STRATTEC is a manufacturer of products and solutions, largely for the ground vehicle market. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO, Jennifer Slater, and CFO, Dennis Bowe. They will have a presentation. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. Should you have a question, you can put it in the Q&A box, and I'll present it to management. With that said, thank you for being here with us this morning. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. Before we begin, as you are aware, we may make some forward-looking statements during this presentation, as well as during the Q&A. As noted here, these statements are covered under a safe harbor. I'm really excited to be here today and appreciate everyone's interest in STRATTEC. As John mentioned, I joined the company in July and am as new to this story as many of you may be. We have a lot happening in the company, and hope you find our evolving story of interest. To begin, I thought it would be helpful to reflect on some of the key changes that have occurred at STRATTEC over the past year. These changes include the restructuring of our equity ownership in the VAST Partnership in 2023.
This provided both a cash infusion of $28 million and also simplified our business, allowing us to better focus on our core capabilities. October 2023 was pivotal for the company, with the addition of Bruce Lisman and Jack LeBeau Jr. to our board. With their addition, and with Jack being elected as board chair, a significant focus on governance improvements began. A number of changes have been implemented, as noted on this slide, and recently, the board adopted proxy access provisions. We also will be asking our shareholders to approve a proposal to declassify the board at our annual meeting in October. We believe that for a company of our size, we are moving quickly to best-in-class governance. So you may be asking why I came to STRATTEC. In doing my due diligence, I found a recently refreshed and engaged board who saw opportunity in the underlying business.
The board and I believe there is inherent value within the business that has yet to be untapped. In fact, this is why they made senior leadership changes that brought me into the company. We expect that uncovering these opportunities will provide stronger earnings, power, potential, and a long-term strategy for growth. Supporting that potential, we have a strong balance sheet with the financial flexibility to execute on change. STRATTEC has a strong legacy in the automotive industry, which I spent my entire career supporting, a solid business across a broad customer base, and a strong reputation of innovation. I believe this provides the foundation from which we can grow and evolve. During my first seventy-five days or about the last eleven weeks, I have visited our sites in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, and Mexico. What I found validates my expectations.
We have opportunities to raise the sophistication of the business and modernize how this company operates. There is a lot of change to be made to extract this value. In fact, I see this as a self-help story. We need to improve how we operate, which includes establishing a management operating system, to break down the existing silos and focus on delivering results. We expect to upgrade our IT systems and improve accessibility to data. As we advance through these improvements, we are also going to be developing a strategy to help drive sustainable growth. Based on these opportunities, my near-term priorities revolve around three main pillars. First, ensuring we have the right organizational capability. Second, stabilizing the business to help lead to more predictable results, and finally, developing a robust strategy.
The key focus items to enable this are making sure we have a culture for the organization around accountability and delivering results to drive predictable performance. We also will look across our product portfolio to ensure we have the right resources focused on high-value, sustainable products, while de-emphasizing those that are not contributing as profitably. We will continue to make sure our cost structure is aligned to our current and future earnings potential, while uncovering what our key competencies are that can drive future organic growth. Once we identify the right products for our future, we need to align our resources to drive consistent profitability. For those of you who may not know STRATTEC, I'd like to provide you a good baseline of what the company is today. First of all, we have a broad and balanced product portfolio. I will go into that in more detail on subsequent slides.
While most of our products are served directly to our original equipment customers, we do have about 7% of our business that is sold into the aftermarket. Our customer mix is heavily concentrated across General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis, but we have built new customer relationships over recent years. One example of this is Tesla. While currently small in revenue, given the early stages of that product line, we believe that doing business with this customer is a testament to the innovative products that the team has created and the potential that we have.... Our footprint is concentrated in North America, with our headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a customer center in Michigan, and the majority of manufacturing in Mexico. Our core capabilities across these sites support our highly technical and differentiated products and include design and engineering, injection molding, zinc die-cast, stamping, plating, and assembly capabilities.
STRATTEC has a significant history in automotive, serving the industry for over one hundred years. This slide depicts the breadth of our portfolio and the significant number of places you can find our products across a vehicle. From the front of a car with front latches, to the rear of the car with power liftgate and tailgate products, to key fobs and steering wheel switches. The company has continually evolved our product offerings with the advancement of technologies. How we excel with leading technology was validated by STRATTEC as we were awarded the Automotive News PACE Award for excellence in innovation for our power liftgate system in 2018. This technology has continued to advance as automating vehicle access is becoming more common.
Another great feature of our products is that they are agnostic to the powertrain and can be found in internal combustion engines, hybrid, and electric vehicles. Our products have continued to evolve as the automotive industry transformed. You can see our products are categorized across three main platforms. Our history is rooted in the security and authorization business, with keys, lock sets, and key fobs. In 2008, we acquired a division of Delphi, which gave us leading-edge capability in power access solutions and latches. We have taken our know-how across these two platforms to build out a user interface control platform that covers steering wheel switches, electronic shifter modules, and transmission paddle shifters. Across all of these segments, we have built platform and system competencies, including software.
We have taken our key fob business to the next level, enabling our Phone as a Key access technology. For our power access solutions, we leverage system and software technology along with a platform approach. The platform approach helps us move with speed for our customers, provides better package flexibility, and coupled with our software technology, provides technically differentiated products for our customers. I should add as well that we have a joint venture that focuses on door handles, fascias , and soft touch access features. With that introduction, I would like to pass it over to Dennis to go through our financials.
Okay. Good morning, everyone. We ended fiscal twenty-four on a strong note, with fourth quarter sales up $11 million. The increase was driven by approximately $7 million of pricing improvement, with the remainder reflecting higher sales driven by the launch of new programs. It's worth noting that our second quarter sales historically tend to be low, seasonally low, but were also further impacted last year by production volume softening at a major customer. From a full year perspective, customer pricing increased revenue by approximately $33 million, of which $9.7 was one-time retroactive price recoveries for prior year sales. The remaining growth was primarily driven by the launch of new programs, which included the power end gate content and new tailgate latch for Ford F-Series pickups. Higher revenue from the fourth quarter translated to solid growth in gross profit.
Gross margin expanded by 370 basis points, driven by improved pricing and higher sales volume. This improvement helped to offset the headwinds associated with the mandatory wage increases in Mexico, higher freight costs, and unfavorable foreign exchange. It's worth noting that the Mexican government has been raising the mandatory minimum wage aggressively the last several years, and we anticipate this annual increase will continue. Looking to gross margins by year, fiscal 2023 would have had a higher margin profile, had it had the benefit of the 130 basis points of retroactive pricing we captured in the first half of fiscal 2024. Excluding the one-time retroactive pricing benefits, our present margin profile is representative of the current customer contracts and our cost structure.
As Jen discussed, we are looking across our product portfolio to ensure we have the right focus on high-value, sustainable products. Through improvement in both our product portfolio and our operational effectiveness, we aim to improve our margin profile. Q4 engineering sales, engineering sales and admin expenses improved by two hundred and twenty basis points due to a $3.2 million higher engineering reimbursement. I should point out that in Q2, expenses were elevated due to $900,000 of CEO transition costs. Typically, engineering, sales, and admin expenses range between 9% and 10% annually. We finished fiscal 2024 with a solid Q4 net income of $9.6 million, which benefited from $2.5 million in non-recurring engineering reimbursement, and $2 million improvement in other income, driven by FX gains.
From a full year perspective, fiscal 2024 delivered $16.3 million of net income, with approximately half of the earnings related to one-time pricing and non-recurring engineering reimbursement. We finished fiscal 2024 with a very strong balance sheet, with $25 million in cash and no borrowings in STRATTEC's $40 million credit facility. Our joint venture, ADAC-STRATTEC LLC, which produces door handles and trim, had $13 million drawn on a $20 million credit facility at the end of fiscal 2024. Strong earnings in the year led to higher cash generation. For fiscal 2025, we anticipate capital spending of approximately $15 million. Typically, new product program spending comprises between 50% to 70% of our capital spending, with the remainder associated with maintenance-related investments. So with that, John, we can open up to questions.
Okay, everybody, if you have a question, please enter it in the question and answer section, and, I will present it to management. I'd like to kick it off with a little bit maybe of background on some price negotiations you mentioned in your prepared remarks, that you're starting to realize them. Can you talk a little bit about that process, where you stand? Is it fully completed? Maybe some background for people who aren't familiar with what's gone on in the past year and a half or so.
Yeah, John, I'll take that, and, Dennis, you can add on if you want to. So with the inflation that the market has experienced over the past couple of years, many suppliers have entered into discussions with automotive customers on inflationary pricing. STRATTEC did a nice job last year in leveling- up pricing for that inflation. A part of that was one time, and a part of that was into the run rate. They were a little late on that happening, but they did do a nice job at getting that pricing last year.
And are you complete with the process, or is there still more to get back?
Part of what I talked about is a focus on our operational stability and predictability, and really getting our hands wrapped around the data of the business and understanding, do we still have opportunities at a product level and a customer level, and what does our margin look like?
That's pretty much my next question, Jennifer. It sounds like you're gonna take a hard look at the product portfolio. I guess that suggests that some are really below margin contribution where you want to be. Do you think the resolution there is a reorganizing of the products, or do you think it's maybe just divesting of some of those underperforming assets?
Yeah, one of the things that I talked about is instilling a management operating system and really getting more access to data. The technology systems right now are pretty disparate and antiquated, and so when you have a starting point that way, this business hasn't historically looked at profitability at a granular enough level. So step one is getting at the data to determine how we look at that at a product level.
Okay, let's go to the audience, see what we have here. Just for your large engineering reimbursement in the fourth quarter, your operating margin was 4.5%. Is that a good level of operating margin to think about on a go-forward basis? And on a gross margin basis, what kind of target are you thinking about?
Do you wanna take the first part of that, Dennis?
Yeah. So on the first question, yeah, we did have a large one-time $3.2 million engineering reimbursement. You know, I think it's fair that we put that out there so people could understand where we would've been without it. We're not necessarily saying that is the forward expectation for our net income per quarter. We just think it was a relevant point on Q4.
Okay. You touched on this in your prepared remarks, the Mexican peso has been something of an issue over the past, you know, five or six years now. Can you talk a little bit about the hedge you put in place? Does that hedge your exposure fully for the next year?
You know, we never fully. Like, historically, we've never fully hedged against the peso. And one of the key reasons is our ADAC-STRATTEC joint venture, which does have similar peso exposure. It does have local revenue receipts, although it's a U.S. dollar-based pricing, but the customers are in Mexico, major big three customers in Mexico. And therefore, we do have currency that's paid in pesos. So we hedge a safe amount that we feel is commensurate with the business, but it's not fully hedged. It's less than half.
Okay. I guess we'll tie these two questions together. Talk a little bit about what you see as growth opportunities for the company. A member of the audience has narrowed in on the new phone as a key program. What's the pipeline product opportunity for this product?
Thanks for the question. As I talked about, we are spending some time in developing our go-forward strategy, and part of that is enabled by understanding our profitability and our value that we offer to our customers today with our current product segments. As we have a better understanding of that, we can understand where our real opportunities for growth are by product segment.
Question about the IT upgrades. You know, you mentioned that it's something of an issue. How big of an issue do you think of it is? How much spend do you think is gonna be needed in IT?
As we develop our strategy, IT will be an enabler of how we think about, you know, the affordability of the IT and the benefit that it's gonna give us to the business to continue to drive growth. You can always get at data in good old Excel, and so that's not preventing us from getting the information to look for where the opportunities are today and building in the future. But I do see it as a big enabler for how we get access to the data and how we make decisions quicker going forward.
Maybe if we step back a level here. A question from the audience about who's your competition? Who do you consider your competition, and how do you gain share?
Yeah. It's a great question. You know, reflecting back on the slides that I showed on all the places where our products are available in the vehicle today and the product segments that we operate in, our competition varies. But the key to our products really is the technology and the innovation we bring to our customers through solid customer relationships, and that's what drives our value and our differentiation against our competition.
Good question here from the audience about the balance sheet. How do you look to maximize your balance sheet strength?
I'll talk to that. We one of the areas of opportunity is just the working capital, whether that be inventory turns or high levels of customer tooling and some outstanding Mexican value-added taxes that were a one-timer that went out, that we're expecting to work back. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to to tighten up our working capital. Inventory will take us longer to get to find, and I think it's through the strategy work that we find strategy and operational model work, that we find the right inventory turn that. And then, so but that will most likely take. That, that's the longer term of the three.
Question about where the stock is trading below tangible book value. You have strong free cash flows. You have a reconstituted board of directors. What are your thoughts about repurchasing stock, capital allocation for that free cash flow? I know you've, you got money allocated to, looks like, you know, systems improvements. But what do you think about what is the thoughts about, you know, buying back stock at this level?
Yeah, we have to get our hands wrapped around the business today and our operations today, and the usage of cash we need. You know, as we further develop our strategy, we'll continue to have a better understanding of, you know, where we should prioritize our cash.
Got it. And what are your thoughts about car production estimates, maybe, for the balance of this year and maybe looking forward into next year? How do you see that playing out in the near term?
Michael?
I'll take that one. So we did put in the 10-K in the executive outlook, based on July IHS, July, our forecasting, you know, the, the forecasting source for North American production, that the overall industry looked to be relatively stable over the next twelve months, our, our fiscal 2025, although, slightly softer on Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. And it's worth noting that we went through the same exercises on our preliminary view of our budget back in February, and where there was growth in February from IHS's forecast, it within four months of their, within four months by July, they were projecting something more stable. So as far as we know, there could be further softness, and maybe IHS is catching up with it.
We don't know, but right now, we're projecting relative stability with a slight softness in the big three.
Jennifer, you mentioned that you're agnostic to the platforms, but is the dollar content the same in ICE versus hybrid versus full EV?
That's a great question, John, and again, I don't wanna sound like a broken record here, but it is an area to get the granularity at a platform level on what our content looks like, you know, because we are in automotive, and Dennis just talked about overall vehicle production, the platform production on what platforms are winning also matters. So as we continue to build out our strategy, we'll look at our growth products on those key platforms, and prioritize both our customers and our platforms. But the benefit to me, coming from the automotive industry and electrification for a very long period of time, is we don't have to worry about different products and different technologies as the shift is happening from internal combustion engine to EVs.
Fair enough. Question from the audience about, again, the cash flow generation. How much cash flow generation do you expect from inventory levels, customer toolings, and the Mexican value-added tax receivables over the next twelve months? It sounds like you, Dennis.
Yeah, I see that. I see that came from Harry. Hello, Harry. So, yeah, as I mentioned earlier, of the three, the inventory levels is the one that requires the most study. What is the right inventory term? So that and once we determine that, how quickly can we get to that point? But I think optimizing our inventory turn has been and will continue to be a focus. It was a focus before Jen got here, but I don't think it was sufficient enough focus. So I think we'll get that right, and we'll determine how long that is. The other two items are elevated balances, like the customer tooling historically was closer to $10 million and ballooned. With the launch of so many new programs, it ballooned up to...
It peaked at around $25 million. We finished the year, fiscal year 2024, at around $22 million, and that's work in progress to get recovery for that. Those tools will be owned by our customers, and they will pay us the cash for it. It's now the exercise is how quickly we get that cash, but we anticipate of getting that cash. Same with the Mexican VAT receivables. There was about $8.5 million that, in a one-timer, the Mexican IRS has, and as we can all imagine, you know, trying to predict what the IRS is gonna do, especially a foreign one, and when you're gonna get your money back, is highly unpredictable, but it is something we anticipate to get back.
All right. I see no questions remaining. Any final thoughts, Jennifer?
No, the slide that's up here really covers the key points. You know, we really are focused on getting to a more predictable and stable business and developing a strategy, and I'm excited about the opportunity here.
All right. Well, thank you for attending the conference today. I know you have a full schedule ahead of you, so, I appreciate you being with us at Sidoti & Company . Everybody, have a great day.