Good morning, everyone. My name is John Farnsworth. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation for the day is Vishay Precision Group, ticker VPG. For those who are not familiar with the name, Vishay is a manufacturer of sensors and sensor alloy, carbon, and micro-alloy, steel products. We are fortunate to have with us today CFO Bill Clancy and Director of Investor Relations, Steve Cantor. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A icon to submit your questions, and I'll present them to management. With that said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. It's good to be here today with Sidoti to tell you about VPG. Before we do, I do want to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements, and you should read our filings carefully to understand the risks associated with those statements. So at our core, if you're not familiar with VPG, we are a sensor company. And as we all know, sensors are proliferating. They continue to proliferate. It's a large global market, some estimated to be about $250 billion annually, growing in the high single digits. We play in a corner of that market, really where measuring weight and force and torque and pressure are really critical. And we've been doing this for quite a while. What we do for our customers by doing that is really focus on the highest performance, the most premium solutions for those needs.
So even though we address, as I'll show in a minute, a broad array of markets, it's really focused on providing that kind of high value to make our customers' products and processes safer, smarter, and more productive. And we really are ubiquitous. You may not see VPG in your daily life, but you're probably benefiting from it almost in ways you can't even imagine. As I mentioned, we address a broad array of applications and markets. Again, these are niche markets. This slide is showing our revenue by end market. And as you can see here, it's quite diverse. We think perhaps the most diverse for a sensor company of our size. But you'll see we address traditional industrial markets.
We also address manufacturing and industrial weighing scales, as well as tech-driven markets such as test and measurement, which includes semiconductor equipment, which is a key market for us. And then in the other category, that 20% of our revenue from last year, that includes markets and applications like precision ag equipment, construction equipment, medical equipment, and even consumer electronics. So it's really a broad array. Again, in each of these, we focus on the niche premium applications within those categories. And in general, we have a number one or number two share within those segments. We operate in three business segments: sensors, weighing solutions, and measurement systems. I think of these as sensors being components which go into modules or systems, things like precision resistors that we provide or strain gage sensors, which is a form of sensor that is measuring weight.
And what we do is focus on the highest performance, precise technology to do that. Weighing Solutions or modules, in many cases, they actually incorporate a sensor such as ours. And those modules go into OEM equipment for medical or construction or precision ag. And then measurement systems, the third business segment. These are really standalone systems. They're doing one thing, but really for a very specific purpose or application. You can see the numbers in the middle of the slide, which are our financial highlights from 2024. But I think what's more relevant is the three to five-year targets that you see on the right-hand side of the slide. These are our long-term financial targets. As you can see, we're looking to grow our business in the low teens. That's a combination of organic and inorganic growth. You can think of that as about half and half.
And if we do that, we think we can achieve these kinds of operating results: 45% gross margin, operating margins of 18%, and EBITDA margins of 22%. We've had these targets now for the last couple of years. And as you can see, we still have some work to get there. But we are confident that we can. And we have come close on a quarterly basis over the past couple of years. But really, what's more important here is that we now believe we can achieve these targets on lower quarterly revenue levels than we did when we first put these numbers together. And that's a function of a lot of the investment at work we've been doing on the operating side to really improve our capability and efficiency. And I'll talk more about that in a few minutes. So how do we grow organically?
And I think we've been seeing over the past few years some interesting trends that are really changing the opportunities that we can address. So now we're seeing larger volume opportunities than we had before. And they're really coming to us because they're now requiring levels of precision that our products can provide. And those levels of precision relative to those applications, they didn't really need that in the past. So we're really talking about new applications. And there's a few ones we'll talk about, such as humanoid robots, which is a totally new disruptive technology, which is now really requiring the kinds of levels of precision and reliability that we can offer. So a lot of these opportunities are being driven by macro trends. And these are not new to you. We've actually seen these trends for a few years. But we see continued opportunities emerge for them.
Things like electrification, digital transformation, industrial automation, of course, defense and space technology, which is not really a trend, but it's a need that unfortunately continues to grow. Let me talk first about these applications just to give you a flavor of what we're doing relative to them. For example, electrification. We're really not involved on the EV, but we're involved in the testing of new EV models for safety. We're also involved in the testing of EV batteries. But beyond that, we've seen other opportunities, such as testing new electric aircraft, which are called eVTOLs. That's electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, if you're not familiar. It does sound a bit science fiction, but they are coming, and we think the industry may actually see the first commercial deployment of these things in the next year or two.
We also want things like e-bikes, where our force sensors are used. This is the force sensors or products within the Weighing Solutions segment. Our force sensors are being used on an e-bike to measure how hard the human is pedaling and taking that information and using it to modulate the battery so that you actually can extend the range of your e-bike. Industrial automation. Clearly, robotics is an important piece of that for us. But it's not just industrial robots. It's also medical and surgical robots. And as I said, it's one of the most exciting opportunities that we're addressing today in terms of humanoid robots. We've been supplying technology for manufacturing automation for many years. And that continues to be an area where we see growing demand, particularly as more and more manufacturing becomes automated.
And then in precision agriculture, this is an interesting area, even though today that whole market is somewhat soft for a number of reasons. But the innovation of that equipment continues to move forward at a fairly aggressive pace. And so today's agricultural combines are really very, very sophisticated technology pieces of equipment. In terms of defense, about 9% of our revenue last year was in what we call avionics, military, and space. About half of that is space. And one of the applications, as an example, is we're involved in testing parachute reentry systems for a leading rocket company. We're also involved with satellite communications, both in terms of command and control systems for precision resistors and even on the satellite itself. We started an initiative to penetrate the new technology for low Earth orbit satellites. That could be an interesting opportunity for us.
We've participated and continue to participate in missile systems, including new hypersonic missile systems that are being developed and will be deployed fairly, fairly soon, and then unmanned drones, both land, sea, and air. We've been involved in the testing of those platforms for a number of years. Digital transformation is a kind of broad category. It includes things like consumer electronics. We have a product on a consumer electronics platform. Semiconductor equipment, both test and front-end, is a key market for us, as I mentioned, and then data center, fiber optics. This one is interesting because I think it does exemplify what I was describing before as an emerging need that is now requiring levels of performance precision that it didn't need before. We've historically served that market, the data center equipment market, particularly fiber optics equipment, but we're actually seeing that pick up.
We think in part because it could be demand-driven by AI computing. What we do there is our precision resistors control the bias, which is the flow of current into the laser source, and make sure that that current is stable over time, and this is really important because there are other components that our competitors provide that can do the same thing, but our product, again, remember, is built to be reliable and stable across all kinds of environmental conditions and time, so the value proposition has now become more attractive to tunable laser source companies for long-haul data transmission because we believe our products can reduce the frequency of calibration, and also, the equipment itself does not need to be replaced as often and, of course, is more reliable.
So hopefully, that gives you a flavor of some of what we're doing in terms of applications and how they may relate to high-end trends. But on the other side is what we've been doing internally, which is really focusing on improving and increasing our operational capability. And we're building off some of what we think are core competencies that VPG as a company really can do, such as our ability to innovate, our technical expertise in the areas that we serve, the fact that we do have an acquisition track record, which we're proud of. And then, of course, our focus on operational excellence. And the operational excellence piece is not trivial for VPG. And I say this to investors quite often. VPG is operationally focused and financially driven. And so we've invested a significant amount of capital in terms of upgrading our manufacturing.
We've built perhaps the most sophisticated facility of its kind to produce strain gauges. We've invested $53 million of capital between 2021 and 2023, and that has also involved moving manufacturing from higher-cost centers to lower-cost centers, so the result is we have a more efficient operating platform today than ever before, and we're able to achieve attractive gross margins at lower revenue levels than we did before. We actually achieved a record gross margin in 2024 on a quarterly basis, and just this past quarter, Q3 of 2025, our Weighing Solutions segment achieved a record gross margin, so we're already seeing the results and benefits of these investments, but we're not finished. We're continuing to implement additional cost reductions and operating efficiency programs this year, and then the other next piece is really about business development. This is really focused on growth.
It's an increased area focus for the company. It's really going after new customers and new applications with existing customers that we didn't have before. I'll talk a little bit more about that. And of course, the third piece is around acquisition strategy. We really believe that we have an excellent platform to add high-quality businesses. We're in a net cash position on our balance sheet. We have a capacity to borrow. And we continue to look for the types of businesses that are growing, that are profitable, and that can provide us with key synergies. So I just want to focus a little bit here on the business development activity or new business. I'm showing here on this slide a partial list of some of the opportunities that we're addressing. Again, these are new customers we didn't have before, new applications with existing ones.
So there's really three takeaways I want to leave you about this area. So first, it's a really broad list. Each of our business unit has their own set of business development initiatives. There are a handful within that list that are quite large. But most of them are actually moderately sized, maybe somewhere between $50,000 to 250,000 in terms of opportunity. But in aggregate, they represent a significant potential for us. The second point I want to leave you with is we're approaching this in a different way than we did before. So not only are these programs more formalized, but we're putting more resources to them. And there's also greater accountability and visibility, which goes all the way up to the board level. And then third, we had a target this year of generating $30 million of orders from these new business initiatives.
Through the Q3 of 2025, we've booked $26 million of orders. So we're well on our way to achieving our annual target. And I expect you'll hear more and more about these level of activities as we go into 2026. So just to highlight a couple of them, the first is humanoid robots. Elon Musk has been noted talking about how everyone would want an R2-D2 or a C-3PO running around their house. He also said that we don't need currency anymore, but that we probably have a little more work to do on that. But there's a real vision here. And it's real in the sense that there's a huge amount of capital that's being put to work to develop these humanoid robots. And it's really hard. These are totally disruptive technologies.
It's hard to make an inanimate piece of steel move and act and even think like a human. It has enormous technical challenges, so we've been able to work with two of the leading humanoid developers. One, unfortunately, we can't disclose their names, but one of them we've been working with for more than two years. To give you a sense of how aggressive this development is, in 2025, through Q3 , we've generated $3.6 million of orders just for prototypes. That's for both customers we have, and I have to tell you, in the history of VPG, in all our engagements with customers, that's very unusual, so hopefully, that gives you a sense of how aggressive the development is and sort of the depths of the technology challenges that are needed to be solved.
The first customer, we've been working with them on what we call torque sensors, which go into the joints of the robot, essentially giving the robot its stability, its ability to move, and sense its environment, and the second customer, we've been working with the tactile sensors, which go into the fingertips, which give the robot its sense of feel and touch. We've started some initial technical conversations with a couple of other developers, so we think this could be quite substantial for VPG. Obviously, today, as we look at this market, we've yet to see a real-world deployment of these robots. We think that's coming in 2026, and when that happens, we think that the value of these robots in a number of use cases is going to be significant and could drive substantial growth for VPG. The second opportunity relates to the testing of new kinds of ceramics.
To give you a little bit of background, we've been making leading testing equipment to test new metal alloys, so if you're an engineer or if you're a researcher and you're working on developing a new metal alloy for either a new vehicle or for 3D metal printing, you've either used our tool, you know of our tool, or you want to use our tool. It's considered to be best in class. We've now taken that and we've adapted that to test non-conductive materials such as ceramics. Ceramics is an interesting material because it has a lot of emerging use cases, including in defense, such as hypersonic missile or in energy applications, and if you think about a hypersonic missile, the heat that's generated as that missile travels at Mach 5 speeds is really intense.
So if the material at the cone of that missile is not constructed correctly to withstand that heat, that missile is not going to end up where it's intended to go. So clearly, ceramics is an important emerging technology for that application. We've developed a platform that can increase the test throughput by a factor of 10, which is really significant if you're a laboratory and you're developing a new kind of material. And there are enormous amounts of different kinds of ceramics that are being tested, but need to be tested at really high temperatures. So our tool has the ability to heat up to 2,000 degrees Celsius and cool down quickly so that you can put another sample in the tool to test. And we've been able to demonstrate that that improves the throughput by a factor of 10.
We now have two betas going on with universities, one with the University of Alabama. And we announced recently a second beta with Stony Brook University. And there's clearly more interest behind that. So we hope as 2026 comes along, those betas get fully implemented, we'll see some additional interest and be able to commercialize this product by the end of 2026. Just a few comments before we take Q&A. In our last quarter, we thought it was a solid quarter. We had year-over-year and sequential growth. We had our fourth consecutive quarter of book-to-bills over one. And that came after nine quarters of book-to-bills below one. So it shows you that our core business has improved and is improving. And then we achieved a record gross margin for the Weighing Solutions segment, as I mentioned.
And that was on revenue that was certainly not peak revenue. So all in all, we thought it was a good quarter. And we hope to see some additional improvement in some of our core businesses as we move through 2026. And so with that, hopefully, I've given a sense of what we're doing, our prospects for growth, organic and inorganic, and also our focus on operational excellence and execution, which is really helping us to address some of these larger opportunities that we weren't able to address before. So with that, Bill and I will be happy to take any questions you may have.
Thank you, Steve. If you have a question, again, please enter the Q&A box. I'm going to start out with the three-to-five-year target number that you have out there, gentlemen. Can you talk a little bit about which end markets are going to be key to driving the top line gains that will enable you to hit these marks?
Yeah, John, it's an excellent question. As we talk about this, a couple of years ago, we had revenues of like $362 million. We had gross margins like in the 43%. We feel that we can run at a slightly lower number per annum or maybe say like $90 million per quarter. And we've given all the operational excellence. And also, I think we have to have a favorable product mix. And this is where I think we see more revenues in the measurement systems area. I mean, so it's whether it's DTS, whether it's transportation, it's the AMS, steel. I think from a profitability, look, we saw what the potential volume could be for the humanoids.
We, for sure, at that revenue of $90 to 95 per quarter can hit our targets of at least 45% gross margin and the 22% EBITDA margin. We would truly see that. Plus, we're seeing other opportunities in the precision resistors with data centers. If they continue to grow and expand, like I said, that'll just create an even greater favorable product mix going forward.
Fair enough. Several questions here from the audience, so let's move right to them. We recently had some new leadership additions. Can you talk about those additions and the expectations for these people in the coming years?
Yeah. So John, I would say, look, I mean, I think Steve mentioned in the call, we are extremely, extremely focused now in our next phase of truly wanting to grow revenues, grow opportunities, expand the markets.
I think we've hired one outsider who has extreme, his credentials are impeccable to be our Chief Business Product Officer, Rafi Uzan, who is now the COO, has done an excellent job. The Weighing Solutions is at an all-time record gross margin from a cost perspective. I think the impetus is, and the board's backing us, that they're beginning to see these large volume opportunities, whether it's with humanoids or whether it's with the ceramics. I think it's too early to tell yet since they just joined the company, and we're putting all the parts and all the places together. But truly, the momentum where we're going and what we're seeing, I think over the next, and we'll probably report this later when we're six, nine months into this, but I think you'll see that it has extremely strengthened the company and strengthened the core of VPG.
In terms of the humanoid robots, you mentioned that you've been working on prototypes for over two years with one customer. Can you speak on pricing or the prices for your sensor prototypes different than the pricing for the actual robots?
Yeah. So we've disclosed actually a few quarters ago that in terms of our cost or our revenue per robot was somewhere between $500 and $1,200 for customer number one. But we expect that revenue per robot to come down as volumes increase.
And so what we've been doing is working with that customer in terms of our operating and manufacturing capabilities to be able to not only meet a fairly big demand or ramp, but also to make sure that we can achieve a cost-down roadmap to allow us to not only increase our operating margin, but also to make sure that we're well-positioned in that market, especially with that customer. So something definitely we've been working on and we feel like we're prepared for.
Fair enough. Question about are the coming revenues from new business initiatives expected to be incremental or are your legacy businesses declining?
Well, clearly, some of that is incremental. And I'd say some of that is maybe follow-on business with existing customers.
But I would say the important focus now, as Bill described, is we need to make sure that first, we're seeing all the opportunities that exist for our products. And secondly, that we're able to go and really engage with those customers, many of which are ones we haven't addressed or served before. So I would say as you see that, as you hear us talk about business development activity, there's certainly a large portion of that, which is incremental. And then another portion of that, which is capturing ongoing opportunities that we really need to.
And John, like Steve mentioned in his presentation, already through nine months, we hit $26 million over $30 million.
So obviously, and we feel extremely confident by the time we get to the end of our Q4 and year-end, we'll have passed what we had believed to be the $30 million that we had projected. So we're continuing to see, I think, greater opportunities and also being more aggressive in these markets.
Several questions here about your outlook and assumptions for calendar 2026. Maybe can you talk to the environment that you think you'll be walking into when the new year turns around?
Well, John, I think obviously it's a tough one. Look, the environment seems to be changing all the time. I think what we can say is that we've had four consecutive quarters of book-to-bill. And we've seen in certain reporting segments, like foil, like the precision resistor, especially for semiconductor testing, has actually improved those orders each of the last three quarters.
So I think we're seeing rolling into 2026 a good opportunity. Look, the new business initiatives that a lot of these orders were booked in 2025 will be revenues in 2026. But yeah, we'll have another, I think, wave on top of that to really meet our target of $100 million over the next three to four years. So I think we're feeling good about that also. We're beginning to see more, I'd say, quote activity for steel. So even though we don't see a total rebound yet, the fact that we have these opportunities and an increase in these quotes gives us a sense of that also portrays going forward as a good point for us.
Yeah. One of the factors as we think about 2026, and we saw a bit of this thus far this year, is that many of our customers have really leaned out their inventories and are ordering basically as they need or as they see demand of their products in their markets. So we think that's actually a good setup because really any incremental demand, we should see that fairly quickly and in a pronounced way in terms of our business as we go through 2026.
Question here about the competition and your ability to raise pricing.
Well, I mean, the competition for VPG is fairly fragmented. Generally, we think we have a number one or number two position in most of the niche markets we serve. We generally compete against one or two other leading companies.
Many of them are local sort of smaller companies or very small units of large companies, so we haven't really seen any major change in our competitive landscape, but I think one of the goals of bringing these new roles to the senior management team is to make sure that we are stepping up our competitiveness and making sure that we're addressing the opportunities that are in front of us in ways that we continue to improve on that from what we've been doing before.
Question about your plans for excess cash generated for operations. So priorities for cash.
So I'd say priorities of cash and through our financial statements, and we've always talked about this, the majority of our cash is outside of the US. So a lot of it will still be for continuing to do, one, grow the business, capital improvements, capital expansions, also cost reduction programs.
And then secondly, look for acquisitions that we feel, and a sizable transaction of something $75 million revenue or greater that would be an opportunity for us to grow and bring us together with our other core business to really take VPG to that next level.
Fair enough. Gentlemen, we're out of time. Do you have any closing remarks?
Again, John, really appreciate the opportunity to be at the Sidoti Conference. And we look forward to updating everybody as we go into 2026.
Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Bill. Have a great day, everybody, and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.
Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Thanks. Bye.