider has done with some of their inorganic activity. This is an area, it's coming.
We see it. We are actively trying to grow organically what we have and look at inorganic options for what we don't have, so this is an area where we're pretty excited about where the industry is going, and we think we have a role to play there. From a services perspective, this is. I mean, the sky's the limit here. I mentioned we bought GE's medium-voltage breaker. I mean, these things are, they're scattered across the globe. The installed base is enormous. Powell's installed base for our medium-voltage breaker is quite robust as well. Adding that value add, that configured more complex solution to our service customer, is what we aspire to do. We don't aspire to be...
You know, a lot of the PE companies have bought Shermco and CE Power, guys in a truck, and they go, you know, they're more very standard wrench-turning type of service applications. Our value prop is, look, you have a complex solution that you need electrical configuration that maybe a Bechtel won't. It's too small for Bechtel, and maybe it's too large for your local electrical contractor. Powell, Powell can help you in that end. And then, you know, our R&D group really, we got a new R&D VP leader here over the last two years ago, he joined. Over the last couple of years, he has, with his team, he's grown his team.
You'll see our R&D spend is, it's up probably as a percent of revenue, it's probably up probably 30,40 basis points, just year-over-year. We aspire to really, really double down on that, on that initiative, and, and, there's a lot of, a lot of, opportunity in the products that we have, in enhancing them, as well as building new products for applications that we traditionally haven't really, haven't really gone after, specifically in the utility industry. You know, there's both inorganic and organic, little channels that we're, we're looking at to, to grow the business. When we think about capital allocation, we talk about Brett and I talk about this all the time, and, we talk about it with the board every, every quarter.
Growth is really at the core of what we aspire to do. Like I just said, organically and inorganically. A lot of the working capital that we spend will come mid-project. So when you look at our cash balance of $375 million or so, probably $150 million-$175 million of that is cash that we've collected upon winning the order, that we will spend on working capital as the project goes through the cycle. You know, these projects are a big project, a big LNG project, is probably 2.5-3 years in length.
So the tail of our backlog, as we sit here today, and if we're booking new orders today, those new orders are certainly being delivered in 2026 and maybe early 2027. So, working capital is a big component that we always have to keep at the forefront of our mind. Getting into the financials. Look, we've had a great run post-COVID, winning a lot of core industrial work. We won an outsized share of LNG work immediately following, you know, the world opening up post-COVID, and these are very long lead projects. Like I just said, minimum two years, some go three years. So through the third quarter, we've generated just under $750 million of revenue. That is certainly a record for us.
I think the last time we were north of 700 was when the offshore boom was going in 2012, 2013. That was, I think in total, that year was about $700 million. Post that time, we have built out capacity in Canada as well as in the U.S., that was really deployed for the industrial oil and gas growth. Oil and gas, as you know, it, the cycle went down. We were left with all this capacity, particularly in Canada. But fast-forward to today, it's taken a few years, several years to really materialize. But the capacity that we built, the business built, long before I was with the business, this capacity is now being utilized to its full degree.
They're fully utilized in Canada now, and the facilities in Houston are also fully utilized. And we're able to grow that top line as the demand of the industry continues to increase. You'll see the margins. We're very pleased with our margins. The third quarter discrete was about 28.4. There was some, you know, and a projects business is very choppy, and I noted this on the call 'cause I got asked about it. If you look at the trailing 12 months or the nine months, year to date through fiscal 2024, probably a better barometer for this business. It's a project business. It's pretty choppy.
But we have made great strides from 2022 and prior to where we are today from a profitability standpoint, generating 17% on EBITDA. And over the last couple of years, just terrific operating cash flow across the business. I talked a lot about the top line. This page goes to kind of what's driving that, and I'll talk to the lower left-hand quadrant, the book-to-bill. This is a metric we watch. We watch it like a hawk. We wanna keep the backlog north of $1 billion. In order to do that, you need to have a book-to-bill that is 1.0+ .
You can see in Q2 and Q3 last year, those two sequential quarters, as we exited the third quarter, that's what propelled us into the billion-dollar backlog club. Those were each $500 million orders, core industrial orders, one petrochem order in 2Q 2023 and one LNG, and then two LNG orders in 3Q. Prior to that, in 4Q 2022, we had a large LNG order, and in 1Q 2023, we had a large LNG order. So you know, fast forward to our latest reporting period, the third quarter, no mega orders, no LNG work. We did book a nice petrochem job up in Canada. Not a mega order, nothing to the magnitude of what we're seeing back in 2Q 2023.
But the positive thing is, if you look broad-based, the utility, the utility activity, very strong, very strong hydrogen, carbon capture, legacy oil and gas, just really strong across all of our, all of our core end markets, except for, the traction, the light rail traction, which is a conscious decision. It's not as profitable, and we have, we have the, optionality to kind of step away from some of these, poor terms, not as, not as good margin jobs. So, really, we, we ended 3Q, and we're very, very positive about our, our end markets and, and, activity for electrical equipment across those end markets. So as we, as we exit 3Q, we're sitting just under $790 million of, of, orders across the business.
And feel comfortable that we can hold our backlog through the end of the year here. Now, I talked a little bit about the ANSI product and the international IEC products. And you can clearly see from the map, because we grew up in the ANSI market, the North American Standard Market, most of our infrastructure is in North America, Canada, and the U.S. We have a location that is in Bradford, U.K., that for any IEC applications, whether it's in Southeast Asia or in the U.K., they will manufacture switchgear and breakers for those locations. And we also have some sales offices and commercial offices in the Middle East and Asia.
Now, if you break our revenue down by sector, if you will, most of it, and a growing portion of it, is our core industrial, and that's really due to the bookings that we secured in mid 2023. They're beginning to make their way now through the backlog and convert into revenue. So you see the large uptick in the petrochem number from 13 to 18. That's really attributable to that job that I noted in 2Q of 2023, converting to revenue. But the oil and gas sector, again, this is, that's our catchall umbrella. This has the legacy oil and gas, as well as the new energy transition fuels, hydrogen, carbon capture, LNG. That's maintained about 40% across this span of time.
What is notable is the utility sector, you know, the utility is on $533 million, and prior to that, it was about the same, $525 million in 2021. It's maintained about a quarter of our business, and as the water level has risen, now we're at $750 million. It's a little bit less, but it's still hovering in that 20%-25% realm. So it's a growing sector for us, and we continue to really focus there. The final point I'd make on this page is on data centers.
In 2022, we broke out a new sector called Commercial and Other Industrial, and that's because the data center work that we were doing for a specific product that we build was growing quite rapidly, and it eclipsed the 10% threshold that the SEC requires us to report on sectors, so if there was a 2021 pie chart on here, that commercial and other industrial sector would be 6% on about $525 million, and now it's grown to 14% on $737 million, and that growth, that eight or nine point growth, is really attributable to data center volume.
Just from an income statement perspective, I think the takeaway on this page is, we've really doubled down on some of the things to grow margin, whether it's price, commodity hedging, proposal validity out in the market. We've seen some of these things that the business has done really monetize into EBITDA performance, as well as gross profit. And the other item here is our SG&A. We take particular care to make sure we don't grow our sales group and other SG&A core fixed costs in the business, so that when volume goes up, we're able to lever that base pretty well. That falls right through.
From a balance sheet, this is probably the thing we're most proud of, from a, the ability to really manage the business with no debt. We haven't had debt in a few years. We paid off an industrial revenue bond that we had up in Chicago in September 2021, and we're debt-free, and cash continues to grow, and we do think about how what the capital framework, the use of that cash is, as I noted earlier, but just given the profitability of the company over the last two or three years, really has given us the ability to lever up on SG&A and our operating facilities and really drive a really good return on equity and, you know, our ROIC.
This is probably the number one component that we pride ourselves on, and we are a conservatively run company. Our CEO, Brett, and myself, you know, kinda cut from the same cloth. If we're gonna do something inorganically or organically, it's gonna be done very thoughtfully, and you know, it goes back to the Powell roots. Tom Powell, who really, you know, he set this whole thing in motion. He's got kind of the same framework. This is something we pride ourselves on. With that, I will take any questions.
Sure. Can you talk a little bit about what's driving a lot of your gross margin improvements? 'Cause if you look over, like, the past two years, you've gained kinda 10 points obviously, that helped really drive your operating p rojects you're working on, the type of customers?
Yeah, you know, I'll step back. Keep in mind, our projects are long cycle projects, and they're firm fixed price. So when we were in COVID and order activity was very low, we were taking projects that were lower margin projects than we're seeing today. Actually, you know, fast-forward, you have hyperinflationary things on the market, whether it's engineered components that we have to buy, whether it's labor. There was a quarter in late 2021, where we generated about 12% gross profit, and we doubled down with the business, and we said, "Look, we got to keep our pricing models. We have to update them really monthly," because things were changing so rapidly. You can't fix what's in backlog, but what we can fix is, going forward, what we're going to the market with.
Honestly, the ABBs, the Schneiders, the Siemens, everybody's in the same boat for these large projects, so margins were suppressed. They had, they had other things to cover it. They had residential business that was covering it, but we did not. We were kind of exposed, and we were getting those questions from investors. "Why is Eaton doing so well, and you guys, your margins are terrible?" We don't do anything in residential. We're all industrial, you know, commercial type of applications. Fast-forward, you know, we shorten the bid validity. Powell used to put a bid on the street because we're so customer-centric. It's good for a year. Take your time, you know? We don't do that anymore. It's 30 days, and we'll hit the refresh button after thirty days.
We're hedging our core materials, you know, copper and the like. It's very, very volatile. That's helped us over the last few years. And just from a supply chain and pricing standpoint, you know, the things that we buy, HVAC systems, battery systems, low-voltage motor control. What we're giving our customers, we're getting from our vendors and giving our customers with margin, and it's good for 30 days. So we're protecting ourselves from a supply chain perspective as well. So it's a culmination of those three things that you're seeing margins grow by 10 points from 2022 to 2024.
And what we, what we've got in backlog, you know, the stuff that we booked a year ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago, is now making its way through the, through the system. And all those improvements that we've instituted over the last three years is now, it's monetizing through, through the EBITDA and gross profit.
One follow-up question on that. Do you think that, like, that going forward, like, the learnings from COVID on, you know, the thirty-day billing and the hedging and the copper and supply chain stuff, that you're going to be able to keep these gross margins on a going forward basis? Obviously, there's competitive dynamics, but...
Yeah, I mean, I think what would change it is if something in the macro market changed the supply picture. Right now, for electrical distribution equipment, the market is really tight. I mean, pre-COVID, our average lead time was 12-18 months, and customers were complaining about that. Today, even with supply chains back to normal, it's 24-36 months, and customers are okay with that because there's not a lot of capacity on the market for this type of equipment. Sure.
What are your CapExes? On its face, it seems quite low.
It, yeah.
On one slide, it's less than D&A, so I'm just-
Yeah. We typically run our base, you know, maintenance and just growth initiatives, $5-$6 million. We just announced an $11 million expansion at one of our newer facilities in Houston. So, you know, I would expect that'll be kind of staggered between this year and next year. Break it, you know, probably $5 or $6 million in each year. You know, if there's a step up in our ability to do more, and we need more land and/or buildings, you'll see that. We just spent $5.5 million on nine acres of land at an adjacent facility at our core location. So you'll see these incremental spikes in CapEx, probably due to...
They'll more immediately will be due to expanding capacity, you know, in a thoughtful way.
So as you're generating more and more cash, no debt-
Sure.
Capital needs.
That's right.
What do you do with the cash?
Well, like I, like I said, you'll, I hope you see R&D continue to grow, because that has, you know, downstream positive implications. And we've got automation is first and foremost on our radar screen from an inorganic perspective. This is an area we really feel is an area we need to be in to grow Powell. And we just brought on a new services vice president from one of the multinationals. I think he'll, at some point, when he gets his feet on the ground, he'll, you know, he may see some opportunities inorganically to grow the business there, as well as organically, new thought leaders in the business. So, you know, that's...
We want to use this cash not only to execute what we've got flawlessly, but if you were to take, like, an average power control room that we build, and it's complex, and it's large, it might be $7-$10 million. Let's just pick a number, $10 million, and it's got 100 lineups of switchgear in it. What we would buy from an Eaton or a Schneider are the low-voltage breakers, 'cause we don't make them. We make the medium voltage, and we make the low-voltage switchgear. We don't make the breaker that goes into the switchgear. So we would buy a low-voltage breaker from a Siemens or probably Eaton, not Schneider, maybe Schneider.
and we would also buy from an Eaton or a Siemens, probably the low-voltage motor control, 'cause we don't make that either. The brains of distributing the electric to where it needs to go. Everything else is, you know. We're buying HVAC systems from an HVAC provider, battery systems, and then everything else we make. We make all the switchgear, we make the building, we make the breakers. So it's, when you just take out Eaton/Schneider, Siemens, it's a very small %, single digits.
I'm just curious, you mentioned non-organic growth. I mean, what's your view on consolidation space? Do you see a lot of M&A opportunities out there? Do you think a lot of your competitors are looking for opportunities?
Not so much. I think if we're in the driver's seat, and we're looking at M&A, there's not a lot of attractive options out there for building capacity to build buildings, 'cause you need a lot of real estate. Building buildings is great, and you can do more, but the calories that that carry don't carry as many calories as if we were to expand into growing our services franchise or our automation franchise, or we could do more of what's in that building, like switchgear and breaker work. That's where the calories lie from a profitability standpoint, as opposed to just the building. We're very thoughtful on where it is we wanna grow, and what it is we wanna grow within the business.
As far as being on the other side of the table, I, you know, we don't really worry about that too much. Yes?
So you mentioned-
This is the last question? Okay.
You mentioned the industry and yourselves, included, are moving towards automation.
Yes.
So I was wondering if you could just, you know, give us some example, or some more color on how you're doing that, and what you think it should be?
How we're focusing on automation?
Right.
Yeah. So today, we have the - I call it the hardware. We have the instruments inside our gear that measure the abnormalities. And there is a huge value prop for, you know, operators, whether it's a Southern Company, a utility, or it's an Exxon petrochemical refinery, to put all that data that's going on inside their electrical circuits onto a main - one maintenance operator's iPad, and we don't have that today. And the entire industry is very... They're really far behind in that whole realm. So in that race, and they're all in the race. Schneider's in the race, Siemens' in the race, they are all in the race.
Some are gonna be successful, and some will be slower, but we realize it's essential in order to grow this space, and that's where we would need some, you know, we'd need to focus some of our capital there. Yeah. Okay, thank you.