Okay, we'll move right along, and we're honored to have our next guest with us today, Mr. Frank Connor, the CFO of Textron. Textron is a world leader in business jet, general Aviation, helicopter, tiltrotor aircraft. The company operates in four segments: Aviation, Bell Helicopter, Systems , and Industrial. Textron has 190 million shares. They trade at about $89 for a $17 billion market cap, $1.6 billion of net debt, for an almost $19 billion enterprise value. Welcome, Frank. We'll have a nice discussion here. Thanks for coming here, Frank.
Great to be here.
Frank, it's always great having you here. Thank you for making the time to come back.
My pleasure.
You know, I think most people are familiar with Textron, but maybe you could just go in a little more depth and give us a little brief background in Textron.
Sure. A quick spin around the businesses. So, our largest business is Textron Aviation. That's primarily the Cessna and Beechcraft brands of aircraft. Bell Helicopter is our next Aviation business, and obviously making both commercial and military helicopters, and particularly in the military side, the tiltrotor aircraft, so the V-22, and now the FLRAA program, the V-280 aircraft. Our other defense-oriented business is Textron Systems. There we play in a lot of different domains in that business. We are in basically the air, sea, and ground areas.
We have a strong presence in unmanned air vehicles, increasingly in unmanned and robotic ground vehicles, as well as in the sea domain. Historically programs like the Ship-to-Shore Connector for the Marines, so hovercraft again, technically a flying aircraft. Our fourth manufacturing segment is our Industrial segment, which is comprised of Textron Specialized Vehicles. A number of brands there, E-Z-GO, Jacobsen. We're in the ground support equipment business through TUG, and so you know, but primarily, you know, kind of battery-electric vehicles more and more, but also internal combustion vehicles there as well.
And then Kautex, which historically has been a fuel system supplier to the automotive industry, and increasingly we've been investing in the transition to electric vehicles as well, and so we've been investing in technologies in and around battery enclosures for the electric vehicle space. Our last manufacturing segment is relatively small. It's something that we formed about a year ago. It is Textron eAviation, and that segment is focused on the transition to alternative propulsion platforms in Aviation. So we consolidated a number of our activities in and around battery technologies, hybrid, hydrogen, as well as some automation and autonomous systems.
We bought a small company in Europe called Pipistrel, which had a presence in electric Aviation with the only certified electric aircraft in the world, and we are investing in that segment, in these technologies, both in platforms, as well as technologies that we would then push out to our other Aviation businesses. And then lastly, we have a small finance business that supports our various product.
Frank, that's a great overview. You guys are, you have a lot of things going on at Textron, which is great. Maybe we'll just start off with the Aviation segment. Could you talk about order activity and backlog for your business, all forms of your business aircraft and turboprops?
Yeah. So, as you know, we... Coming out of the pandemic, we saw a really nice increase in the demand side for business Aviation, frankly, both on the business jets, but also, turboprops. So we have a very broad product line at our Aviation business, everywhere, everything from our largest business aircraft, the Longitude, down through M2, which is our smallest jets, but also on the turboprop side, the King Air brand name. We've recently introduced the SkyCourier, which is a two-engine, unpressurized turboprop, so a very broad product set there. We reported at the end of the second quarter, $7.5 billion of backlog.
That's up again, very substantially, from the pre-pandemic period, and it gives us great visibility on, you know, kind of our forward delivery activity. So pre-pandemic, you know, we were basically manufacturing to a forecast. Post-pandemic here, with this type of backlog, obviously, we know, you know, that represents about two years or so of aircraft OEM sales. So we have really nice visibility on, what that manufacturing flow needs to be. Obviously, it creates a nice dynamic with the customers in terms of being able to forward plan their acquisition opportunities, and really, you know, kind of presents a very nice foundation in terms of a rational marketplace for the product.
You know, this question's come up quite a bit on calls, but just managing huge backlog and demand with production and not getting, you know, quote, unquote, "over your skis," and overcapacitizing from 2025 and beyond. Can you just sort of talk about the dynamics there and how you think about it?
Sure. You know, it's been a continuing dialogue, but let's put it in context. Pre-financial crisis, the Cessna and Beechcraft platforms delivered well over 400 business jets a year, right? Last year, we delivered about 170 business jets. So you're talking about an order of magnitude change in terms of the volume that we are producing in this environment relative to some of those historical environments, where arguably, the market got oversupplied, and as people know, who have watched us for a long time, you know, we took a long time to work our way through that, where those aircraft aged and basically got removed from competing consistently with new aircraft, from a demand standpoint.
I think we're at a very. We're undersupplying the market right now, I would suggest, by you know, kind of the consistently strong book-to-bill. We would like to build more aircraft, but as we've talked about consistently, the industry has seen supply chain challenges. That's gotten better, but you need 100% of the parts in order to deliver an aircraft, and so we continue to work through that. We've seen some labor shortages as we've looked to ramp production. It has been hard to attract and mostly retain very early career people coming into a manufacturing environment. We've talked about, we've had attrition levels of upwards of 50% for those new hires in the factory environment. I think that, you know, we're seeing a better trend there.
We're doing a lot in terms of trying to better screen from a selection standpoint. We've invested in new training facilities and new training programs. We've increased our mentoring activity, and so we're doing a lot of things to, you know, kind of alleviate that. But if anything, you know, we, we have underperformed what we would like to do in terms of our increase in manufacturing activity. So I think in, at least in the near term, we would look to continue to, you know, kind of grow our manufacturing activity. But certainly, if we saw a significant change in the marketplace, we have plenty of visibility to adjust, you know, kind of our manufacturing activity and that ramp to reflect that change in the marketplace. And, you know, kind of there's...
Every quarter, everyone's waiting for the book-to-bill number, you know, and people are waiting for book-to-bill to be below one-to-one, and, you know, kind of that's a sign that the market has turned over, and the fundamentals have changed and everything else. We will have a quarter where it's below one-to-one, right? But if you just do the math on a 0.8 book-to-bill, you know, you could have a 0.8 book-to-bill for a couple of years and still have pretty good visibility into what your near-term delivery activity is. So there's plenty of time to adjust. Having said all that, you know, I'd say, you know, we talked about on the second quarter call, we continue to see very good customer engagement, order activity. The summer is typically a slower period, but that engagement level remains consistent.
So still, you know, seeing good demand, good engagement, continuing to book orders.
What are sort of the... Could you maybe talk about? You talked about, you briefly went over supply chain and labor, but what are sort of the long poles in the tent on the supply chain? Are there specific items, or is it sort of spread loaded, or it?
You know, the frustration is it just moves around, right? So, again, you don't know. We spend a tremendous amount of time out with the supply base trying to, you know, kind of ascertain, are they having problems? Are their lead times expanding and everything else? But then you get surprised. And, you know, again, the way airplanes are assembled, and they come down the production line, there's a certain sequence to things, right? So as soon as you don't have that part, you start working around, you're doing things out of order, you're increasing cost, introducing inefficiency. Very importantly, you're creating more of a demand on oversight because you're creating non-standard work, which we've seen in the industry, you know, is a big-time problem. And so all of those things kind of cascade themselves.
It's been everything from, for a while, it was aluminum spars, where you can't really even start an airplane until you have that spar, so that alleviated itself. People have talked about, you know, there's been shortages of, Aviation glass recently, so cockpits, right? So we're having, you know, kind of trouble getting enough, windshields, which, you know, we need obviously product- for production, but windshields crack from time to time. So you have aircraft on the ground unable to fly because you're not able to supply windshields. But it's. I wish it was consistent because then we could effectively deal with it, you know, through, you know, some better planning, but it tends to be sporadic.
And then maybe on the order side, are there parts of the demand where there's just more? What is seeing the most demand right now? Where is the-
Yeah, you know, it, it really is consistent. And, you know, if, if you just step back, again, I've kind of talked about a little bit about the product portfolio, but, you know, we, we made the decision to continue to invest through a very difficult period of time in the business. And so, our product, when you look at it, I mentioned before, the Longitude, which is our largest aircraft, you know, is, is a relatively new aircraft, introduced from an introductory into service. The Latitude on down through the CJ line, as well as through the Beechcraft line, we have done upgrades or introduced new product in really all of those various categories.
Going into this cycle, I think we were very well positioned from a product standpoint to do very effectively in the marketplace, and we've continued to do that. You know, that's paying off for good demand across, you know, all of the various product platforms. Business jets tend to be more Americas-centric, so North America, South America are very good markets. U.S. is by far the biggest and best market. That continues, and we're seeing, you know, that same trend. Turboprops tends to be more broadly distributed with international probably being 50% over time of that business. And we're seeing, we continue to see that as well. In terms of, you know, various customer segments, the fractional players continue to do quite well in the marketplace.
We're seeing good demand from traditional customers, we're seeing, you know, new people entering the marketplace, and we're seeing the typical demand out of all the other areas that use aircraft, governments, agencies, you know, kind of, you name it, it's there. So there's no real, you know, kind of change in any of those areas for us.
Maybe we can shift to the Bell business and sort of the Big Kahuna, the FLRAA. You just completed Milestone B. What's the outlook now for the V-280 program now that you're sort of into more of the engineering phase and increase?
Sure. So we feel really good about one, having won the program, obviously, and secondly, the important move into the Milestone B. So we're moving officially into the EMD phase of that program. That's a big step for the program. We feel very good about the progress that we're making. We are continuing to work with the customer on, you know, releasing engineering drawings, getting supply chain in place, all the things that go with, you know, this phase of the program. There's a tremendous amount of interaction there has been since the award, and up until EMD phase, with elements of the customer that we hadn't interacted with during the, you know, the OTA phase. So, you know, just stepping back, we've been investing in this program for over a decade.
We were competing against Sikorsky. We built and flew a prototype, we demonstrated the capability of the tiltrotor technology, and then we won the program, so from a design standpoint and everything else, the program was quite mature when we won the program relative to a lot of new starts, but there's a lot that changes as you get, you know, kind of all these other constituencies involved, so we're working through that, the digital models, the MOSA compliance, all of those types of things. We're now, you know, as I said, we're working through that EMD phase. The next big step is first flight in 2026.
We expect to, you know, kind of deliver that initial aircraft to the Army for first flight in 2026, and the team is hard at work executing on that.
You know, you have other, obviously, programs in Bell, more legacy ones. Could you walk us through maybe the phasing, and transition of the V-22 and H-1 production over the next few years?
Sure. So, both of those programs are in the later stages of their manufacturing cycle. The V-22 has been a tremendous program for us. I think it's been a tremendous asset for the military. It's utilized by the Marines very extensively, the Air Force and the Navy. We just saw five additional units added to that program, so that takes manufacturing out through 2027 in terms of new aircraft deliveries. And we would expect that over time, there'll be upgrade activity on the V-22. There's been a lot of press recently about the V-22's reliability. The V-22 safety record is very consistent with lots of other military aircraft and rotorcraft. It is a, you know, these aircraft operate in difficult, harsh environments.
Every mishap and accident is absolutely tragic, but the V-22 has been used extensively for decades and continues to be flown, as I said, by those three military services. We'll continue to work with them on continuing to upgrade the safety and reliability of the aircraft. There's always things that can continue to be invested in, and I would expect that the customers will look to continue to invest in those platforms. You know, there's upgrade programs associated with the V-22 that over time, like a program that we've been doing for the Air Force, where we've been improving the nacelle on the V-22 from a reliability standpoint, I would expect that will continue to, you know, kind of flow through our factories, over time, once the OEM units are fully delivered.
On the H-1, H-1 again is used by the Marines both in a utility version, the Yankee, and a combat version, the Zulu. Those lines had gone cold for the U.S. military program, but we recently received an order for 12 additional Zulu aircraft for a foreign military sale to Nigeria. We are beginning to execute on that. And so we actually are restarting the production line of the Zulus. Those are flowing, beginning to flow through purchasing activity and those sorts of things, early stages of that activity. Those would be delivered in the latter half of the decade, 2027-2028 type timeframe. That brings that line, you know, back online. Does allow for other opportunities in the foreign military environment, so we continue to work that.
But likewise, I think the Marines are looking to absolutely continue to upgrade and support that H-1 platform. And so there are upgrade discussions going on, and there's a program called SIEPU. I can't tell you what the naming is behind that acronym, but it's basically looking at systems, electronics, and other upgrades to the H-1 program that is an opportunity for us as well.
With all that being said, from the FLRAA down to the H-1 and what's gonna be going on over the next few years? How could you sort of walk us through how that's going to impact margins at Bell going forward?
Yeah. So we've been talking about this for quite a while, that as we continue to ramp the engineering activities on the FLRAA program, which is largely a cost-plus program, there are some fixed price elements in it, but it's largely a cost-plus program, that would have lower margins than some of the revenue that it is replacing in terms of overall Bell revenue coming out of these manufacturing programs for the V-22 and the H-1. So Bell has consistently executed at above 10% margins. We have been warning investors for a number of years now that there is going to be pressure on Bell's margins as we move forward with this transition. The Bell team has done a nice job of executing. We are replacing, you know, some IRAD spending, with essentially paid for government engineering spendings through the FLRAA program.
So we went from having to invest our own money to now the government paying for that. So this year, you're seeing a benefit to margins of that, and we're outperforming our margin expectations. But as we move forward, there's going to be margin pressure. Now, the key is we're challenging the team to offset that margin pressure with revenue growth and other opportunities to be able to grow EBIT or NOP in the face of that margin pressure. And we'll see over time how things progress, you know, on various programs of our ability to achieve that. But certainly, we expect revenue growth will, you know, partially offset or hopefully, largely off or, or more than offset that margin pressure.
Maybe, switching to systems, you know, you have a lot of irons in the fire at systems, a lot of programs and potential. Could you talk about some of those opportunities, so maybe some of the larger ones?
Yeah, Systems is, as I said, a portfolio of different businesses where we have a lot of very strong technologies. Systems has been frustrating. We've been investing in growing Systems, top line and NOP for many years now, and it seems like, you know, kind of we'll make progress over here, and then we have a setback over here. And, you know, the latest one this year was in the unmanned air vehicle space, the Shadow program, where we, you know, have provided that unmanned air vehicle to the Army for decades. The Shadow was unexpectedly taken out of service, and frankly, it's left a big gap in the unmanned air capabilities at the brigade level, you know, in the Army. So, so there, there are...
You know, that, that's been a headwind, but I think that 2025 is gonna be a big year for systems from the investment that we've been making. So just to kind of go through that quickly. In the unmanned airspace, we've been investing in Future Tactical UAS , so FTUAS, that is essentially the replacement program for the Shadow. We are one of two competitors in that, the other competitor is Griffon Aerospace, relatively small company, and we think that we're, you know, continuing to show competitively very well there. We've been recently awarded a couple of additional options, options three and four in that program, and that program is scheduled to go to a full rate production position during 2025.
So there'll continue to be developments there, and, you know, kind of we're working hard at winning that opportunity. The land business for us has been relatively small in the recent past, but we've been investing significantly in a bunch of land programs that, again, are, you know, kind of making good progress and where there's gonna be important decision points in 2025. The ARV program for the Marines, the Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle, we are one of two competitors that are building prototypes in that program. We expect to down select to an EMD phase for that program in two thousand and twenty-five. And so, you know, that's an opportunity that we've been investing in. The Army's Robotic Combat Vehicle program, that is, again, we've been competing in that.
We bought a company up in Maine called Howe & Howe, a number of years ago, that has been really good with creating tracked and robotic vehicles. We've been investing again for many years in these types of technologies, but there'll be a down select, further down select, for the RCV program, in 2025 . I'd say, lastly, in the vehicle space, a little longer term, is the replacement for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the XM30, which is an Army program, where we're teamed with Rheinmetall, and again, you know, are one of a couple of competitors in that program, and making progress there. Lots of opportunity in the vehicle space. Two other quick ones, Sentinel, in our weapons business.
There's been a lot of press about Sentinel and the Sentinel program and overruns on the Sentinel program. We are not involved in that part of the program. We are expert at the front end of the missile. So as we look at upgrading and modernizing our ground-based nuclear deterrent, we historically have had a strong position in that space, and it's been a long time since the U.S. has invested in that area, but we've reinvigorated that business. We are a, you know, and we're working on that program, and we continue to see more content coming to us in that program. And then in the marine side, Ship-to-Shore Connector, we recently saw an award, or we're in discussions with the Navy about an award of additional nine vessels there.
So there's a lot of good things going on in systems. You know, kind of this year is gonna be another year of relatively flat top line, but very strong margin performance. But I think 2025, you're gonna see a lot of important things happen, you know, kind of that we're, we've been investing for.
Yeah, you're doing a lot of good stuff there. Maybe I'll open the floor up to the audience. Sir?
Hi. You mentioned that you have maybe insufficient demand or scale on some of your manufacturing operations, and I'm wondering whether, overall, a company such as Textron, you have sufficient scale in manufacturing to do advanced manufacturing to a meaningful extent, or do you feel maybe you're falling behind in that?
No, not at all. I didn't mean to suggest in any way that we were subscale in manufacturing. We've been having issues around attracting labor, because certain of our products are difficult to automate in certain areas, but we're absolutely investing in advanced manufacturing technologies. Two quick examples. One is certainly in the Aviation space, we are investing in robotics. And as robotics get more agile, as costs come down, and as importantly, as imaging systems continue to improve, we're seeing a lot of utility for that. I was out at our Aviation business the other day, and we're making a big investment in, for instance, airplane prep for paint, with using robotics for sanding and those preparations for systems.
So there are absolutely places where you can automate, but there are places where you still need individuals, you know, kind of stuffing cables, crawling through airplanes, doing, you know, kind of various assembly activities, but we are automating in that area. I'd say the other big area of manufacturing investment that we're making, and I think this was important in our winning the FLRAA program, is down at Bell, we invested in a Manufacturing Technology Center to demonstrate the manufacturing readiness of all the new things that we're going to be doing on the FLRAA program to improve manufacturability, improve cost, and improve reliability.
And so a lot of new manufacturing, grinding technologies, heat treat technologies, you know, kind of other metal-based technologies, composites and other things that we demonstrated to the Army will be part of the FLRAA program when we ran production for that. So there's been a significant investment in the manufacturing base.
Let's jump to Industrial. You know, just a very brief overview on the state of the Industrial business, and you can maybe, like, talk about a little more. You went into a little bit about with Kautex and the
Yeah
and the shift to EVs, but talk a little bit more about that and what that means for your market.
Yeah. So look, two businesses, again, our TSV business and Kautex. So let me touch on, you know, I'll touch on both of them as you asked. I'd say, first of all, from an Industrial standpoint, as we talked about on the second quarter call, I'd say Industrial is where we are seeing heavier headwinds this year than we would have expected. So, we are seeing a tougher demand environment in both of those businesses for similar but different reasons. And we are responding accordingly in looking at our production levels and our cost structure and making sure that we respond to that environment. At TSV, TSV is a very good business.
The biggest business there is E-Z-GO, which makes golf cars and golf car derivatives, both for golf courses as well as lots of other applications like personal transportation vehicles that you see at retirement communities, increasingly in low-speed, public road environments, and those sorts of things. The golf business remains very good. Golf rounds are up post-pandemic, significantly, but we are seeing pressure on the PTV side, as well as the powersport side, where we have Tracker Off Road and Arctic Cat as brands. I think associated with one, the economic uncertainty and higher interest rate environment for that type of buyer, which has been a headwind, but also on the electric vehicle side, we are seeing increased competition from Chinese competitors.
You know, there's been a lot of discussion in the press about the over-capacitization of Chinese automotive EV makers. Those same folks are increasingly moving into this, you know, lower speed, smaller wheeled vehicle base, and competing at a price point that is, you know, not consistent with our historical price points in the marketplace. The industry filed an anti-dumping claim against the Chinese. That is in review. It is moving forward. We'll see what happens there, but, you know, we are needing to respond to that, obviously on the demand side and, you know, kind of maintaining competitiveness there. So I'd say overall, you know, kind of TSV is facing some headwinds, but, executing well in other of the businesses, such as the turf business, and the ground support business. At Kautex, little bit of a similar story.
You know, we serve the global automotive markets in all regions. Europe has been softer than expected this year, you know, and we're really a victim or, you know, kind of subject to what's going on at the automotive OEMs and what they're seeing from their demand cycle. We tend to have plants that are relatively close from a proximity standpoint to their plants and respond to their production changes. And Europe, again, has been softer than everyone had forecasted initially. North America and China have been relatively flat to expectations, so that we've seen some headwinds there as well.
You know, I think this, the whole debate about the transition to electric vehicles, is, you know, kind of moving a bit our way in terms of we have always had a very strong presence in hybrid technologies in the automotive space, and so we're seeing increased demand on the hybrid side that is, you know, a benefit to the business.
Frank, you have a lot of great businesses, and it was great overview today, and a lot of opportunities looks like coming down the road. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you for making the time and hopefully get you back next year.
Thanks, Tony. Great to be here.
Thanks, Frank.
Thanks.