Good morning, everyone. We will be starting our next presentation here with Richardson Electronics. I have Ms. Wendy Diddell. All right, enjoy.
Good morning, everybody. It's a smaller group, so that takes a little bit of the pressure off, although somebody told us that the presentation he just went to, their stock went up 70% during the presentation. After this, I need everybody to go buy stock, push the price up so that we don't fall below that benchmark. We are Richardson Electronics. How many of you are familiar with the Richardson Electronics story or already own stock? Saw you on the elevator. Okay, good. Quite a few of you, because we are going to—we don't have a lot of time, so we are going to go through more highlights about the company. I'm Wendy Diddell. I am the Chief Operating Officer, and I am joined by Ed Richardson, who is the CEO and also the son of the founder of Richardson Electronics.
Richardson Electronics was founded in 1947 by Ed's father. You probably, if you haven't read the book, I strongly encourage you to do so. Started in 1947 in a little red barn in Wayne, Illinois, and selling surplus war tubes, which was the basis of Richardson Electronics, the electron device group or the tube business. Through a number of years and acquisitions, Ed took the company public in the early 1980s and then made a number of acquisitions. We've really morphed from a distributor of power grid tubes to a company that is focused on engineered solutions. That's a term a lot of people throw around.
For us, what it really highlights is that we take products from the point of distribution, add in value-added engineering, our own manufacturing, our salespeople, who the majority of them are degreed engineers, and we take those products, we identify customer solutions, and then we put them through to manufacturing. Today, more than 50% of what we sell is actually products that are products that we manufacture. If we do not manufacture them ourselves in one of our facilities, then they are manufactured by one of our partners, but exclusively for Richardson. If you are relatively new to the story and you think of Richardson as being a distribution company, kind of rethink that. Today, again, we are in LaFox, Illinois, which is about 45 minutes west of the O'Hare Airport, out in the Geneva, St. Charles area, if you are familiar with Illinois, beautiful area.
We invite everybody to come see us. We're very proud. The facility is what you see there. It's a beautiful campus. We have over 250,000 sq ft in this facility, and we're on about 100 acres of land. We have plenty of room to expand and grow if we need to. Right now, we are doing well within the 250,000 sq ft that we have. On a global basis, we have 24 legal entities, and we have people in over 60 countries. We transact in local currencies. We are pretty much real-time, 24/7. It's a very broad organization. A lot of our employees, again, are degreed engineers, and we are very, very focused now on some of these opportunities that the political environment is creating for us. I don't know if you've heard a lot of negativity. You'll hear a little bit from me.
I'm pretty conservative, but on the other hand, it really creates opportunities for us. First and foremost, again, if you know the story, you know we had four business units, and we made a public commitment to simplify our business. Back in January, we sold the majority of our problem child, and that was the healthcare business unit. We started that back in 2015. It didn't quite go the way we had anticipated. We sold the—when we say the majority of it, we sold what we always referred to as the IMES piece, which was the parts part of the business. We retained the CT tube manufacturing, and we now have an exclusive supply agreement with the buyer of the rest of the business. We did not retain any sales organization. We make really two separate lines of CT tubes.
One is the Canon replacement CT tubes, and the other is a repaired Siemens program. Those will now be rolled up in our PMT business unit, which I'll talk about in a second. Instead of four business units, we now have three. A little cleaner story, and I'll talk a little bit more about that or answer questions at the end. We sold it for $8.2 million. The question, if I were sitting in your chair, would be, what are you going to do with the $8.2 million? We'll talk about that. This is what we look like now. We have three business units. The largest and the oldest is still PMT. PMT is the power and microwave technology group. I kind of like simple math.
I look at it as EDG, which is the tube business, plus PMG, which is the power and microwave components group. Think of that as our discrete distribution business, lines like Qorvo and MACOM. You have EDG plus PMG plus the semiconductor wafer fab equipment segment of our business, which is a very profitable part of our business. Those three components together make up PMT. Several years ago, through this PMT part of the business and our relationship with our technology providers, we got into green energy solutions. The story goes, we had a relationship with Maxwell on the PMG side where we were distributing ultracapacitors. Maxwell was subsequently sold to Tesla, at which time we formed a relationship with another capacitor company called LS Materials.
Through that relationship, they came to us and said, "Hey, we have a customer that's looking for these modules that go in the nose cone of a GE turbine that replace the lead acid batteries." Within a very quick period of time, we developed what's called the Ultra 3000. NextEra was our first large customer. They came to us and they immediately ordered $10 million worth of that product. That got us into green energy. Since then, that focus within the green energy business unit has expanded to include wind, solar, hydrogen, EV rail, and synthetic diamonds, although the synthetic diamond market has kind of peaked and come down a bit. Very much a growth business for us and where we have been and where we will be investing money. All right, green energy solutions, remember that piece of the business.
The third business unit is Canvas. Canvas is our custom OEM display group. We've been in that business for a long time. The majority of our customers in that market are medical OEMs. They're the blue chip. They're the who's who of who makes medical equipment: the Medtronics, the Siemens Healthineers, the Karl Storz, Stryker, you name it across medical, dental. We make custom displays. Everything in Canvas is a one-to-one relationship. One part number goes with one customer. It's all on an OEM basis. Long development cycle. Once you're in, you're in for, we always say five to seven years. My favorite story is what's now Siemens Healthineers. They bought Varian, and we started that program that they're still doing today back in 2008. Once you're in, it's a great market.
Because everything's custom, it's a nicer margin than kind of like an off-the-shelf display solution. Those are our three business units. As I mentioned earlier, the CT tubes that we still have to manufacture under healthcare will now be part of PMT starting in Q4. I should have mentioned that for the new people in the room. Our fiscal year is a little different. It starts June 1, and it ends May 31. We are now finishing up FY2025 and moving into FY2026. Let's talk a little bit, like I said, about where we see growth. I've already mentioned that everything we do has its roots in the tube business, and then it migrates up into other technologies and other solutions. As I mentioned already, our focus for growth is going to be in the green energy market.
Now, some of you are going to say, "Well, wait a minute, you know, you got Trump and he hates windmills, and what's that going to do to your business?" Fortunately, what we sell, these ultracapacitor modules, those go into existing turbines, and there are tens of thousands of existing turbines, and they replace lead acid batteries. When those lead acid batteries are replaced, these modules last 10 years or more. Lead acid, in comparison, those are failing every one to two years at the best. Imagine you're sending somebody up into the nose cone to replace those. Your turbine's down. It's not generating energy, and you got to have the cost of somebody going up to replace them. Of course, you have the cost of the product.
The Ultra 3000, again, is a nice replacement, not tied to new wind turbines going up. We also have zero exposure to offshore wind. Just a couple of key points there. This is where we're going to be investing, in this green energy space. This slide here really kind of takes you through what I was saying earlier. On the far left, where you see phase I, those are some of our key technology partners. We take that, we start off, we're distributing. Not our favorite part of the business. It's a lower margin, but it moves to the right. From those relationships and from those vendors, we then make these solutions that you see in the middle, the engineered solutions. Now, where we're going and investing in is on the far right. That's our next phase, and that's going to be battery energy storage solutions.
While we're working on all that, a lot of you have heard our presentation before. You know we have a lot of irons in the fire. Our biggest frustration has been speed to market, and so we're going to be making some investments to try to expedite the new product development process. Ultimately, and unfortunately, a lot of times we are at the whims of our customers, and they're like, "Yes, we want this. We're going to place this multi-million dollar order," and then we wait, and we wait, and we tell you guys about it, and you ask us about it, and we're still waiting. These are the products that are in development and in different phases of rollout. Maybe it's still in beta. It may be that it's now moving into production, but we have a lot of products that we're working on.
What you see here are some of the key applications, the transportation market. I'm going to talk about the start modules here in just a minute. In the industrial space, we have lithium iron phosphate batteries. We have the ultracapacitor modules. Then we have a new product that we're just right now finishing up beta testing, which are IGBT modules, energy storage. We're going to talk more about that. The wind and solar. In the wind in particular, this is again going to be a key growth area near term. Again, we've been talking about this for a while, but today we have primarily shipped the Ultra 3000, which is the module that is used in the GE turbines, and it's predominantly been in the US. What we've been working on are a series of related modules that work with other OEM turbines.
You have expansion from GE into other brands, and you see these other OEM turbine platforms here, Alstom, Suzlon, Nordex, Senvion. You see that. We also have geographical expansion. Again, 90 some odd % of our revenue to date has been in the U.S. And on the GE turbines, we've probably only really captured about 10% of the market. If you look at the global TAM, you'll see that's a sizable market, and we are still at the beginning. I've heard people say, or maybe somebody posted on one of the chat rooms, that we no longer have first mover advantage. Nothing could be further from the truth. These products are patented, and if you go to any trade show, a wind or an energy show, what you'll hear are people referring all of these companies to Richardson.
They're saying, "No, you know, we can't do it. We'll trip over their patent." GE itself has said that. Still a tremendous amount of growth opportunity just from these products that are already released. The related products, again, the Ultra PEM, the geographical expansion, which again, we'll be investing in additional field engineers with some of the money we got from the healthcare sale. We're also investing in more development R&D resources. Today that whole group is in La Fox, Illinois, in our corporate headquarters. We have launched a small, let's call it an R&D office down in Sweetwater, Texas, and that is staffed with some of our employees that have been with the green energy business for a while, but again, they're engineers. We've put them there, and what they're doing now, they're closest to the customer.
They're closer to the customer than the engineers are. They are taking a product from idea and getting it into, let's kind of call it like a garage shop sort of prototype, a prototype. Once we've validated that, yes, we understand fully what those customer requirements are, and yes, this is a solution, and we know it's got both longevity and depth in terms of the customer base, then it'll be brought up to La Fox, where our very strong engineering team there will take it from that 80% over the finish line. We believe that, and we've already seen it in a couple of products that you'll be hearing about over the next couple of weeks. We've already seen it work in terms of speeding up the process for new product introductions.
Good stuff coming with some of that money that we got from the sale of the healthcare business unit. If anybody has, did everybody see the press release on Richardson that went out earlier this week? What is today? Today's Wednesday. It went out on Monday. This is a pretty cool story. Dan Leighton is with TransAlta. TransAlta is a Canadian company that manages wind farms. I'm not going to read this, but take the time to read it. The presentation, I put it online, so I don't know. It's both on our website, rell.com, but it's also on the Planet Microwave website. Take a minute to read this because this really helps people understand the process of introducing a new product all the way through to when the customer accepts it.
It is not just us trying to defend kind of some of the slowness. You will hear from the customer themselves how they look at a product, how they test a product before they will step up and start to order it in quantity. This customer, again, new customer, and within the next 12 months should be about $3 million-$4 million in incremental revenue for the Ultra 3000 and the Ultra PEM 3000, the new one. When I say Ultra PEM, just think of that as multi-brand. That is the one that works with other brands other than the GE. We are super excited to receive this and be able to share it with you. It is also in the press release. Another area of investment for us going forward is in, again, the battery energy storage market. That is a huge market today.
$25 billion today, growing to $114 billion. What you see down at the bottom of the screen, that's a picture, and that's about the size of a container, like a, you know, a shipping container. It's a large unit. What it does is it allows you to store energy that you're not using, which you can then either sell back to the grid at a nice price, or you can save it and use it during your own peak hours. Believe it or not, in the state of Illinois, there is still quite a bit of money that's available both from the government and from ComEd. We are in the process of tapping into some of those funds. We'll use some of our cash that we got from the sale first, but a lot of that will be reimbursed.
We are creating the demo site finally in La Fox. We hope to have that done in the next few months. It is just depending on how quickly we can get permits. That will allow us to have a demo site where we can bring customers in and show how this works. Our first target market will be selling systems just like this to, let's just call it companies like Richardson Electronics that either, you know, you do not even have to have solar. If you do, this is great. If you have wind, this is great. If you are just pulling electricity from the grid, you can also gain advantage from this. That is phase I. Phase II, kind of fast forward to now, especially with all the tariff situations on all of our heels.
There is one of our partners that we're talking to about the possibility of doing all the assembly of this unit that you see in La Fox because it has to have a certain percentage of made in America in order to avoid a lot of the tariffs. That is phase II. Phase III will be taking what we learn both from the customers and from our own site and adding some more engineering value and patenting the products that we develop and having more of our own solution. It is a multi-year strategy. It will take some of the cash again from the green energy, or excuse me, from the sale of healthcare, but investing in an area still within power management.
You're going to hear us talking a lot about how we are a power management company, streamlining what we have, going deeper, not necessarily taking on all new challenges, but we're talking about expanding in markets and with customers that we already know. I heard somebody was worried that when I said in our last earnings call that we were going to go out on a buying spree, that we were going to be buying businesses that we knew nothing about or getting into areas that were brand new to Richardson. We are focused on bolt-on type acquisitions. Maybe it's part of a customer or part of a technology or gives us a little bit more to sell within the range that we're already selling, but it'll be companies that we know already and that we're very comfortable with.
Somebody said to me, you know, you should date before you get married. I said, that works, and that's what we'll be doing, obviously. Not rushing out to spend every dime that we have right away. This is a list of our key customers, primarily in the green energy space, and you can see it's truly the who's who in that space. Thank you. Quick update then on everything I just said. For FY2025, we ended in a month. Remember that, you know, like everybody else, we don't have a crystal ball that gives us a lot of visibility in this very volatile, changing environment that we're living in, but we're in good position to really manage through or mitigate the impact of the tariffs, both because we don't buy a lot of product from China, for example, and we have multiple warehouse locations.
We're able to move inventory around so that if we have customers in Europe, that inventory will stay in Europe. If we have customers in Asia, that inventory stays in Asia. It doesn't have to come to the United States, get the tariff applied, and then go back out. We also, as I said, intend to capitalize on the made in America by bringing in more manufacturing. That is going to have twofold impact. Number one, it'll obviously grow top line, but it will also help improve our gross margin. Right now, our gross margin is still being negatively impacted by underabsorption. The more that we can move into that beautiful factory I showed you to begin with, the better off we're going to be. Increasing sales of the wind turbine modules, both within the United States and globally.
The Start Saver, that's a product for EV rail, but it's a product that's used in both electric vehicles and as well as in diesel engines. The green box to the right is Chris Miller, and he works for Wabtec, which is one of our largest customers. We like putting this in there because, again, words from the customer to tell you how excited they are. We've had this order now in the system. It is going to be shipping starting in Q4 in very small quantity and then moving up into FY2026. Finally, still good growth coming from the wafer fab equipment market. This year we've had really good growth. It's been nice. It's not back to the FY2023 level, but it's moving in that direction. Year- over- year, really good growth in this market.
As we have told you in the past, this is a very profitable part of our business. Quick look at the financials, the highlights here. I already mentioned the fact that the semi-fab market quarter over quarter was up 139%. For the total company, year- over- year, we are up 5.3%. Not as good as we want it to be, but I think very respectable given the kind of market that we are playing in today. Balance sheet, we are good. Probably enough said. I have already talked about how we are going to invest our money. Do not freak out if you hear us say we are going to make acquisitions. That is not something that is going to be willy-nilly. We will be doing a lot of studying before we do anything. We do still pay a quarterly dividend. That is very regular. No plans to change that.
Backlog? while it looks like it's down, which it is, it was $134 million at the end of Q3. When you go back to 2019, before COVID, you see that we're still up 120% versus the pre-COVID era. That FY2022 line that you see is when we did have a lot of the growth in backlog. Companies were getting the orders in the system. They were worried about supply chain shortages. You are seeing sort of a leveling off there. With all the new products we have and the customers and the growth initiatives, we think that that's stabilized. Obviously, our goal internally is to try to grow that as quickly as we can. All right, with that, I will end the presentation. Thank you for your time and interest. If you have any questions, you can reach out to eds@rell.com. I'm Wendy D@rell.com.
Those of you who know us know that we always make ourselves available on a very short time basis. Thank you. We appreciate the interest.