Welcome everyone to the third day of the Growth Stock Conference. I'm Brian Drab, the industrial technology analyst at William Blair, and I have covered Protolabs since it became public, 2012. You know, I met Brad Cleveland, the late CEO of Protolabs in 2011, and when I first was introduced to Protolabs, I was extremely excited about this company. You know, classically disruptive company took an injection molding process that you know took the typical competitor two months or three months to go through, and Protolabs was making these parts that took them two or three months to do in a day.
And, you know, the margin that any other competitor could make on this, on these types of jobs was basically, you know, it was a negative margin, and Protolabs turned it into a 60% gross margin business. So, like, really got my attention early on, and the company's evolved a lot since then. They have many other processes, CNC machining, 3D printing, and, you know, Rob will tell you about everything else that's going on at Protolabs. But one thing I just want to point out is that, you know, we had Xometry here yesterday, and for those of you that know Xometry or were in that presentation, it's a marketplace.
Protolabs has a very similar marketplace, creating a lot of value for, the buyers and the sellers, the manufacturing partners, by matching them up, you know, through this marketplace. So a really interesting evolution of Protolabs and, you know, we have today with us CEO Rob Bodor and, VP and Corporate Controller, Jason Frankman. Thank you both for being here. Rob, I'll let you elaborate on all the exciting things that are happening at Protolabs. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. Appreciate it, Brian. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Thank you all for being here. I'm excited to talk to you today about Protolabs and what we're doing to transform manufacturing. So we serve the most innovative companies in the world, and we partner with them to help them bring change and positive change to the world, right? And we do that by serving as their trusted contract manufacturer. We make key components for their most important products, and through that, help them, you know, bring positive change. And I'm excited to share with you some of the examples of those kinds of products later in this presentation. So, as I said, we are a contract manufacturer. We make custom components, bespoke custom components for our customers in metals and in plastics, and we get to serve our customer throughout their entire product pipeline, right?
Through the entire product lifetime of their products. So starting with early-stage prototyping, as our name would suggest, but then also into high volume production, and onto end-of-life MRO and replacement parts as well, right? So we can be a true deep partner with them. And some of that has evolved, right? As Brian shared with you a little bit of our history, we weren't. We didn't always do that. We were founded really with prototyping in mind, and we were the fastest... We're still today the fastest manufacturer in the world. We can make parts in a day. Even after 2.5 decades, nobody can compete with us there. But we've expanded our capabilities now into production and end of life, which is providing some really great growth opportunities for our business.
Also, as Brian pointed out, we are truly digital, right? We are a digital native. We started the company 25 years ago, founded by a software developer. We really infused digital and software technologies into the traditional manufacturing process in ways that no one else has. And now we've coupled that with a network that is also digitally enabled. So we have a single e-commerce interface that the customer sees, and then we fulfill either through our digital factories or through the digitized and digitally enabled network, depending on what the customer's needs are, so that we can serve them again across the entire life cycle of their products. We work across a broad range of industries. Our five largest are medical device, industrial products, aerospace, automotive, and consumer electronics, and we're a growth company.
Last year, we celebrated our record growth of over $500 million, and we're highly profitable. In fact, we're the most profitable company in our space. We're a global business. We're headquartered in Minneapolis, but we operate and go to market in Europe and the U.S., and we have facilities throughout the U.S., our digital factories, as well as digital factories in Europe. We've got manufacturing partners around the globe, throughout North America, Europe, and Asia as well. Okay, this illustrates our digital platform. Customers engage with us through B2B e-commerce. We serve thousands upon thousands of custom quotes a day through this platform for our customers. Many of them get their quotes instantly. Certainly, everybody gets them same day.
Once they place their orders, we then fulfill them either through the network or the factory, depending on what makes sense for that customer and what their needs are for that opportunity, and then we ship them directly to our customers, right? We serve tens of thousands of customers through this platform every year. Last year, we served 53,000 customers, large and small, including 85% of the Fortune 500 companies in those 5 target industries that I shared with you. Okay. We operate in a very attractive $100 billion market, which is a subset, a portion of the $multi-trillion-dollar contract manufacturing market globally, right? This is a market that is undergoing digital transformation, and I'll speak a little bit more about that momentarily.
But, it makes us incredibly well-suited to partner with our customers in this market because we are digital natives. Everything we do, transact, is digital, and, this is really what we're hearing from our customers that they're looking for now, right? The supply chain leadership within our customers need their contract manufacturers to be digital because they're driving to make their supply chains digital, and that requires that their suppliers be able to engage with them digitally, right? We have a tremendous advantage in that. We've been doing that for over two decades. And they're also looking for a one-stop-shop partner who can, who can serve their needs across the broad range and across the life cycle of their products. Because as you move from prototyping to production to end of life, every transition that takes you to a different supplier introduces risk, it introduces delay.
And so by being a one-stop shop, we can really bring great value to our customers. So this transformation, I think, positions us incredibly well. We're really excited about the growth opportunities that we have as a result of it, and I'll just remind you that we are a very financially strong business. We have a great balance sheet, and we carry no debt. So I'll talk a little bit more about one of the key drivers to the market as we see it, and that's really about the transformation and digitalization of manufacturing. So, manufacturing is undergoing a massive transformation with digital, possibly the biggest transformation for manufacturing in many of our lifetimes. Just like other sectors before it, whether it be retail or finance or real estate or what have you, manufacturing is now undergoing e-commerce and digital transformation.
Gartner estimates that by the end of next year, 86% of supply chains will be digital at some level, right? And as I said, those supply chain leaders who are within our customers that we talk to all the time, their biggest challenge is they're driven to digitize their supply chain. There are things they can do on their side, but they need their partners, their suppliers, to have digital interfaces in order to meet that need, right? And that's someplace where we're just incredibly well-positioned, right? We're also hearing from them that the most comprehensive offer wins, right? They wanna work with a single-source supplier. They don't wanna have to be chasing down many, many suppliers, especially on a single product, right, and across the life of that product. And so we've really reshaped our business to be able to serve that very effectively.
This shows you a screen capture from our e-commerce, right? We have this kind of custom e-commerce interface for all of our different manufacturing services. This allows the customer to engage and see detail about their design. And when they place their order, and again, we show those thousands and thousands of times a day to our customers. When they place their order, then we fulfill that order through either our digital factory or our digital network. And sometimes for products, we'll be using both the factory and the network to fulfill, depending on the nature of the order and depending on where in the life cycle of that product the customer is. So our digital factories are highly, highly digitized. They're highly automated, perhaps the most automated factories in the world, especially for custom, bespoke contract manufacturing.
This enables us to be the fastest manufacturer in the world. We can make parts in as little as a day with very high margins, as Brian pointed out, and a high degree of automation. In contrast, or to complement that, our digital networks have been designed to be very complementary. So we've selected manufacturing partners that expand our capabilities so that we can do more for our customers. We can make more things, and that are cost-effective at high volume. So it allows us to, again, follow them through their needs as those needs change through the life of that product, right? So we can serve them for prototyping and then transition into production, and then when they have end of life and there's volatility, we often will bring that back to the factory.
Our digital factories are excellent at high mix, low volume, while our network complements that to help serve production. And while the factories have very high gross margin, the network has essentially no invested capital. So together, they make for a really strong financial foundation for our growth. Here's a shot of one of our digital factories. Again, great for quick turn and prototype and anywhere where there's supply disruption. We've been winning at that for over two decades. Here's a photo of one of our injection molding facilities. This facility is in Minnesota.
Just to illustrate truly how digitized our factories are, our Plymouth plant in Minnesota, which is an injection molding facility, was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a digital lighthouse, one of only about 10 in all of North America. Here's an image of our CNC machining facilities. That's also in Minneapolis. This facility produces over 40,000 custom machine parts a month, and it does so without a single machinist on staff. That's because of the level of automation, the software investments, and the digitalization that we've put into that facility that's enabled us to reduce our need for skilled labor in a lot of roles. Our digital network, again, very complementary to what we offer through the factory. This network expands our capabilities in terms of what we can make.
It offers very cost-effective pricing with flexible lead times. So we can be a winning price at all volumes. So together, between the factory and the network, with, again, a single e-commerce interface to serve the customer, we're really able to expand the capabilities from what we used to be able to do. Not just to be successful at prototyping, as, of course, we've been the leader for a long time, but now also being able to serve them in production and in end-of-life applications. This also significantly expands our TAM and allows us to play in a much bigger market, so tremendous growth opportunities as a result of this. This is our global executive leadership team, and great, experienced leaders.
On average, across this team, each individual has over 20 years experience in leadership in industries like technology, software, logistics, and supply chain, and advanced manufacturing. I wanna particularly highlight these five individuals who are newer members of the team over the last several years. We've brought on additional leadership and really upskilled our leadership in order to bring, you know, great talent to people leadership, to technology, to finance. We also added two new roles: a strategic growth officer and a managing director of the Protolabs Network. We've been evolving the business, and we've also evolved the leadership team in order to make sure we can execute against our strategy. We've built a very deep and strong moat around our business.
One of the great things about being profitable is that you can reinvest those profits into R&D, into new capabilities, and further your differentiation. And while we're a digital native, and we've been digital from the start, we haven't stopped there. We have continually invested in new automation and new capabilities to drive productivity. In the back office, on the factory floor, we are a great adopter of AI technologies. We use that in a lot of different areas, in pricing, in customer-facing kinds of applications, in R&D applications, and in factory applications. And we have a great leadership already in terms of speed and a really unique business, so we're continuing to invest in IP.
We have one of the strongest IP portfolios in our market as well, and really see this as a strong area of differentiation that we're gonna continue to drive. All right, now let me tell you more about our customers. So as I said before, we serve the most innovative companies in the world. These are our five kinda target and our largest industries that we serve. Again, we serve 85% of the Fortune 500 companies in these industries, and we served over 53,000 additional companies, large and small, last year through our platform.
Historically, we have primarily served those companies in prototyping, so early in their product life journeys, and we've got a very strong, highly recurring set of customers who are used to relying on us for their prototyping and who've been asking us to bring them more opportunities, more ways they can work with us so that they can use us across those product lifecycle. And we've done that, right? So I'm really excited about the growth potential that that's gonna bring for us and also some of the great work that we do with our customers. So I'll give you a few examples of what we do with customers. So the first is gonna be a medical device example.
Here, we partnered with Parker Hannifin to help them bring a robotic exoskeleton to market that's used by patients who have some paralysis to be able to walk, right? So really impactful. This was a project where we partnered with them early on, so we helped them with the design and the prototyping, and then as they needed higher volumes, we took that into production, and we were able to source their production volumes. We did that across a range of our different manufacturing processes. In fact, we used 3 different manufacturing processes to produce those components that you see there that were part of that system. So great, tremendous impact.
You know, we do a lot of work on life-saving medical devices of all kinds, and, and it's just really rewarding to see us, you know, be able to have this kind of impact on the world and partner with our customers in this way, and also bring them not just from ideation and prototyping, but into production.
Hey, Rob, the inefficiency of seeing seven open seats and four people standing is killing me.
Yeah, please.
You guys, you guys could spread out a little bit. I hate to see people, like, standing. Sorry, Rob.
Not at all. Welcome to all of you.
Thanks. Thank you. All right, Rob.
Okay. All right. Thanks for joining us. So the next example I'll share is in the electric vehicle space. Here, we partnered with an American EV automotive manufacturer to build key components in support of the electrical system for this vehicle. These were molded components. They were actually quite large and complex, and they had high requirements around different material processes and capabilities. And so we partnered with them early on, again, to do the prototyping and help with their design. We then prototyped those components in the factory, and then as they were going to high volume, it made more sense and was more cost-effective for them, for us to fulfill those through the network.
And so we smoothly transitioned that to the network, and, we were able to serve them prototyping through production, you know, in this new high-tech car age that we are in. So pretty cool stuff. And then, the third example is obviously in aerospace. It was for NASA, where we partnered with them to help a part of the moon mission. You can see that part there. This was a part that holds equipment that measures volatile gases on the surface of the moon. And this part, you can see kind of its complexity. It was generatively designed with input from Protolabs. They designed it, we manufactured the components in under a day, and within 48 hours from concept, these completed parts were in their hands, right?
So I just wanna highlight how incredibly fast that is, right? No one else in the world could go from concept to parts in hand across the country in two days, right? We do this routinely. And, you know, it's again, very, very meaningful for me to be able to, you know, help move kind of lunar exploration forward. You know, I'm a nerd, and if you would've told me at twelve that I get to do this kind of work, I would've lost my mind. All right. So we've been undergoing a transformation, right, over the last several years. Now, this has been very customer driven, right? Driven by the voice of customer, and, I'm very encouraged by the reaction that we've gotten, right? Customers have clearly been excited about this.
We've seen adoption, and I really do think that this sets us up for great growth potential into the future. So just to kind of summarize and really clarify that transformation for you, right, where we used to be focused on prototyping, today, we can really be a deeper partner with our customers, right? Whether they have needs for simple parts or complex, whether they're looking for quantity one or quantity 1 million, whether they're looking for prototypes or production, whether they have a need for speed, right, or they can be more planful, Protolabs is there. We can be their partner in ways that we couldn't be before and in ways that uniquely no one else can be.
Because those investments that you make to be great at prototyping, great at quantity one, great at low volume, high mix, don't work when you need high volume, reliable, demand, right? And those companies and most manufacturers fall in that high volume space. They can't effectively do low volume. They lose money on low volume. That was our niche for so long. So the combination of the two under one shared e-commerce experience is unique to the world, right? And it's bringing us tremendous value. So, as I said, we're a growth company. We have a strong track record of growth. Since our IPO in 2012, we've grown at an average of 13% a year. We celebrated record growth last year at $504 million, and we expect continued growth this year.
So to summarize kind of our financial profile, we're the most profitable business in our industry. We generate great growth margins, 17% Adjusted EBITDA margins. We're a cash-generating machine. Last year, we generated 15% of revenue in cash from operations. We have a very strong balance sheet. We carry no debt. Protolabs pioneered digital manufacturing industry in 2020, 25 years ago, in 1999, for those of you doing the math. And, you know, and we're the most profitable today. We're uniquely positioned to be able to capture the opportunities that digital transformation is taking hold, in our industry, and, we're very excited for the future. I hope you'll join us on this journey. Thanks.
Thanks very much, Rob. Thanks very much. Test, test. Thanks, Rob.
Thank you.
I know everyone in the room at least can hear me. I'm not sure what the answer is, but so, oh, here we go. We have 6.5 minutes of Q&A.
Great.
And so I thought maybe you could just start by talking about the current operating environment. It's been challenging. I mean, you and I traveled recently, and-
Yeah
... and one of the common talking points at the time, I think, was, like, you know, 17 months out of 18 of ISM Index below 50. And, you know, if you, if you look at Protolabs in, you know, two buckets, there's the factory that has been a little bit slower, I think because of the, you know, this operating environment.
Right.
And then the network has been growing like crazy. So how do you, when you-
A good kind of crazy.
Yeah, strong double digits, I should say. When you look over the next couple of years, you know, what do you expect in a, if the environment's more favorable, what do you expect that the factory growth rate could be? And then I got a follow-up question.
Sure. Yeah, well, I think that, manufacturing certainly has been undergoing, right, some headwinds in terms of, the macro environment, and we've been seeing that. That said, I'm, you know, very pleased with the fact that, you know, we grew 5% last year in that environment, you know, in, in an environment where there was manufacturing contraction all of last year. As you, as you said, that's continued into this year, though, you know, we expect to continue to grow this year. And I think it's because of the combination of, the model that we have put in place, which I think allows us to succeed in many macros, right? In a range of different macro environments where we're not so highly dependent on that.
Part of that is because, as we've seen historically, in the factory, that's really about prototyping and innovation. So what we've seen is that in strong economies, our digital factory grows at multiples, right? 3x-5 x GDP, because people are innovating, they're investing in new products, they're in a hurry to get those products launched while the market is strong, and, you know, we're the best prototyper in the world, and so that's really driven growth historically. However, when economies are slower, then that acts as a headwind to the prototyping business. On the flip side, when economies are slower, customers are willing to wait longer, they're more price sensitive, and, and so forth, and our network really rocks in that environment, right? Because that's really consistent with what. So last year, our network business grew 70%.
So I think the combination of the two allow us to serve the customer and meet their needs, not just in the product life cycle, but in the economy that they're facing, in ways that we couldn't do before. So, that's been great.
Yeah, great. Can you talk a little bit more about the network and maybe give a, like a case study of, you know, how the network helps you take a customer through the whole life cycle? You know, whereas before, in the past, maybe it was, we'll work with Protolabs for the prototyping product development, and you know, what capabilities do you have now in terms of, you know, quality analysis-
Sure
... and documentation, and, you know, these ancillary services that you can perform to really be a production partner, and because this is where the growth has been lately.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And maybe weave in, like, how the revenue per customer has been growing nicely as a result of this, too.
Yeah, that's right. Thank you. Yeah, our average revenue per customer grew 9% last year, and we attribute it to again, more adoption of production applications as we've brought this, you know, broader set of capabilities to the market. The network is incredibly beneficial and complementary in that way, because in the past, we would and we're so well-positioned because we're talking to customers at the early part of their journey, right at the start. They're thinking about launching a new product. They're in the design phase. Well, we're there, and we're prototyping that for them. In the past, because we didn't have production options for them to transition into, some of them would leave, right?
They would, they would take the learnings from the prototyping, and then they would go to a different manufacturer, a different supplier, to do the high volume. Now, that wasn't always the case. We've, we've been doing production at some level for a long time. But the places where we traditionally win in production, due to the factory capabilities, has been in low volume. So if you've got a large capital, you know, piece of large capital equipment that's $500,000, you're not gonna sell 2 million of those a year. Right, we could produce parts for that cost effectively. We were the lowest total cost of ownership. And if you had line down, if you had crisis, if you had anywhere where there was kind of high volatility demand, you needed somebody to jump in, well, then we would win.
But if you had stable, high volumes, we weren't priced right for that. But through the network, we are. And so now we can serve them through the prototyping. We can get them to market very fast and kind of bridge them to that high volume. Then we can transition to a network partner for the stable, high-volume portion, and then if they've got end-of-life needs, replacement part needs, which is just inherently hard to predict and low volume, and our manufacturing partners, frankly, no manufacturer wants that business, except Protolabs, we're great at that business, so you know, then we can transition it back. So the combination of the two is just so complementary and so synergistic that it really unlocks some new capabilities.
Traditionally, every time the customer would have to transition from one supplier to the next through that life cycle, there was risk, right? There was risk of delay, there was risk of that new supplier not meeting their needs, quality being an issue, and we take that risk away, and we do that because those manufacturing partners are already part of our network. We vetted them, right? We physically audited them. We have learned what they're great at over time, and when we send them the work that they've proven to be successful at, right? We then do the final quality inspection and quality control. And so, you know, our brand is tied to, to their ability to deliver, so we ensure that that they're, they're delivering well, and, and that's been really successful.
And to some extent, there's a knowledge transfer, right, from the... Because you did all the production or all the prototyping-
Exactly
... and product development work.
Exactly.
And then you're moving to production, and from the customer's perspective, it's a lower risk because they're working with the same entity.
That's exactly right.
Yeah. I think that, the screen just turned red. Maybe one on the way out the door, because I don't have a choice. I have to end it here, so thank you, Rob and Jason, for being here, and thank you all for attending.
We can pick it up.
It's great. We're moving to what room for the breakout session?
B.
What is it?
Burnham B.
Burnham, Burnham B for the Q&A.
Which is upstairs.
We'll be there in 10 minutes. I'll show you where it is.
Okay.
It's upstairs, yeah. All right. Thank you all for attending.
Thank you.