All right, everybody, I'd like to introduce our next top-tier track presentation, hosted by Maj Soueidan from GeoInvesting.com. He is doing a Q&A with Ed Richardson from Richardson Electronics. And with that, gentlemen, take it away.
You left out Wendy Diddell. She's Chief Operating Officer, and she's really the boss. So I, I take all the credit, and she does all the work. So Richardson Electronics has been around 77 years, and I've been there about, 61 of those, so it's pretty hard to tell you in 10 minutes what a company does, over 77 years. Let's see here. So it's just a forward-looking statement. We're located about 50 miles west of Chicago. We bought a, factory from Dukane Electronics in 1981, and it was 120 acres of property, and today we've added to the building. We're about 250,000 sq ft on 120 acres of property. And we manufacture, this slide says 50%, but more than 65% of what we sell. So we have a strong balance sheet.
We have about $20 million in cash, although we have 24 foreign subsidiaries all over the world. So that cash is spread out between those subsidiaries. We have the normal certifications. We're about 425 employees spread around the world. We have over 20,000 customers, and we specialize in what we call engineered solutions, and that's trying to help customers develop products for anything they need, from a module to a complete system. We have four business units today, and as you can see, it should be up here. There's the Power and Microwave Technology Group, which was $98 million in sales last year, and that has our core tube business. We started in the tube business with the acquisition of National Electronics in 1981, and the majority of companies wanted out of the tube business.
Over the years, we've acquired about 25 divisions of RCA, GE, Westinghouse, Philips, you name it. We own about 50% of the total market for tubes worldwide. I was told the tube business wouldn't exist 25 years ago in 5 years, and we did $85 million in the tube business this year. Green energy is really the area where we think is our future. We've developed a lot of products, one of them being ultracapacitors, to do replace lead-acid batteries and wind turbines, and that's become a very successful business. We're also making ultracapacitors and other batteries that go into electric locomotives, which Wendy will tell you about. We think in the next 5 years. Last year, we had a very good year. We did $262 million, and we made about $22 million.
A high percentage of our business is with the semiconductor industry being Lam Research and Applied Materials, Thales, and companies of that nature. Last year, that business was over $40 million. But with the CHIPS Ac t that our wonderful government put in place, those companies were precluded from selling into China. So our business this year is down to about $11 million in that area. We had a sort of a renewal call with all the vendors from Lam, actually yesterday, and they're telling us in 2025 that their business is going to be even higher than it's been in the years past with AI and all the new applications. So if that's true, we can look for more than $40 million in business next year in the semiconductor wafer fab business.
Healthcare is our newest business unit, and the only one that's not making money for us, and I'm sure Wendy will tell you about that, reports to her. Canvys makes very specialized displays, and they're one-off displays that are made for companies like Siemens. They use our display as a control device and linear accelerators for cancer treatment. We sell to Medtronic, and they use our displays for robotic surgery, where the surgeon actually uses the display to do surgery. We sell to Carestream, Stryker, all primarily medical OEMs across the world.
That business has been a very good business for us as well. So with that, I'll let Wendy tell you about some of our new growth strategy. We're looking for the company five years out to be 50% green energy, which she'll tell you about. As I mentioned, we have no debt, about $20 million in cash, so we think we'll go cash flow positive at the end of 2025. And five years out, you'll see that we have a substantial amount of cash.
Thanks. Okay. So as Ed mentioned, I'm just gonna focus quickly on our growth strategies and cover some of our financial aspects of the business. So Ed mentioned we have the core tube business, and a lot of our growth strategies have come out of the core business. So it leads us, we're working with customers on tubes, they change technology, and we're there to assist them in that. So Ed mentioned our core growth initiative right now is in green energy solutions. What's important about this slide that I'm gonna talk about next is that. And a lot of our growth opportunities, particularly in green energy solutions, comes from relationships we've made over the past years with our technology partners. So they're companies like LS Materials, Amogreentech, Navitas, a lot of the names that you've heard of.
We start out by distributing components for those companies, and then as we meet and work with our customers, they identify applications that are problem areas for them. Those come back into our engineering team, and collectively, we design, with our customers' input, a solution that fulfills that particular requirement. Our technology partners are very critical. When we first start selling those products as a distribution agreement, they're typically lower margin. As we move through that engineered solutions middle circle into the end customer, our margins in the green energy solutions business, our growth initiatives, move from the low 20s into the mid- to upper 30s and even higher than that. That's why these relationships are very important to us. We identify, again, green energy as our key growth initiative. You'll see several others listed there.
I'm gonna focus, because we only have a couple minutes, on the green energy market. So as I mentioned, we have developed several new products to date for the green energy solutions market. The first one that Ed mentioned is the ULTRA3000, which is a patented product that replaces lead-acid batteries in wind turbines, and the ULTRA3000 is specifically for GE wind turbines. So to date, we have almost 3,000 wind turbines that have been retrofit with the ULTRA3000, and there's still 30,000 more to go. So huge growth opportunity there. It's been a nice way of getting us in that wind turbine business. The wind turbine business itself is very, as we describe it, as a bridge club.
Once you're in one, then you got your phone ringing, and they wanna know, "Can you do something for us?" So where we're going in that is we are launching what's called the ULTRA PEM or Pitch Energy Module. That is gonna be the, it's similar functionality to the ULTRA3000, but it'll be for other OEMs. That is exciting for us. That product, the first one, will launch in production later in this calendar year for Suzlon, and they're an Indian turbine manufacturer. They have 9,000 turbines in India. We're in test with them, and that, again, will be rolling out. You might have seen the press release. That'll be rolling out in the fall.
And then behind that, we have several other large, wind farm operators that are bringing us into other wind turbines like SSB and Nordex and Alstom, and the list goes on and on. That is what's going to take us from being primarily distribution and sales in the U.S. to Europe. So we're quite excited about that opportunity. One of the things that works well for us are a lot of the government acts that have recently, put more money out there, and so they are helping fund a lot of, green energy, whether it be in wind, solar. EV rail is a market that we really haven't talked about much yet, but EV rail, we actually sell replacement modules, again, for lead-acid batteries that are used in diesel, locomotives.
So our two big partners there are Progress Rail and Wabtec, and, we have products being sold to each one of them now, and we are rolling out, a new program for starter modules, which will be used to either supplement their existing battery system or again, replace the lead-acid batteries. This allows them to take advantage of some of these fundings that are out there, but it also allows them to meet some of the regulations that they have to meet, depending on what state they're in. There are some that are as early as 2030, where a certain percentage of their EV or their locomotives have to be green.
I would strongly recommend that if any of you are interested in the stock, you either get with us and let us schedule a call with you, because there's too much to cover in this short amount of time, or come see us tomorrow, because there's programs, again, that I'm not even touching on that are quite beneficial to the future. So switching over real quick to the financial highlights. Ed mentioned FY 2023 was just a rock star year for us. Everything was firing on all cylinders. FY 2024, we are. I should mention, our fiscal year is June 1 to May 31. So we are just finishing our fiscal year 2024, and it's been a disappointment to us.
I mean, with the issues that Ed mentioned in the semiconductor wafer fab market, as well as rising interest rates, it pushed some of the programs with our customers out. So we are very much at their discretion. A lot of our green energy solutions programs are project-based, and so it's really incumbent upon the customers as to when they're ready to move forward with those. We're starting to see an improvement. We saw it in our Q3, which we finished at the end of February. We're now finishing up Q4, and we anticipate again to have stronger sales and profitability in our fourth quarter as compared to our third quarter. In terms of backlog, you will see in FY 2022 was our high point.
That was coming out of COVID, where a lot of our customers stocked a lot of extra inventory to avoid any supply chain issues. And then it came down, and now you can see it's leveled off. As the semiconductor wafer fab market recovers and as more of our green energy solutions products are launched, we'll see that number start to increase up again, but very stable. Balance sheet, Ed already mentioned, we have an extremely strong balance sheet. We have no debt. We do have cash on the balance sheet. A lot of that cash again resides outside of the United States, and we will continue to work on improving our cash flow. We are not cash flow positive today. Our goal is to be cash flow positive by Q4 of FY 2025.
So this time next year, we think we'll exit the fiscal year being cash flow positive. So overall, in summary, we are more excited about this business than ever. Again, FY 2024 has been a disappointment for us, and we fully concede that point, but the opportunities are significant. The number of products that we're launching, the number of customers that we currently have on the books, has grown, and it continues to expand in the green energy space. With the return of the semiconductor wafer fab market, that business is very profitable for us. It's also very good for generating cash for the company. Our goal is that the semiconductor wafer fab market should be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. So that is what we'd like to see.
I'd mentioned that the green energy solutions business, our plan shows that will be almost 50% of our revenue in the next five years, with, again, that will help us manage the cyclicality that we see in the semiconductor wafer fab market. Our favorite line is the last one you see on screen: It's not a matter of if, but when. The opportunities are there, and again, our enthusiasm really couldn't be higher than where it is today. So Maj, with that, I'll turn it back over to you. All right.
Hi, Maj.
Hi, good afternoon.
How are you?
Good, good. Thank you. Fine, thanks. It's been a while since Chicago. I did a site visit with RELL a few years ago, and was really impressed.
That's something you should all do if you have a chance. We're about 50 miles west of O'Hare Field, and we do a lot of sort of teach-ins, where we invite all the investors to come in, and we spend a day leading them through the plant. It's a lot easier to show you what we do than to tell you about it. And do a lunch and just actually lets you see in the plant all these products that we're making and what the future is.
I got lucky. I think I got there before that, you know, little upturn in your stock. So that was... I do own some shares in RELL, by the way. I was looking for a comeback here, hopefully within the next few quarters here. So I do wanna talk about, you know, your, I guess, semiconductor side of the business. Now, you know, I was reading a little briefing note, Briefing.com note by Lam Research. The LRCX commented, "The demand for DRAM and NAND," I don't—I wouldn't know what that, "NAND has remained strong as demand for high-bandwidth memory grows and investment in China continues. Lam also noted that it has witnessed an uptick in fab utilization surrounding NAND.
As a result, management was confident in bumping up the 2024 wafer spending estimate to the low- to mid-$90 billion range versus previous estimate of mid- to high $80s." So that's what you're saying is obviously echoed over here. Let me go on to say, generative AI has been a clear underlying factor. Lam said that AI transformative use cases are merely at the beginning stages of realization, leading to potentially substantial semiconductor manufacturing capacity increased down the line, providing massive benefit to Lam.
AI is currently benefiting Lam, DRAM and Foundry Logic businesses. Management anticipates growth for its NAND business over a longer timeframe, particularly given how much faster and powerful efficient NAND-based storage is compared to traditional disk storage. So the reason I'm bringing it up is not, not to talk about AI. I mean, everyone talks about AI right now. But is it possible that, that AI could extend these kind of cycles and make them less cyclical because of what's going on there?
No, absolutely. We just had, as I mentioned, a vendor call. Lam has a monthly vendor call, where they ask all their vendors to be online and then answer questions, and they tell you about the future. And they're telling us that their business is going to be stronger in 2025 than it was last year when we did $40 million. And we make products like RF matches and microwave devices, probably coils, 100 different items that were almost proprietary. We developed those for Novellus back in the early 2000s, and Novellus was bought by Lam, and that put us into that business.
And we don't want to tell Lam, but our margins are higher in that business than any other, except some of the green energy business today. So that's a really important business, and if that comes back and this year we're down to what? $11-$12 million? $15 million this year versus $40 million last year. But if it's higher than the $40 million next year, you can just imagine what our bottom line will be, along with all the green energy. So it's an important business to us.
Now, you said, I think in your Q4 conference call, you believe Q3 will be your lowest semiconductor revenue quarter. Our customers continue to tell us they anticipate growth in the back half of the calendar year, leading to a record sales in calendar year 2025. Were you talking record year for that portion of the business or in general, in for RELL in general?
Yeah, for RELL in general.
Okay.
The green energy, we think will, you know, outgrow the semiconductor wafer fab business, in the future, for sure.
Great.
Clarify.
Sure.
We're talking about record growth for Lam in FY 2025, potentially FY 2026.
Right. Okay. Okay.
That's what you have.
Well, I was taking a. I believe this was your Q4 call. Oh, that was reference to Lam Research? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay, good. Thanks. Thanks for the clarification. So if we, let's go to green energy now again. So you have your wind turbine business, that's where the bulk of the revenue has been coming from, correct?
That and electric locomotives.
Yeah. And you talked about. Okay, so is the electric locomotive where you want to be or?
It'll be a far larger business than the wind turbine business, right?
When you talked about the products, set up, Wendy, and the ultracapacitors, you talked about a new model here, the Ultra... What is it?
Yeah. Yeah.
ULTRA, ULTRA PEM 3000?
The ULTRA PEM.
The ULTRA PEM.
Pitch Energy Module.
Okay, cool. And then you have another one here that I saw, the Ultra, let's see.
ULTRA UPS 3000.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that, I thought, was interesting.
Okay.
You didn't really bring it up, so maybe you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, so the ULTRA UPS 3000 is a ultracapacitor-based module that replaces lead-acid batteries, but in the generator that sits at the base of every turbine. So this one is a product that will be used by multiple OEMs, multiple operators and managers of wind turbines. So it's only one per turbine, where the ULTRA 3000 can be anywhere between 6 modules per turbine, if it's Suzlon, up to 18 modules, if it's a GE. And again, the ULTRA UPS is just one, but it's at a higher price point.
Okay. And would that be applicable to any wind turbine operator, basically?
Yeah. It'll have to be tweaked a little bit. That's the one thing we're learning, is it's got a base, you know, unit, and then based on grounding and some different mechanicals, we'll have to tweak it.
You said here, you expect to ship production orders for the, is it Suzlon program?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Starting in late October 2024. So that's,
Yeah.
Still on track?
That's still on track. Again, we issued a press release, yesterday-
Okay
announcing the relationship. We are in a beta test with Suzlon right now. It's going extremely well, and again, we would look to start shipping the production units in September.
Okay. So that's pretty significant events that you got going on, and then the product lineup for your, your capacitors, for sure.
Yeah.
Great, great. All right. So, you know, when we look at your margins now, so you're talking about revenues getting back, you know, kind of scaling up here. I mean, do you think margins go back to where they should be to when you were at your record numbers in 2023?
Yes, absolutely. With, as Ed has been talking about, with the growth and recovery in the semi market, that'll have a dramatic improvement on the margin. And the more of the green energy solution products that we get launched, those, again, are in the mid- to upper 30s at a minimum. So those two alone will take us back into kind of that low- to mid-30 range where you saw it in FY 2023.
Okay. And any questions, by the way here, just ask a question whenever you want at this point. So let's talk about the other businesses now, a little, a little bit. I mean, I really wanna, you know, get Canvys and your healthcare. Is there anything there to get excited about yet? I mean, are we still kind of still pushing that out a little bit?
I think you want me to talk about healthcare, don't you? All right. So healthcare is one of our business units that we've invested quite heavily in, and we're currently focused on a repaired tube program for Siemens. There are four tubes in that series, and it's coming along quite well. We've launched the first one of those in the series. There's three more to follow later in the summer. At this point, we can sell every tube we can make. We're still in the process of formalizing the repair process. Again, these are repaired, but we sell them with new tube warranties.
There are no replacements, third-party replacements in the third-party medical service market. So those customers are really anxious about getting this product in the field. So that's what we're most excited about in healthcare. Ed mentioned that it is our one business unit that isn't performing as well, and we believe this is what can get us over the hurdle, and if not, we'll explore what our alternatives are for that business.
You said maybe, maybe break even in Q4 is what you're looking for?
It's not likely because we don't have enough product to ship yet.
Right.
We're a little bit behind on the production side, but definitely trending in the right direction.
Okay, great, great. All right. So, I mean, like, one really concentrate more on your engineering kind of division type of emphasis here. I think it's a really important part of your business, right?
It's all focused around engineered solutions.
Yeah.
Probably the most exciting business right now is with the electric locomotives. You know, between GE, which is Wabtec, and Progress Rail, which is Caterpillar, there are 33,000 diesel locomotives in the United States, and the charter is to get all of those locomotives, either electric or on hydrogen, by 2030. In the meantime, every one of them uses a battery start, so it's like a starter in your car or truck, except they use 50 lead-acid batteries, and those lead-acid batteries fail in two years or less. We've designed an ultracapacitor module in one case, or a lithium iron phosphate module in the other, to replace those, and they're about $5,000 a piece, and we're just starting to deliver them. We have one beta site order that's going out with a follow-on order for 1,000.
But if you can talk about the potential to replace 33,000 lead-acid battery starts in diesel engines that exist today, you can see what the potential volume is in that business. And then, we're also making complete battery racks that go into electric locomotives that are being built by Progress Rail in Muncie, Indiana. And those battery racks are about 4 ft by 6 ft, and they have 160 battery modules, ultracapacitor modules in them, or lithium iron phosphate battery modules, and when we're finished with them, they weigh 11,000 lbs, and they're about $1 million a piece. And we're just delivering the first 3 of those to Progress Rail that go into Burlington Northern, Long Island Rail Road, Metra in Chicago, where they're just starting to use them in electric locomotives.
When you look at your current revenue breakout between locomotive and energy, and the green energy side, and wind turbines, what's the split there in terms of percentage?
Fifty-fifty.
Okay, great. Great. And with the pushback, well, the deceleration in growth temporarily, was it coming from both sides because the projects were getting delayed from both sides?
Probably more from Lam Research than anything else.
That was it, that was. Okay. Okay. Right. Yeah. All right. Good. Good. All right. I think, I think that's about it. Unless you have anything else you want to add, Ed?
No, thank you very much. If you're interested, we've written a book of 75 years history that's called Never Give Up, and we're happy to send anybody those books if you'd like to read it. It's sort of a fun read.
Excellent.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.