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Yep.
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All righty. Thank you, everybody, for attending. Up next, we have Twin Disc on NASDAQ under symbol TWIN. On behalf of the company, we have John Batten, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Jeffrey Knutson, VP of Finance, CFO, Treasurer, and Secretary.
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Just a quick disclosure on the safe harbor. I know you're all fully aware of that. Just going to give you a quick high. I'm not going to read every word, but just give you some ideas to take away when we're done who we are, and I'll get into it in a couple of slides. We are a global power transmission manufacturer. Global power transmission is not transmitting electricity over wires. We basically make gearboxes, control systems, clutches, and things like that that make equipment move. Where we are right now, we're in a very good atmosphere as far as defense spending. We'll talk about the things that have changed, whether it's Navy here in the U.S. or defense spending in trucks with NATO in Europe. A lot of things going on to improve margin.
We'll talk about moving things around the world to different points of assembly and test. We'll talk about our recent acquisitions. We've been going 100 years without doing very many. We've done three in the last seven years. Today, strong cash flow generation and what we're going to do with that cash. A quick overview of Twin Disc. We've been around for 107 years, always based in Wisconsin. We recently moved our corporate headquarters to Milwaukee, but our single largest point of manufacture is in Racine, Wisconsin. We also have a facility here in Lufkin, Texas, as well. We're about 1,000 employees around the world. Most of those, the largest share is in Europe, which when you look at these slides, I'll get to in a second. We finished up the year at just under $341 million and a gross margin of just over 27%.
When people look at our business, they tend to put us in one of two categories: products that go on the land, products that go on the water. Historically, those have been evenly split around 50/50. If it's a strong oil and gas year, land base will be higher. In a normal year, marine will slightly be higher. Our recent acquisitions in Europe have really driven the percentage up more on the marine and propulsion. You look at what's also happened in the revenue by geography. Historically, it was dominated by North America. North America, the U.S. and Canada were probably two-thirds of the business. With our acquisitions of Veth and Katsa in Europe, it shifted. With oil and gas having somewhat of a down year, North America was our third largest geography segment after Europe and Asia.
As I mentioned, we went through really 1999 with the acquisition of the Rockford Powertrain product line and Technodrive, a small gearbox manufacturer in Italy. We really had not done very many acquisitions. A couple of cycles, more than a couple, with the current management team and those before us in oil and gas, particularly fracking, of going way up and way down. We made the conscious decision in 2015 that we were going to try to diversify heavily away from oil and gas, not get rid of oil and gas products, but find new products in new markets. That led in 2018 to our largest acquisition in the history of the company, which was Veth Propulsion. You will see some pictures of their product. They do Azimuth Thrusters that propel vessels.
If you think of a river cruise boat in Europe going up and down the Rhine, that was their typical application. We have since, and I'll get into how we've grown their business around the world. Coming out of COVID, we did two kind of back-to-back. We did Katsa in Finland, a gear component manufacturer and gearbox manufacturer. We just recently, this year, acquired Kobelt in Vancouver. They do a line of marine ship controls and industrial brakes. Just to quickly get an idea of what our products look like. In marine and propulsion, this could be a workboat. It could be a patrol boat. This just happens to be a mega yacht where our Veth thrusters are on. Typically, they're all diesel-powered or hybrid, diesel and electric-powered. Land-based transmissions, this is by far our largest part of land-based transmission.
These are airport rescue firefighting vehicles. Most of our customers, we have number one and two in this segment, Rosenbauer out of Austria and NAFFCO out of Dubai. We also make transmissions for frack rigs, specialty oil servicing rigs, rail maintenance of way, and some defense applications as well. Industrial would be our oldest product segment and our most broad. We make dry clutches, wet clutches, reduction gearboxes for all sorts of mobile applications, whether rock crushers, wood chippers, recycling, construction equipment, pavement, that such. Very broad and very global market. Again, looking at what's changed in the last 12 months, certainly the defense spending, both in the U.S. and in Europe, has been probably the single biggest change in the last 12 months. There's some 13%. This is old by a few months. It's only gone up.
Year-over-year increase in the defense spending and 150% increase in NATO defense spending. What we're seeing as part of Twin Disc is we're seeing this in the autonomous vessels for the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps. What we're seeing in our factory in Finland is a rapid increase in orders for all-wheel-drive trucks for the NATO fleet. Just see our products. It's marine transmissions. It's propulsion systems. It's transmissions and gearboxes. We're seeing demand across all of our product lines as far as the transmission. Where it's showing up for us is our backlog, 15% increase in the backlog for it represents, sorry, 15% of our backlog is now for defense products. It's a 45% increase year over year. What's not on the backlog, which is kind of in projects that we think are going to fall, is in that $50 million-$75 million range.
Can, again, push the backlog up even further. Just a quick glimpse at our strategy, which is driving us to our targets at fiscal 2030 of $500 million in revenue, 30% gross margins, and a 60% free cash flow conversion. For 100 years, our markets have been relatively, I would say, the same as we put a clutch or a gearbox, and that could be a gearbox in a tractor. It could be an all-wheel-drive truck, military vehicle, or boat behind a diesel engine that's turning axles or turning propeller shaft. There has been a definite push across our products into the hybrid and electric space.
We are doing projects in all of our markets where we've gained the most traction and seen the most traction with the success of our customers into their market has been in marine, which is interesting because it's the one place where you're not regenerating, braking into creating more electricity. It seems we have the most traction. Most of the applications that we're doing now with Veth in the Netherlands are diesel-electric. Their thrusters are being driven by electric motors. Instead of diesel engines for main propulsions, it's diesel engines as a genset. We have seen this. It's also hybrid. We're seeing this filter through into some of our marine transmission applications around the world. Same technology that we're able to use that we've developed in the Netherlands on our marine transmissions built in Belgium or the U.S. or Japan and other applications.
We're seeing this as the biggest success. Somewhat hindered by, I would say, and I'll get to that, the supply chain in batteries and motors has been complicated, but we continue to make progress there. We're also looking, again, where we've had a lot of success is when we acquired Veth. They were a $40 million company. They finished the year at $80 million, and they'll be close to $100 million this year. What was unique, and we saw the opportunity, is they were very much a regional player. Most of their sales were in Europe, almost all of it. Most of those sales were in the Netherlands building vessels for the inland rivers. We've been very successful. The only pause really was during the COVID time. We were very successful in bringing those products to the U.S.
and also their diesel-electric drives to the mega yacht market in Italy. Their single largest customer now is our distributor in the U.S. with multiple different customers here. This one, the rationalize, our global footprint. If you'd have asked me 12 months ago, this would mean something a little bit different than it does today. We have manufacturing assets and resources obviously in North America and Europe and a JV in Japan. Most of our competitors do not. They're all in Europe. They're all in America, or they're all in Asia. Where we were looking to consolidate production and maybe downsize a facility, it's becoming clear in the age of tariffs that the trend of globalization has reversed and it's much more protectionist. We are bursting in the seams in the Netherlands. We're bursting at the seams in Finland.
Some of these products, if they're intended for the U.S., they're going to be domesticated here and vice versa. Product that we build just solely in the U.S., like ARFF transmissions that go mostly to Europe and Asia, we're going to have to move those around into theater. What has been, you would say, may have been a drag on our strategy is now turning out to be an asset because we are unique in our competitive landscape as to where our facilities are. Another thing that really sets us apart from a lot of our competitors is our development of control systems. We've been at this electronic controls for 30 years. We acquired new technology, new philosophy with Veth and Kobelt. They do a whole range of electronic controls.
The synergies between the three, the product development, the standardization, what our teams have done on hybrid controls, whether it's for vessels or for vehicles, has been astounding. This is where we're really leveraging bundling packages together for our customers based on the controls and the systems. Our M&A strategy, we think we've had a very good history of finding and developing long relationships with companies that are smaller in that $20 million-$50 million range, family-owned, very regional, acquiring them like that, bringing them into the family and expanding their breadth and their opportunity through our global network. We think we're on the way with Katsa and Kobelt. We're looking for those types of acquisitions to bring into the fold. Just going back to hybrid and electric and why is it important to us and what is the opportunity?
We see the push in regulation legislation on the powertrain becoming more efficient. Our customers recognize it. They are also looking for help in these solutions because a lot of our customers, if it's a Volvo Penta or a Caterpillar, certainly they have internal capabilities. If it's some of the smaller players, they do not have internal capabilities. That is why we've spent years developing our hybrid control relationships with battery manufacturers, motor manufacturers. It really does provide us the opportunity with the system on significantly more content. On one pleasure craft vessel, if we sold two $15,000 transmissions for $30,000, we are selling a complete hybrid system for about $280,000. There is more work involved, but there is certainly a bigger payback. We see this as definitely an opportunity. We have applications in all of these across the bottom.
As I mentioned, workboat passenger vessels have been the two that are finding more success. Certainly in the pleasure craft space, with the diesel-electric, we're finding a lot of success. Industrial and E-Frac, we just got our two orders for two first spreads in the E-Frac arena. I'll get to that in a bit. Just looking at what we're trying to do in creating a standard package for the pleasure craft market. This is our test boat. It's a 48-foot Riviera. It's based in Australia. One of the problems with hybrid is there's no standard. It's not a Toyota Prius where you develop it once and you sell 16 million vehicles. Everybody is trying to do it themselves, coming from the design of the boat or whatever, a naval architect. We're looking at it in terms of the manufacturer.
We spent a considerable amount of time working with different battery and motor manufacturers, developing a system that we think is market-ready. We are testing this down in Australia with our team there on a system that we think hopefully we can bring the price down and make it more affordable, more standardized so that we can get more of these out into the market and reduce the amount of diesel fuel that people use on these.
Jeff, I'll turn it over to you on the back. Thanks.
Thank you. Covering a few more slides here, the Veth expansion and sort of expanding on what John was saying, the success of that acquisition and why we want to continue that strategy. You can see here when we acquired Veth, shortly thereafter, they were at about $45 million in revenue. Last year, they did $83 million. This year, they're going to do something north of $90 million up to $100 million. We have seen our ability to take these regional companies that are selling basically to their home markets, limited by their resources, typically privately held, family-owned, in markets and with products that we understand, we can take that business, those products, and take them around the world with our global sales and support network. That is something that we have that many companies do not.
We have a presence around the world and a reputation for quality and service that gives them immediate credibility when we go into that market. At least it opens the door and allows them to get their foot in the door and be able to sell their product. John mentioned about the geographic footprint. Here it is in all its glory. It's all over the place. We've got three locations in the U.S. or in North America, two in the U.S., one in Canada, five in Europe. We've got a company-owned distribution in Australia and Singapore, a sourcing office in India, a joint venture in Japan. We are complicated. For a $350 million company, it's a pretty big footprint. It is something that has pluses and minuses, certainly. I think what we are seeing today, hopefully, are the pluses.
It gives us a lot of opportunity to consider where we make things for what markets. We can assemble frac units for Chinese consumption in Singapore and avoid tariff situations. We can assemble ARFF transmissions in Europe for European consumption and potentially avoid tariffs. That complicated footprint that we will continue to make sure we optimize today gives us some good potential levers to help the business. Given the success of Veth and the early success of Katsa and Kobelt that John mentioned, we see that as a real core strength of ours and a real growth driver as we go forward. There are a lot of opportunities like that out there. There aren't a lot of companies our size that would be interested in a $20 million-$40 million, $50 million company. For us, it's important. It's significant. And they're companies that we can integrate.
We can see a real path to growth, and we can give them the kind of attention that they need. We will continue to do that. There is a good pipeline. The more we do it, the better we get at it. The more we execute the synergies that we have laid out, the more confidence the market has, the more confidence our board has, and really the more confidence that the seller has dealing with us. They can see our track record, what we have done with the companies that we have bought, how their employees were treated, how their customers were treated, and how their business was allowed to grow. We have gotten more introductions and more pipeline participants than we ever have because of that experience.
These are a couple of the recent ones that I think John mentioned: Katsa in Finland, Kobelt in Canada, Katsa privately held, family-owned company looking to really generationally move out of the business and wanting to make sure that their legacy, a multi-generational legacy in their community, was maintained. It really came down to a good relationship with us, a comfort level with us, obviously a competitive price. I think what we are able to do in this deal and the Kobelt deal is not just buy on price. We are dealing with sellers that are not just interested in price. They are interested in their legacy. They feel good about selling to us. We feel really comfortable with the strategy and with our ability to help their business grow. The valuations that we get are actually very good.
As we look at, as we buy these companies, we generate cash, we pay debt down. In terms of capital allocation priorities, debt reduction right now is a focus. We did two acquisitions in the last couple of years. Our net debt to EBITDA is still very low. We'd like to get gross debt down to as low as we can as we entertain another acquisition, really just give ourselves a lot of wiggle room to make that acquisition be what it needs to be. Is it a $20 million acquisition? Is it an $80 million acquisition? Right now, we're focused on making sure we drive debt down, maintaining the dividend. We had a dividend pause for about six years. We brought it back a couple of years ago. We feel really good about our ability to maintain that dividend as part of our capital allocation priority.
Continuing to invest in organic growth. John mentioned Katsa has a big opportunity in the defense market. Here in the U.S., we have a big opportunity in defense on the marine side. Veth continues to grow. That is the acquisition in the Netherlands. We will continue to invest in that, provide the machine tools, the investment in R&D. For us, the bolt-on and transformational acquisitions, that is a key to us getting to what we have laid out as our target for 2030, $500 million. We did, say, $340 million last year. We will continue, we believe, to grow organically. We can get probably to $400 million in that window without any footprint changes, without any acquisitions. We feel that to get there, $500 million is very achievable.
Doing one or two more acquisitions, we might very well shoot past that $500 million at the rate that we've executed the last couple of years. I think that's a really good target for us to get out there. In terms of share repurchase, it hasn't been a priority of ours. I think for us, a dividend is more important. Our ability to allocate capital into growth engines, into acquisitions, into organic growth is a better use of our capital. I think going back to the highlights, the investment highlights, we're a leader in the global markets that we play in. We have a diverse product portfolio, diverse end market portfolio. We're well positioned for the tailwinds in defense. I think that's something that two years ago, we wouldn't have expected. Sitting here today, it provides us a great opportunity.
We are in a great position, across the globe, to participate. We have seen margin improvements. I think as we integrate these acquisitions, get them more disciplined around what they do, how they do it, how they price, how they contain costs, we are seeing good growth in margins. We expect to see continued margin expansion as we integrate those acquisitions and continue to generate strong cash flow, do the acquisitions, but maintain a balance sheet that we feel comfortable when we go to bed at night, that we are not overextended, that we are in good shape and ready to take advantage of future opportunities. That might be the last slide. I think so. Any questions from the group for John or I?
For those of us who are not engineers, would you help us understand why customers are choosing to go down the hybrid electric front? Pose the question with the backdrop that it's still a diesel generator, whether it's running genset or running?
Sure. The broader question of why people are going diesel, electric, or hybrid, it's either a selling feature because a customer, whether it's our customer, shipbuilder, whatever, thinks that having something that's more fuel efficient will help them sell more in the marketplace. It's seen as greener. Second would be they're forced to because of legislation. You have a third one where it truly is cost-effective to operate a vessel or a piece of equipment purely electric. It makes more sense. It's more economical. We have customers in all three. For instance, the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls, we have our Veth thrusters on that. It makes a lot of sense. You plug it in, you charge it overnight, you take a tour, you come back, you can recharge while one group's getting off the next. It just makes sense.
They're burning no diesel fuel. It wasn't that much more expensive than a traditional vessel. There's a big payback. I'll get to the tougher diesel electric can be. Not as if you're operating all the time, it's probably not as fuel efficient. On yachts and other things where you're not operating that much, operating a diesel genset at an ideal RPM and then propelling the vessel or operating it as a condominium, as most of them are, it does make more sense. A lot of times when you're just loitering and going at slow speed, you're not operating the diesel engine at optimum speed. You're at idle speed. You're wasting more fuel and it's not good for the engine. That's where the trade-off is on diesel electric.
The other thing that diesel electric allows you to do is you're much more flexible on where you put the engines. Typically on a yacht or some type of vessel that has diesel electric, usually you'd have an engine, a gearbox, and a propeller shaft. That was somewhere in the back two-thirds of the vessel, and that space wasn't really usable. With diesel electric, you can put the engines, you can bury them in the bottom of the boat. There's no propeller shaft. You run cabling to the thrusters and you gain an entire estate room on a yacht. All of these things start to play out where diesel electric is becoming the more preferred propulsion system for larger yachts and things like that.
The other one, hybrid, hybrid is where you can run purely on internal combustion diesel or you can flip a switch and run the propeller shaft through electric batteries to electric motor. Those are the most expensive, the most complicated, and the heaviest. Those are ones that are challenging. Those are the ones honestly a lot of customers gravitate to because they look at it as its reliability. It's like if something goes wrong, I can still have electric. Those are also the most complicated systems and the most expensive. That was a really long answer for a simple question. I'm sorry. I know there's someone over here.
You talked quite a bit about the tax budget being increased in Europe and North America. How do you plan to capitalize on those community?
Yeah. Thankfully, as of right now, we have the capacity. The marine transmissions, most of them built for the autonomous, most of those right now are built in Racine. We have capacity. We grow. These are marine transmissions that we built for the offshore supply vessels, the crew boats. We also have some coming in from Belgium. We may assemble some of those in Lufkin here in Texas. It is a trickier issue in Europe for the trucks because that volume is going up. We probably will assemble and test a good chunk of those at our facility in Belgium. Also, obviously in Europe where we have capacity. We have to be careful because we are already moving some of the Veth product line, that is, we are running out of room in the Netherlands. We are also moving that to Belgium.
It is a bit of a challenge, but we think that we can fit both of those growing demands overflow in Belgium. I think there was one more.
Maybe two, but what about this in June? It looked like you were in August when Melissa made a step change. Was it something?
That was in August, I think.
Yeah. I mean, we're that good, I think. No, yeah, finally got recognition. No, I think.
We can't explain why it dropped that much and why it went back up.
I think, and we've had that question today. This was my answer, I guess. I think we were unfairly penalized as a company, as a micro cap in sort of unfavorable markets maybe. We got dropped out of the Russell 3000. We're a small company, not a lot of public float. It's a little bit hard to get a lot of momentum in the stock. I think a lot of people were, we've had a lot of these discussions at these kinds of conferences about the story. A lot of the hesitation has been execution of the strategy. Let's see it. We've talked about the acquisitions, what it's going to do, how we're going to grow. I think through last year, we built some credibility and then delivered a really good fourth quarter.
I think that's in some ways flipped a switch. Some significant new shareholders got into the stock and it built some momentum. I think to me, it was long overdue. I think it's just the start of where the stock should be going. You had another one though, right?
Longer term, maybe hopefully tariffs won't be a question that we have to ask about. It is causing you to make some strategic changes for better or for worse. Why? Does that make sense going forward?
Yeah.
Because you're not being where you think so, but moving your production?
Yeah. I'll answer. Talking to our congressmen, talking to our former congressmen, talking to our Europeans, I don't think tariffs may come down, but I don't want to, I think tariffs are here to stay. If you ask me, I believe that the left side of the aisle is ecstatic that Trump did this. It's something they always wanted to do and they didn't have the courage to do it. Now that it's done, they can blame him. I think that the days of single-digit tariffs are gone for a while. I think that there's going to be some, it may not be 50% on parts. It may not be 15% on finished goods, but it's going to be more than what we've, so it's going to be more of a factor on where you produce than it has been in the last 20 years.
For us, some of the easy things we can do, Lufkin is in a free trade zone. We can import parts from overseas. Ninety percent of our transmission, the airport rescue firefighting, you saw I was talking about Rosenbauer. Ninety percent of those are shipped back overseas. In Racine, if the parts come to Wisconsin, we pay full tariff. We assemble them in the transmission. We charge our customers a surcharge based on the tariff. They're angry because they had to pay more for Trump's tariffs and they're not in the U.S. If we do all that assembly and test that was done in Racine for those in Lufkin, they don't pay a surcharge because we're not charged a tariff. There are things that are easier to do.
I think long term, this is going to be more of an issue than it has been in the past because I really don't think tariffs are going to go away. Back to the level that we saw before Trump. I think we have to prepare that these are here to stay. Maybe not at this level, but it's not going back to where it was. It's too cynic. It's too easy of a revenue stream for all governments. It's just like no one's going to want to give it up. That's my opinion.
Anybody else?