Okay. Have a real treat today. Anytime you get to have a company where their stock is up 10% in the day, you get to get off to a good start. So STRATTEC Security Corporation is a really unique company in that it's undergone some pretty substantial operational changes under its new CEO, Jen Slater, who we'll hear from in a minute. Based just in the outskirts or right in Milwaukee, actually, about 4 million shares, roughly $68, about $280 million equity cap, great balance sheet. There's no debt at the parent. There's $90 million in net cash. There's about $25 million in minority interest. So about a $200 million equity cap company. The company is a developer of access control systems for vehicles, whether that's locks, whether that's your active tailgates and liftgates, and also enhanced locks and keys, passive entry systems, etc. A real portfolio.
With that, I will let Jen go through some slides. With Jen is also Matthew Pauli, the company's new CFO. Then we'll get into some Q&A after some slides. Jen, thank you for being here.
Thank you, Brian. I'm happy to be here today joined by Matt. We thought we would start with the Safe Harbor statement for any forward-looking statements that we may make during the presentation or the Q&A. Really, we wanted to start with who STRATTEC is. Brian gave a nice overview. I should have let Brian continue with this slide. We were founded in 1908. We became a public company in 1995. We do have a diverse product portfolio all the way from the front of your vehicle with power fronks for electric vehicles to the rear of your vehicle with power liftgates and tailgates, key fobs, and door handles. Primarily, we've historically served Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. We do have a broad product portfolio. Our product portfolio is diverse. We've got about 8% of our revenue in aftermarket. Our footprint is North America.
We've got headquarters, as Brian said, in Milwaukee. We also have component manufacturing in Milwaukee. We have a customer service center in Auburn Hills, Michigan. We've got more component manufacturing and assembly manufacturing in Mexico and a distribution center in El Paso. Our primary core capabilities from a component standpoint are die cast, stamping, injection mold, painting, PCBA manufacturing, and then we've got strong assembly operations. I started here last July, so I'm a bit over my one-year anniversary. Matt joined in November. Since we both joined, we've really primarily been singularly focused on four strategic initiatives. The first, it all starts with making sure we have the right team and the right capability. We've got almost a full new executive team.
We've made progress at the second and third levels with bringing in new talent and making sure we're fostering the talent that has existed for a long history with the company. We've been focused on our culture shift, which is around three pillars: innovation, not just product innovation, but how we do business and our systems and our processes; collaboration, there are a lot of silos that exist in the organization, so breaking down those silos; as well as driving for results, all with understanding the external focus and our customer's perspective. Kind of leveraging off of driving results, there was not a business operating system when Matt and I joined.
Kind of day one was, "Let's get a business operating system that's really helped us drive the focus on our margin improvement and our cash generation." It's also made sure that it kept the right focus on our cost structure. As the prior presenter talked about, there's been a lot of things that have happened in this first year as CEO. It's been a good test with tariffs and some of the supplier issues. Making sure we had a strong focus on our cost structure was important. We focused on leveraging our value proposition for our customers. We were able to achieve some low-hanging fruit on some pricing opportunities. We've made some advancements with our product portfolio. The biggest thing has been about modernizing our company.
There are harder things to do from a process standpoint, but there were also simple things like automating online benefits for our employees, automating a lot of things that were happening from a paper station. And really the focus on all of those strategic initiatives, we're proud of the improvement that we've made in the underlying business over the last five quarters, both from a margin standpoint and a cash generation standpoint. I'm going to shift a bit into the future and give a bit more understanding of our product portfolio. When we started as a company in 1908, that was primarily with lock and key and lock cylinder business. We still have a good standing in that product category. We're working on the next generation of key fobs with our digital key fob.
I'll give you a little bit more understanding on what a digital key fob is on a subsequent slide. Our vehicle access business is our power liftgates, our power tailgates, and our door handles. Our engineers showed their capability and their willingness to drive a new product category, which isn't an easy thing to do, but they took the capabilities that they had in their key fob business, coupled it with the integration opportunities they had around software electronics and systems engineering, and created a user interface controls. I like to talk about this segment only because it demonstrates the capability of our engineers to develop a new product with a new customer. One of the things that we've done to make sure that we've got the right focus on the products that will deliver the most growth is we've deprioritized that segment.
It's already a crowded segment. There are less switches in the vehicle over time. We want to make sure that we're prioritizing our resources where we think we have the most opportunity. Talking about our power access products, as I said, our primary customers that we targeted were Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. We're excited about this because as power access proliferates, vehicles really starting with a premium segment and then going across vehicle segments, not only do we have an opportunity to increase our content, but we have an opportunity to increase the customers that we serve today, starting in North America where we have a strong manufacturing footprint, where our customers are looking for local-to-local to supply. Digital key. What's a digital key fob? I will tell you that I've spent a lot of time with our engineers just to understand myself what a digital key fob is.
From a consumer standpoint, it's not different, but really what it is, it's the next generation of a key fob. It works seamlessly with your phone, with ultra-wideband technology to make sure you've got the right security and user interface. We've looked at key fobs because our customers have been looking at other ways to access your vehicle with biometrics and other vehicle access needs. From the voice of the customer and actually some trends of our customers moving backward to make sure that you still have an electrical key in a safety situation, we see key fobs still being here for the next decade. We're going to continue to work with our customers to make sure that we can drive what they need from a value after that timeframe.
Before I hand it over to Matt, just wrapping it up, we see revenue over the next year primarily in line with North America auto production. Our margins will continue the focus on our cost structure and driving margin improvement. Our cash generation, we made a lot of progress in this space in year one. We see that getting back to a more normalized view as we go forward. We're really now shifting, while there's still a lot of work to do on the underlying business model and operating model to continue to drive margin improvement, we're shifting our focus to make sure that we've got the right focus on our growth and proliferating our products across multiple customers in the North America region. Matt, I'll hand it over to Matt.
Thanks, Jen. I'll just walk through a few slides. And then we'll open it up for Q&A. For those of you who are new to the STRATTEC story, we are at June fiscal year-end. And so we just recently completed our first quarter of fiscal 2026. So our revenue for the first quarter was $152 million. We're up about 10% on a year-over-year basis. That's on a backdrop of North American automotive production that was up about 5% during the same period. So our performance was better than market, largely driven by price increases. We put in about $8 million of price increases last January. So we still see the benefit here in our first quarter. We had some favorable sales mix, some additional content per vehicle. And then we had $2 million of net new program wins that benefited us from a top-line sales perspective.
On the right-hand side of the slide, you'll see our annual sales for the last four years. It's about a 6% growth rate from fiscal 2022. But keep in mind, fiscal 2022 was a little bit lower from a sales perspective for us. That's when kind of the chip shortages and some electronic shortages negatively impacted our sales levels. But since then, you see a continuous growth, a combination of price increases to offset inflation, albeit a little bit delayed from when we should have gotten the prices in the past and some new program launches. On a trailing 12-month basis, our sales are about $578 million. And as Jen mentioned, on a go-forward basis, we'd expect our revenue to be in line with North American automotive production volumes.
And looking at our cost structure, both from a gross margin and from an SAE perspective, our gross profit margin for this first quarter was 17.3%, which is up significantly on a year-over-year basis. The key drivers there were price increases, the additional volume, and then also restructuring benefits. So in fiscal 2025, we did do restructuring both in Milwaukee. We reduced our operations there from a three-shift to a two-shift operation. And then we did restructuring in our Mexico operations as well. Our headcount is down about 15% on a year-over-year basis. Tariffs were not a significant cost for us in the quarter. I'll just frame it up, though. On an annual basis, tariffs are about $5 million-7 million of incremental cost, but we've largely offset all of that cost with a price increase on the aftermarket side and then also passing through the cost to the OEM.
From an SAE perspective, it was 10.4% for the first quarter. That's in line with our expectations of generally 10%-11% SAE. Obviously, the largest portion there is the cost for our people. In the support functions. Lastly, just looking at kind of bottom-line profitability, either from a net income, adjusted net income, or adjusted EBITDA, I think the highlights for our first quarter, we delivered $8.5 million of net income or $2.07 a share. On an adjusted EBITDA basis, it was $15.6 million or 10.2% EBITDA margin. It's the first time we've seen double-digit EBITDA margins in the last two years. We're encouraged by the profitability. I think the other thing on this slide, if you look at it, this is kind of the trend since Jen joined as CEO and our profitability and our improvements.
You see some of the results of our transformation efforts here on the bottom line. Switching gears, just talking about our cash position and capital flexibility. At the end of the first quarter, we have $90 million of cash on the balance sheet, and we have $5 million of debt. The debt relates to our joint venture. We have a 51% owned joint venture that has a separate revolver. After the end of the first quarter, we did refinance the STRATTEC-based business revolver and extended the maturity out through 2028. From a cash flow perspective, we drove significant cash flow in fiscal 2025. It was a focus that had not been in the business prior. We drove about $70 million of cash from operations. Here in the first quarter, we added another $10 million of cash. I'd say before 2025, cash flow was inconsistent in the business.
At the bottom of the slide, we've laid out our capital priorities. Our capital priorities are primarily internally focused right now. Driving the transformation, supporting organic growth opportunities, and on a longer-term basis, we'll look at other value creation opportunities. We're starting to think about how M&A can help us as well as we look at our product strategy. The last slide I'll just leave you with is kind of the STRATTEC investment rationale. As Jen mentioned, we've got a brand new leadership team that's driving the business. The STRATTEC story is a transformation story. We're in the early innings. We probably say we're in the third inning of a nine-inning game. It's a balance. It's a balance in supporting growth, but also making sure we've got the right cost structure and we've got a strong balance sheet to continue to support us. With that, I'll open up for Q&A.
Yeah. I guess I'll start with the nine-inning game. We just saw a World Series game that was 18 innings. STRATTEC was, I would say, historically, in an 18-inning game of trying to improve. In a very short amount of time, you have shown substantial improvement with some of the initiatives that you have installed, including on pricing. Maybe just start there and just talk about what is now the way you go to market from a pricing standpoint, maybe relative to past practices and how that's driving both top and bottom line.
Yeah. I think first, my disclaimer is I'm a hockey fan. So I'm still getting used to the.
It can be double and triple over time in the playoffs as well.
I think.
Very stressful.
I think of pricing really twofold. The first part of the pricing is understanding where you are contractually with your customers. That was how we started. There were some products that we had been serving our customers for an extremely long period of time that was past what the expected life cycle of the product was, that the team had never really gone in to talk through inflationary pressures on COVID, material economics, labor. Holistic, it's always making sure you have an eye on where your contracts are and what your customer contractual commitments are to deliver what you are driving value for the product. It's making sure, as you're looking at your portfolio, you're pricing right from a SKU standpoint so that you're getting paid for complexity, that you understand how complexity is driving your cost. The third is making sure that you're not outpricing yourself for the market.
You're always keeping an eye on where the [audio
Perfect job on the pricing side. Cost rationalization has also been a major part of this improvement. You're unique in that you're primarily a Mexican supplier. Maybe just talk about how you are situated relative to USMCA and then also just the operations themselves in Mexico and what was needed to be done down there to get to where you want to be.
Yeah. For USMCA, we're more than 90%.
Yeah. Most of our or almost all of our final assemblies come out of Mexico. We have a plant in Milwaukee that's just providing components to our Mexico operations, which are assembly. All of the products, 60% of it comes back into the U.S., and the other is distributed to production sites outside the U.S. Of that 60% that comes back to the U.S., 95% is USMCA compliant.
Yeah. Your point about what needed to be done to start making the progress on our cost structure, what I did not say in the presentation is how lucky we are to have the team we have. Typically, when you are going through a transformation, a lot of change, there is a lot of pushback from the organization. I would say Matt and I find a very different acceptance. Our team is just looking for a different perspective on what good looks like. Our operations and leaders in Mexico have done a tremendous job to relook at their operations, make sure that they are optimizing the cost, not to sacrifice quality or delivery for our customers. Now we are kind of moving into phase two on automation. We are starting simple.
The simple things are, we have demonstrated where you can take one manual operation, a really quick read across where we have demonstrated automation already, how do we read that through into other operations. Phase two is thinking about automation in a very different way than the team has thought of in the past because there has been so much progress made in automation. The business case between labor and automation has changed drastically when you look at Mexico labor. Our teams are really excited about looking at different ways to deliver flex lines and making multiple different customer products on a singular line where in the past, it had been a different assembly line for every customer and every product. That also helps us optimize our network and frees up floor space for growth for us.
USMCA is up for renegotiation next year. I'm curious if you have any initial thoughts in how you are trying to be as nimble as possible for any eventuality that comes from what are likely to be some, I would say, headline-driven negotiations.
Yeah. Like anybody in this industry, we've all become tariff experts over the past year. I think we're fortunate to have a balanced manufacturing. We do have manufacturing in the U.S., and we have manufacturing in Mexico. We are flexible for if there's any significant shift where the low-cost economics in Mexico do not outweigh tariffs. The other advantage that we have is we do not have a lot of infrastructure with our manufacturing. Our assembly lines are pretty transferable. If there was going to be a longer-term shift, we can relook at our footprint and how our footprint is balanced and make sure that we're meeting our customer needs. With the customer conversations that we have had, they are focused on rebalancing their footprint for U.S., but they also know that there has been decades-long supply put in place from a USMCA standpoint.
We are just making sure we are working closely with our customers as they are thinking through this and reinforcing the fact that we have got a flexible footprint, and we are going to make sure to serve them in the way that they want their supply base to be served.
Questions from the audience before I move on to product and strategy? Mario? Oh. Yep. Harry.
Yes. So obviously, your power access products have been just a fantastic performer. Curious how you're thinking about the potential for, I guess, especially the power liftgate to become standard on a number of vehicle platforms.
I think even before it comes standard, Harry, we have some opportunity to address some customers that we haven't addressed in the past. I look at it as kind of phase one is just building those customer relationships that have those products that may be looking for a different technology. I realized how old I was when I was talking to a different investor, and he was asking me about power access and proliferation. I used the example of how I used to roll up my windows. He looked at me like I had a horn growing out of my head because he never had a manual window. I see the same thing. I mean, generally, technology trends, our customers will start with premium vehicles, and you get used to that in your car, and then it proliferates across their broader set of vehicles.
Right.
This will be a pretty simple question. With regard to tariffs, go back to the presentation, the comment you made, I think you said $5 million-$7 million, but it sounded, the tone suggested it's been pretty easily passed along. I guess, A, is that, I mean, has this been pretty easily passed along to your consumers? Has there been any type of pushback at all, or could there be pushback on further tariffs from here?
Yeah. It's been a pretty straightforward process. On the aftermarket side, we put in a price increase to address the tariffs. On the OEM side, we've had agreements with the OEMs. It's just working through the documentation that they need. We're seeing the recoveries. It's just on a delayed basis.
Yeah. Easy is relative in automotive. I think our customers have acknowledged that. There is something longer-term that all their suppliers are dealing with. I think long-term, that is where kind of thinking of our footprint and making sure that we are still competitive and we have got the right competitive footprint is important if there are any longer-term tariff impacts that we see coming at us.
Jen, congrats. Bottoms up, tops down. You got your handle on the business. Taking the technology in the sensing business, taking the technology in the fab business. What are you looking at to scale that up either for the automotive or for other capabilities over the next two or three years?
Yeah. I would say this first year, we really got our arms around the operations, so the business. While Matt said we were in inning three for kind of our transformation, I would say we're a little bit earlier as we're thinking about our product innovation. For me, the easy place to start is with what we have today, just proliferating that through customers that we haven't necessarily addressed. I think the second would be, and Matt did talk about M&A, and M&A is a very long process. What we want our investors to understand is we are looking at different ways for capital allocation. Because that does take some time, we're starting a framework now to say, what are we good at and what would be complementary? The easiest place is to start with a transportation mindset.
I say transportation because there's off-road heavy vehicle and a light vehicle where we've primarily focused on light vehicle. Once we get our arms around that, then I think we would look at, are there other areas of adjacencies that would make sense for what our capabilities are? I did say in the past, and this is really important, until we're comfortable that we've got that stable foundation, putting anything on top of that just puts more risk to the foundation. That is our priority one, to make sure that we've got the solid foundation to build on. We don't want to stop the progress in understanding what that framework for M&A would look like. I don't know if you'd have anything to add to that.
No, it's a combination, right? We've got to continue to improve the foundation. M&A is longer-term, right? We got to start that process now to be ready.
$90 million in cash in the balance sheet. You're in fantastic shape. You talked about maybe some outward-looking M&A thoughts. We're thinking about this. You've done such a great job on the power access side. Key fobs. The physical key fob is a question mark, I guess, for the long term. Where do you want to maybe augment your own capabilities? If it's too early, then it's too early.
It really is too early because we're really still trying to understand. I mean, I know what we're good at. We've demonstrated we're good at power access, and we've demonstrated longstanding and kind of lock and key. To augment that, I think we need a little bit more information. That kind of goes with what we would even say on M&A, what can we do organically, and what do we need to complement and supplement?
Yeah. And just in the near term and with the short amount of time, I'll probably ask the question of most of the suppliers. We've seen the Novelis fire. We've seen Nexperia. How are you adjusting your own production and own visibility desires to understand what lines are going to be up, what's going to be down, and how can you stay nimble in that kind of environment?
Yeah. Part of our focus on the transformation has been in supply chain to make sure that we've got the right signals to address our customers if there's challenges that they're having. I would say in the near term, we know we were a little late on our inventory, so we're going to actually use this opportunity with some of the production delays to get our inventory in a better place. It is really making sure that we're looking at our customer signals and we're talking to our customers so that we can address our cost if there's anything that's going to be longer than a couple of weeks shut down.
Understood.
Matt, did I miss anything?
Yeah. I mean, it's a fluid situation. I think we're hearing that they're going to make up the majority of the volume. It's just kind of a question of when, right? We're trying to stay nimble. We'd prefer we had a little bit more on the finished good inventory side kind of across the board.
Okay. With that, I think we will move it along. I want to thank Jen and Matt. I want to thank you very much for being here for the second consecutive year in your case, Jen, and obviously just a really just excellent job in transforming this company in a very short amount of time and getting new investors involved. I think it's been pretty remarkable. Good luck.
Thank you very much.