All right, let's begin here. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for the Standex presentation. I'm Ross Sparenblek, the research analyst here at William Blair that covers Standex. Before we begin, I'm required to inform you that for a full list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest, you can visit our website at williamblair.com. Today from Standex, we have Chairman and CEO, David Dunbar. As a brief background, Standex operates as a leading portfolio of niche industrial applications, and we see as the next emerging mid-cap compounder led by its strong exposure to grid, aerospace and defense, and commercial space. With that, let me turn over to David for some opening remarks before heading to Q&A.
Thank you, Ross. It's a great pleasure to be here. I appreciate all the interest. Oh, there we go. Standex. Standex was founded in 1955, and many of you are probably new to the story. For, I don't know, about 50 years, its business model was to acquire family-owned businesses where the founder was nearing an exit and didn't have an obvious heir or something. They collected businesses. There were 40, 50, 60 businesses at any given time. That business model performed very well to the '90s. My predecessor, Roger Fix, those of you who knew him, he became CEO in 2001, and for about 10 or 11 years, he just divested and restructured. There were 16 businesses, 16 P&Ls in the corporation when I started in 2014.
Since then, I'm very proud to be able to communicate what we're communicating today. Looking back on the direction we've come, it's really gratifying. When I started, our sales were $760 million. Our operating income was 9.3%. Our trailing 12 operating income now is 19.6%, and part of that I'll share. Part of what got us there in that time, if you look at the split of the business, now nearly 60% of our business comes from what we call Electronics. I'll get into that in a bit more detail. Then Aerospace and Defense, which is a newly renamed segment. Together, the two of those account for about 70% of the sales. When I started, almost 60% of the sales came from food service equipment. We made refrigeration and cooking.
Between when I started in 2014 and it's 2020, in early 2020, we largely completed the portfolio transformation to get to this group that we have now. One thing that is new in the way we will be reporting our business, to understand what's driving our sales, it is important to understand the end markets we sell into. On the pie chart of the industries we covered, you can see the percent in each of these key businesses. We highlight those businesses of ours that are growing above GDP. This is a new way to look at our business, and we've been waiting to get to this point for a long time. Now 70% of our business, 70% of our sales come from engineered components. We are an engineered components business, and we are increasingly focusing on those end markets that are growing above average.
Our four businesses, three of them are in electronics. One is the aerospace and defense business. You can see the sensor business has a served market of about $3 billion. It's a $250 million business. There's room to grow in that market. As we've zoomed out and looked at when our customers work with us to customize a sensor or even a packaged switch for them, what else are they working on in their new product? It could be a neighboring component on the same board that we're working on or some function elsewhere in the product. Things like capacitors or filters or other sensor technologies are logical extensions of this business model and could greatly expand the TAM to $10 billion plus. The instrument transformer business, we'll talk a lot about that today.
It's based on an acquisition we made in October 2024, that makes instrument transformers that go into grid equipment. We sell to Eaton, Schneider, Siemens, GE. Our current served market is basically Europe, India, and the U.S. It's about a $3 billion SAM, but that's a $12 billion global market. The high reliability magnetics is primarily North America business, about a $2 billion SAM. The aerospace and defense, about a $1.5 billion market for the structural components based on the process we have, and with acquisitions could expand to $20 billion. This is the first major difference in the corporation, I think that's relevant to all of you.
If you were to invest in Standex 10 years ago when we had 16 different businesses, you were kind of making a bet on me and on the board of directors that we would make the right decisions about straightening out the portfolio, aligning around a coherent core strategy. This is our strategy now. We're an engineered components business. We are in attractive sized available markets, and with acquisitions, we can expand into even more attractive available markets. There is decades of execution here, simply executing this strategy to drive growth. Along the way, we have greatly improved margins. You see the margins right after COVID, 13% growing to 19.6% this last quarter. That's a combination of mixing up with a better portfolio, price realization, productivity, just better management practices. I think of my time here as having included four jobs, and I'm entering my fifth job.
My first job was figure out which businesses could grow. The second job was transform the portfolio. The third job was to become an industrial operating company. I brought in some new people, brought in a new CFO to focus on improving our operations. We put together better budgets, we put together better processes to manage our way through a quarter, better productivity plans, and that largely is the explanation for the margin expansion here. We became an industrial operating company since 2020. I had always aspired to ramp up R&D to get our own organic growth engine, and we'll talk quite a bit about the growth engine of the company. We now believe we have an organic growth engine that puts us kind of in control of our own destiny.
If you think about our growth model, we still have a large part of our business that goes into general industrial applications, whether it's, gosh, irrigation systems, security systems, automobiles, coffee makers, appliances. If you assume that's going to grow one percent-three percent, that's the tide that affects the overall business. 30% of our business, 30% of our sales go into markets that are growing on average 20%. That's six percent growth. We say that will contribute five percent-seven percent growth. Our new product releases started in about 2021, 2022, and are now contributing meaningfully to growth. New product sales. Sales of products released in the prior five years last year was $40 million. This year, in our fiscal year ending June 30th, will be $64 million. That $24 million, that's 300 basis points on the $800 million last year.
If you just use that as a shorthand, we think we're in an 8%-13% growth environment. Even without too much tailwinds from the underlying ISM or PMI, we have growth levers that should drive positive growth. Here, to zoom in a little bit, the new product growth you can see on the left has been growing at about 44%, and I told you in 2025, the sales are $40. This year, it'll be $64. Next year, over $90. We also show the number of products that have been released. I had hoped to start investing in new product development and R&D back in 2014, 2015. With those 16 businesses, there seemed to always be one that was having trouble. We were struggling through the quarter. We pushed off hiring the engineers. It's hard to make the commitments.
Once we got to 2020, we had businesses that were strong in their markets, were better able to make forecasts to meet their numbers, and that gave us confidence to make the longer-term commitments in the R&D portfolio, hiring the engineer, building those teams. Once you start developing, because we sell customized components, once the product is developed, the customer has to engineer that into their next generation product. It goes through their development process, then it's released, then begins to ramp. On average, takes about three years from the time we release for a product to start to release its mature level. That's kind of what you see happening here. Even though the releases started in 2023, three, then five, then 16 last year, about 17 this year. Those sales continue to ramp, even with the sales from a couple years ago.
I have to credit William Blair for a report back in, I don't know, '21 or something, Ross? The Fast Growth Vectors. Ross and his team put out a report identifying, I think there were 12 markets, maybe more, that they said would provide outsized growth opportunities for industrial companies. Among them, commercialization of space, defense, grid, smart grid. They said some that didn't apply to us, like smart home. Defense was in there. We went through that list and looked at our sales the prior year were $20 million into those markets. In that current year, which was maybe '22, I can't recall, it'd be $40 million. They grew to $63 million, then $85 million.
We thought, "Well, these guys, they're onto something." We started when we talked with the sales teams, and we looked at where do you want to target new customers, and we look at new product development. Let's solve the needs of customers that serve these fast-growing markets. As a % of our total sales, it grew from 10 to 12 to 23. This year, it'll be 30%, and next year, close to 35%. We'll do a double-click on some of those markets in just a moment. These are examples of some of the new products that are coming out. We've released a new product, a new bushing transformer in our new instrument transformer business. I actually thought we'd have our Rogowski coil in here because we have a patent on a Rogowski coil.
We're trying to inject more innovation into all of our businesses, including our new acquisition. The rocket engine components, this business started out years ago serving space by making fuel tank domes for rockets to take payloads into space. The process that we use to make the fuel tank domes can also be applied to make nozzles, or you can see these combustion liners or this part here. Our content on rockets has increased steadily over the years as we've earned confidence with customers. They approach us about new platforms. "Hey, could you make this part? Could you make this part?" That's an example of how this one came about. On the right, too, we have a new voltage transformer that our instrument transformer business, they just released. This is a plant based in India.
The Indian government is retrofitting all of its railroads with enhanced electrics. This transformer is for Indian Railways. We think in a couple of years, that grows to $10 million. A really nice little adder to our core business. The key markets in our Fast Growth Vectors are these. Power grid, we'll get more into that in more detail in a bit. We currently serve about a $3 billion market, but the near adjacent market is over $10 billion, as I showed on the prior page. This says eight. It's higher than that. Space with our formed components, it's about a $700 million opportunity, expandable to $1.5 billion. We made a recent acquisition to add other processes.
Defense, currently growing about 10%, you all see the same news that we do about the need to replenish missile stockpiles and invest in new munitions, we're involved in those conversations. We think there's upside growth to defense. The biggest element of our Fast Growth Markets with the most attractive near-term growth is our instrument transformer business, which we sell to the electrical equipment OEMs, Schneider, Siemens, Hitachi, ABB, Eaton. We like this end market because there are so many drivers to it long term. Simply, economic growth requires more energy. Replacement of the aging grid in the West will add another two points of growth. The electrification of everything accelerates the need for electrical power. Of course, the data center drive is turbocharging this end market now.
A lot of people ask, "Well, what happens if data centers slow down?" Well, they may someday. There's a much bigger world out there, and the underlying drivers for this business are healthy. You'll see in a moment, we have tremendous expansion opportunities in the market. This is how the market for instrument transformers is split globally. About $12 billion. When we acquired the business, it served that lower left box, India and the U.S., with a little bit of sales into Europe. The European OEMs had been pressing us, the prior owners and now us, to build a plant in Europe. I was in Croatia two weeks ago. We had a grand opening of our new facility in Croatia. That puts us in a market that's three times the size of the one or two and a half times the size of the one served.
Our served market is about $2.5 billion. There's the entire rest of the world, from the Middle East to Africa, the rest of Southeast Asia, we don't really play. The outdoor market, these are the same products, but sold to utilities. It's kind of an aftermarket or an expansion. If Duke Energy or PG&E, they do an expansion or a replacement, they write the specifications. They do the procurement. It's a different sales channel. We don't directly play there. We've hired some salespeople to begin talking with them. There is a certification process to get the customer certification, and it's probably a two-year process. We think long term, we'll gradually expand to be able to serve all of these markets. The big question now is how quickly can we expand capacity?
Demand exceeds our capacity, it's not just us, it's the entire industry. This is a bridge from our current volume to, a look four years from now, end of our fiscal year 2030. As a reminder, when we acquired this business in the end of 2024, this is our fiscal 2025, they did $25 million in that quarter. There was a business, a site in India, one in Texas, making instrument transformers. Last quarter, they did $39 million. We just opened the Croatia plant. We think Croatia, in four years, that will be somewhere between $15 million and $18 million in a quarter. We have found footprint in our existing Mexico plant, that will be $2 million-$6 million a quarter. We've broken ground in Texas. We're going to quadruple our Texas site with more footprint there, with $10 million-$14 million a quarter.
We may very well add another plant outside of our India factory. We have four units in India, may add a fifth. That'd be another $10 million-$12 million. Across all of them, we'll drive productivity through lean, better management practices with automation to improve the performance. India is still largely still operating on a single shift in three of their four units. There's an opportunity to expand capacity there. It's a pretty diversified portfolio capacity expansion actions, to get us to somewhere between $85 million and $110 million per quarter over four years. That'd be $340 million-$440 million in a year. By far, the single biggest driver of growth in the near term with virtually no concerns on the demand side. It's ramping up capacity. Defense and space, just a few quick words about this.
Our sales into missile programs last year, about $9 million. We project next five years for that to grow to $40 million. It could be double that. You all read the same things I do. We're talking with the contractors, we're talking with the government to try to figure out how to make a long-term commitment to these higher volumes. Even $9 million - $40 million is $30 million growth from the missile programs. The space economy is growing rapidly too. We work with everybody that makes large rockets to take payloads into space. Whereas a few years ago, we had three customers, now we have 12 customers. There are more startups all the time in the space industry. We made an acquisition just over a year ago in California. McStarlite was the trade name.
With our presence in space, we have been able to introduce McStarlite to more space customers. We think as we play with those customers in that arena, there'll be more opportunity for us in space. We will continue to do acquisitions within those engineered components categories. In that very first page, I showed to you that we've got a current attractive $10 billion served available market through those businesses. With acquisitions, we can expand into adjacent technology so we can solve a bigger problem for the same customers. This is our history with acquisitions. On the very top, you see our leverage and how we've managed that. The highest we got was after the fall, late 2024 acquisition, we got to 2.9. This last quarter, we've worked that down to 1.9 x. Just a list of all the acquisitions. Oh, I guess the spacing.
We acquired about $350 million of sales and divested about $465 million. For those of you who have watched this for a while, back in 2018, 2019, when we were going through the biggest piece of our portfolio transformation, it was fairly turbulent. It's not easy to do that as a public company. I'm really proud of the team and the way we executed, and you can see we were nine percent operating income going into it, came out about 20% operating income with much better profile in markets, stronger competitive advantages. One thing we don't really highlight in this presentation, which is, I guess, the second most important thing to understand about the company. The first is the strategy is much cleaner and gives decades of execution and runway. The second thing is the caliber of the leaders everywhere in the business is so much stronger.
I'd start with the board of directors. When I started in 2014, we still had a family member of the founder, friends of the founder. Now you look at our board, several investors, some of you have pointed out to me, we kind of punch above our weight with the caliber of our board. We have board members from Ecolab, from Eaton, which is very important for us now. Parker Hannifin, the woman who led all the acquisitions there for 15 years. We learn a lot from our board of directors. If you look at the C-suite executives, the C-suite executives all come from companies that are some years farther down the road than we are, and we're in the process of looking at how do we build scalable systems so we can scale efficiently and meet our opportunity.
I may be more excited about the caliber of the people running our businesses, the presidents, their teams, and the deep bench we have. There's a lot more talent in the company. I'm really pleased at the team we've been able to put on the field. Here's a couple examples of a couple great acquisitions. We could have put the recent Amran/Narayan acquisition on there. It's maybe too soon, it is performing very well. We're super happy with that. We acquired the Horizon Scientific business back in 2016 for $32 million, and it has generated $175 million of cash in that time, and it's generating nearly the purchase price in EBIT. Not quite, it's close to 20. The OKI Sensor business, we acquired the reed switch business in 2017, and that unlocked great opportunities for us in this customized electronics components.
It gives us a privileged position for position sensors, level sensors, and we have early visibility because we sell the switch. We have early visibility to developments going on within the OEMs. If there's a curious order for a small handful of parts from an OEM, we can call them and say, "Hey, what are you working on?" That often opens up a sensor opportunity for us. You can see financially, the margins have improved and they've become very valuable to the Standex business. Capital allocation. If you look back four years, about 65% of our cash went to acquisitions, 14% CapEx. We did some buybacks. We were more aggressive with buybacks after COVID. We're somewhat opportunistic about buybacks. We always counter the dilution from executive compensation. After COVID, there were times when we were clearly undervalued in the market.
We got a little more aggressive. We got an additional authorization from the board, which we executed over a couple of years. The one thing that may change here is the CapEx may increase. We used to show the growth and expansion capital at about three percent of sales. We think with the capacity expansion, which I showed earlier, I forgot to highlight this. To add all this capacity for grid, down in the bottom, we estimate the CapEx for this expansion, about $35 million. If you imagine the margin in a quarter, one quarter from that expansion will more than pay for the CapEx. We're not building semiconductor fab plants here, so it's not $1 billion to create a plant. Relatively inexpensive. The machines are pretty simple.
It has more to do with setting up the supply chain, hiring the teams, and ramping capacity that way. Even so, that would probably increase our growth CapEx a bit from our historic, which is wonderful. Key takeaways. We feel like we're on the verge of demonstrating we have an organic growth engine that will drive us well into the future. We have a clear, well-articulated strategy to drive these engineered components businesses into fast-growing markets. We have a high-performance team all the way from our teams in the businesses, to the C-suite, to the board of directors. We have great investors who are full of great advice for us as well, and I think overall, the system is working well and we feel very confident about where we're at and look forward to continuing the journey.
All right.
Okay.
Thank you, David.
You could come up here, Ross. Just step up here.
Thank you, David. You noted no issues on demand on the grid side, and it looks like we're moving those CapEx capacity targets higher. Maybe just speak to what you're hearing in the environment from your customers. I get a sense that data centers are a big part of it, but there's also a supply chain consolidation element as well. What's just underwriting the confidence for these investments?
Supply chains relative to us, you mean?
The markets.
You mean.
Supplier consolidation.
I think I know what you mean. I went to one of our large OEMs, their annual innovation conference in Las Vegas, and they had a day for suppliers. They have 2,500 suppliers. They invited the top 50. In our review with them, they sat down and said, "Okay. We like the way you guys work. We like our relationship to be bigger." They laid out for us examples of some other products they would like us to supply to them that make sense based on what they procure. Is that kind of what you're talking about? That consolidation?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just the level of demand, kind of what is really underwriting these investments and it looked like $340-$440 target.
for the instrument transformers in the coming years.
Yeah. Maybe my engineer's not catching that. What's driving the demand? It's hard to say what the demand is now because demand outstrips capacity in the industry entirely. Obviously, I'm saying things that probably aren't answering your question. Obviously, data centers, they're still replacement of the aging grid. There's expansions in other parts of the world that we serve. Help me.
It's good.
track. Okay. All right.
Just one more I wanted to get out there since this is being webcasted. Recent managerial changes with the CFO position, and you've been in the company for almost 10 years, and it's not like we're trying to get rid of you right now.
Yeah
What are your long-term plans with the company?
Yeah. With a minute and 50 seconds. I've been here more than 10 years, 12 years. Time flies. If I were an investor looking at the company, I'd say, "Okay." I'd see, "Okay, the CEO's not a spring chicken." I'll tell you, Standex, we are in the most exciting period, I think, in the history of the company, certainly since I've been here. For 12 years, I've been working to get us to this position where we have the organic growth engine, and we are just managing upside rather than kind of firefighting problems. I'm engaged, I'm energized, I'm really enjoying the job. You asked about me, so I'll start with me, then zoom out. There's still some things I want to get done here. We have some numbers out there for 2028.
We say we can get to $1.1 billion in sales, 23% operating income. That's just an extension of what I've shown you here. I think we're on the verge of doing that. I want to prove that we've got the organic growth engine and that is operating. That plus the streamlined strategy sets us up for a long-term run for the business and for all the employees of the company. You mentioned the management changes. When you think about leadership succession, I mentioned that we have higher caliber talent everywhere, from the Board to the C-suite and in the businesses. With the business, we've been talking about my transition for years, and we have plans to handle all contingencies should something happen with me. We have an emergency plan. We also are developing internal candidates. You mentioned recent announcement. We announced that Ademir will run the Electronics business.
One thing you need to understand, for a company like Standex, the CFO is essentially chief operating officer. Ademir in the CFO role, he was in the plants, he was with the businesses, he was in the strategy sessions. He did a fantastic job as CFO, and here's a chance for him to pull together everything he's learned, work with the team, and show what he's got to run a business.
Fantastic. Well, thank you for your time.
All right. Thank you.
Breakout in Room A starting in 10 minutes.