Curtiss-Wright Corporation (CW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So I guess we're getting right into it, there's limited transition time here. So very pleased to welcome Curtiss-Wright. We have the CFO and CEO of Curtiss-Wright here with us today, Lynn Bamford and Chris Farkas. And I've covered the company for over 20 years, seen a few evolutions. This one is the best. I said that about the second one. The first one -- the first one is definitely the best. As you'll see -- you'll hear about the story. It's pretty diversified and at the same time, it has a lot of crosscurrents of technology that flow through it that makes sense even if it looks complex on the surface. So I was hoping maybe, Lynn, you can start, you've had an Investor Day about a year ago and you issued a fewer targets that we're continuing to drive along that pivot to growth strategy as you took charge of the company right around COVID times and curious how things are trending relative to what you laid out at the Investor Day just a year ago.

Well, thank you for that. And I'll try and make sure I stay on mic, so you all can hear me. But thank you for inviting us here. Thank you to the Wolfe [indiscernible]. It's a great conference, and we are very pleased to be here. I'm obligated and I am obligated to say, there may be forward-looking statements that contain risks and uncertainties. These are outlined on our SEC filings on our website. So with that put aside, I don't know -- I'm sure Curtiss-Wright is a fairly new name to many of you in the room. So just to give one minute fly by. It was a great introduction by Myles. And on the surface, we can seem like we are a complex company, but there's really some strong stitchings that weaved together the products and the services that we bring to our end markets. And part of the power of the company is the fact that we do leverage technologies and services across different markets. And hence, spend in engineering dollar once and bring products to market in different things. And that's been part of the margin accretion we've achieved over the years. I'm proud that we celebrated our 95th year anniversary of being continuously traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So the company's roots have many first in industry, whether that's the Wright Brothers, which is Glenn Curtiss, which is the origins of our name, to all things, naval, nuclear, commercial nuclear, [ costs ] electronics that we really have been in the industries we are in, and not just to name a few since the inception of those industries. And we really focus on producing highly engineered safety critical, mission-critical types of applications. And we design, we manufacture, we test and deliver to our customers. So we're a full turnkey company. We tend to be a Tier 2 or Tier 3 supplier in most of our end industries really developing products that have completely unique IP and a unique value proposition, and that's part of how we go to market and manage ourselves. So proud to be the CEO of the company. It's been a great couple of years and there's a lot in our windshield and hopefully, we can touch on some of those things today. Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the top line growth that we rolled out in our Investor Day and then ask Chris to speak to the rest of the financial metrics. But we've projected a greater than 5% organic growth CAGR over the 3-year window, and we are well on track to achieve and beat that target. If I walk through a couple of our major end markets, we projected our defense business would grow at mid- to high single digits across the different pieces aerospace ground enable. We achieved double-digit last year, and we're well on track to grow that as you can see in our guidance this year. And I feel confident we're on track to achieve those targets. And there's a lot of reasons behind that. We're very well aligned with the defense priorities that exists and have a growing direct foreign military sales. If I move on to the other part of our A&D business, which makes up about 2/3 of who Curtiss-Wright is, just to put it in perspective, our commercial aerospace business is largely OEM-based and has had great growth, and we see great things coming as Boeing and Airbus are just really beginning to hit some of the ramps that they're targeting that, that will be great for us. So that group is well on track to exceed its high single-digit growth rate, which we projected in our Investor Day. And a topic that's top of mind for everyone is our commercial nuclear content, which we're kind of a ubiquitous player across many aspects of the nuclear industry. We've targeted a low double-digit growth rate, and we achieved that last year. And I feel good that we will achieve that over the 3-year horizon. I'm sure you're probably going to ask more about that later. So without going into it. Our revenue growth is the Pivot to Growth strategy is it's ingrained in the company at this point. And there's so many great things that hopefully we'll get to talk about in the next half an hour that are just going to take the growth we have achieved and keep accelerating it. Maybe that, Chris.

Sure. So Lynn gave a great overview of what's happening within our end markets right now. The other KPIs that we set for ourselves at Investor Day were that operating income growth would be faster than sales growth, which implies continued operating margin expansion and that we would maintain top quartile operating margin performance. And what I'll say about Curtiss-Wright is operational excellence and commercial excellence is deeply ingrained within our culture. Over the last 12 years, we've expanded our operating margin, 900 basis points. 11 out of 12 years. The one year we didn't was during the pandemic, and we fell back 10 basis points when we lost $300 million of sales overnight. So that's remarkable consistency, and that's something that we're delivering. And we're doing that while we're increasing our R&D investment spending at a faster rate than our sales growth, and we're also covering the initial dilution from acquisitions that we're bringing on to our portfolio. Beyond that, we said that we would grow EPS at a greater than 10% CAGR. Obviously, a lot of that strong sales growth, Lynn was mentioning and the profitable earnings and the margin expansion that we're talking about contributes to that, but it's also about balance sheet and tax efficiency contributing to that. And then capital allocation, right, being able to take that strong free cash flow that we're generating on an annual basis and putting it into the right acquisitions or in returning capital to shareholders. This last year, we bought back $250 million in shares and bought $240 million in high-quality commercial nuclear acquisitions and stayed off of our revolver. So we're really well positioned from that standpoint. And then the last target we set for ourselves, which we're really doing well on is free cash flow conversion greater than 105%, similar to operating margin. We have a long track record of being greater than 100% free cash flow conversion. And we said we'd get $1.3 billion of free cash flow. And with this year, we're on track to get about $1 billion, and that's 2 years through. So we're really well positioned to meet or exceed all of our targets, and we're building momentum as an organization.

Awesome. We can focus maybe on each of the subsegments that you laid out Lynn. On the defense side, you've got a $150 billion reconciliation bill that's piling on top of an [ $850 ] billion base budget bill. We don't have a ton of visibility into the base budget, but we can see what's in the reconciliation budget. Are there any puts and takes on there that are particularly noteworthy for Curtiss-Wright, this portfolio?

I think what -- from what we know, the reconciliation and the skinny budget tend to have pretty similar priorities. And just walking through a couple that are the first mentioned in that is shipbuilding in the industrial base is always kind of the first on the list when they give that. And obviously, our Naval footprint is the largest end market segment for Curtiss-Wright. So that's great for us. And one thing that we've highlighted is -- we've mentioned it in Investor Day a year ago that we had received $15 million of industrial-based funding. That's up to $21 million now, and there's a lot more coming. And it's not that the dollars are necessarily the significant fact. I think it's the fact that our Navy customer knows what business is coming to Curtiss-Wright and wants to help support us to make sure we're ready to ramp for it. And so that's the reason I mentioned it. But we are across all the major platforms, and we're very well positioned there. if I talk about the next thing that is kind of hot off the news is the Golden Dome initiative is something that I think is going to be very good for Curtiss-Wright. We have things and we've announced our partnership with Leidos for enduring [ Shield ]. That is considered most likely will be a part of the Golden Dome. Not all the pieces have been laid out. But when I look across all of our C5ISR capabilities that bring smart weaponry to the battlefield we will have great content across many platforms and some Republican I know, but we haven't talked about them yet. So I'll leave it that. But Golden Dome is going to be great for Curtiss-Wright. But then there's the core business we have, making the Air Force more operationally ready and upgrades, nuclear deterrent. These are all places where we have great content. We're excited to see Boeing pick for the F-47. That's going to be a good revenue generator for Curtiss-Wright. That's over the horizon a little bit, but as a company, we manage ourselves to make sure we're doing the things for the here and now, things for the next 3 to 5 years and planting a lot of seeds that future generations occurs, right, we'll benefit from. But that's just a couple of things. And to kind of flip and not talk about programs, but some of the things that are coming through in the budgets and through executive orders are a focus on how the government, the DoD does contracting and there's a real push to move to more commerciality, which is excellent for Curtiss-Wright. The types of ways they want to go to market, whether it's firm fixed price contracts, or commercial-based pricing very much aligns with how we manage the company, and those trends are great for Curtiss-Wright. There's a move towards promoting more OTA acquisition, which we're well aligned for. So that's good. For us, there's a push in the area of additive manufacturing, which is an area we've been building capability in over the past 5 years. A lot of it is classified. We can't talk about so many of the things we do. But all those are areas that shifting how they're looking to contract work that will be very good for Curtiss-Wright.

And I guess that's mostly applicable to your defense electronics area? Or does it also roll into your naval business or your Aircraft business.

Specifically, the additive manufacturing, that's much more on the naval side.

Sorry. More specifically, the change in acquisition approaches.

It will be both. There's things we have, whether it's our resting Systems business that are in the naval and power segment that will have commercial pricing, maybe less the content on like Virginia or Columbia class. But again, even there, we take almost 99-plus percent of our business is firm fixed price, which is what they're looking to push away from is the big cost-plus programs that can have these large overruns. And we will step up to the plate and take firm fixed price contracting. And so that will definitely support the Naval business and then the commerciality, we already go to market from a commercial standpoint in our defense electronics team, but I think there's incremental places we can even do that.

And maybe just the defense electronics, I often have trouble explaining some of that, lets you do it. Electronics can be a big thing. It can be a lot of things to a lot of people. So maybe just describe what -- where your niche sits within Defense Electronics and how do you go to market your customers?

So the roots of our Defense Electronics was the costs or commercial off-the-shelf industry was really born for lack of a better word, back in the mid-90s with a directive from Admiral Perry to force the price to try and leverage commercial technologies and not have every radar system, every mission processor be a custom design that took years to bring to market. And the company got into the industry, and we have developed, I think, a world-leading position in the space. And so we really do lots of things, all things computing. So we're proud of the broadest portfolio of products that come in various sizes from things that are the size of an iPhone to fuller-sized computing cards that bring all the different technologies you would want from processing, recording, ingesting radar data, all the different parts that you need that are tested and delivered in a ruggedized form factor that can be made into the products that are in jets, on tanks, on naval battleship and solve just so many problems. And it's some of the power and what we do is we're very, I think, skilled in architecting products that we can architect a product and will very frequently sell it to tens and tens of applications. And so if you take that engineering dollar, similar to what we talked about at the beginning about spending an engineering dollar and leveraging where all you can gain market share from that one engineering dollar. That's true in the Defense Electronics by having a product that can go both in a battle tank as well as a jet.

The margins on that piece of business, because you're the commercial approach to the customer are the highest across the company at least at this point in time. How high can those go? I think they were 27.5% in the first quarter, what is a theoretical limit? Or do you think about it just on a perspective of incremental margins and what would those be?

So I'll ask Chris maybe to speak to some of the drivers of the margin and then maybe I'll talk about where we're taking that team. .

So yes, thanks for that. So it was a record first quarter for us, and we actually increased our guidance on the full year, and that's a record for us as well. Lynn and I and the rest of the management team take very seriously the commitments that we make when we lay out targets to -- the Street. And -- we approached this share a little bit cautiously, candidly, given the fact that we entered the year with a continuing resolution. There was a lot of defense budget uncertainty going on. We have a full ERP upgrade going on across the entire segment this year. We're in the process of restructuring to build capacity for additional growth. And some of those risks have simply gone away, right, tariffs being one of them. So we've released some conservatism on the full year and the way that we're looking at this. We've also been seeing those restructuring programs that we put into place are producing savings at a faster rate. We're getting increased throughput through our tactical communications product line, which is the resulting increase to our ground defense market guide. And then operational excellence and commercial excellence, which I mentioned, is ingrained within our core is having some pretty strong effects on that business this year. It's not just cost containment, but it's pricing and a very high margin environment. So the first quarter benefited a little bit from mix. There was a little bit of FX. There's always -- it's never really a perfect story, but certainly strong volume absorption, certainly strong margin expansion from operational excellence. And as we're looking across the full year, we're taking a very conservative view still, right? I mean, a full scale ERP implementation across an entire segment is a big project. And we think that if that project continues to go well, and some of these other risks that we're managing are go better, then we will be in a good position to provide some upside as we kind of go deeper into the year. .

And just to round that out with probably not what you want to hear me say, but we're not -- we're not going to forecast so high. We're not really saying this is the new bar for the organization. We will be talking about '26 when we get into '26. But I do I say that, but we're proud of the margins, and we've made great margins out of that business for years and years and years. So this isn't some -- if you're less familiar with this onetime spike. I mean the business has a value proposition. We price our products based on the value we bring to our customers, and it has afforded us very, very strong margins for years, as you say. But this is also the area where we spend over half of our IRAD is spent in the Defense Electronics team. It's an area we're very committed to ongoing investments to make sure we can maintain a state-of-the-art leading portfolio of products. And as an example, something I'll just bring we announced just a couple of months ago, our partnership with NVIDIA, which is opening up a whole new avenue of product development areas. And we want to make sure we're giving dollars internally to the company to invest in those things so we can just keep projecting this growth forward.

The competitive landscape within defense electronics, there's been -- there's really only a couple of others who do computing similar to what you do. Are you seeing benefits of other competitors who maybe aren't performing in their contracts in your financials yet? Have you seen them pass -- do you anticipate seeing them in the future?

It's definitely a dynamic landscape out there. And we -- I won't hesitate to say we are -- we have market share take in our future. It is not really at all in any meaningful way part of the revenues and the performance we're having today. But I'm confident that we're building traction in that area. And I think in the next '26, '27, it can turn into meaningful revenues. And that's just on top of what the team is doing organically with the products we bring to market.

Great. Outside the U.S., I think NATO has a summit coming up in month, 2% is the current target for spending percent GDP anticipating they will increase that. What is the -- what's the exposure you all have to international and the European build out?

Sure. I'll take that one. So when we talk about international military sales that we typically categorize these as sales directly to foreign customers or foreign primes. I mean we do have content on the F-35 and F-16, and Stryker and other platforms that ultimately goes international, but we're tracking this -- the direct international. And we've got a pretty broad portfolio of products that serves both NATO and allied countries, and that's across aerodefense, ground defense and naval defense markets. We've seen some pretty solid demand more recently coming out of those increases in GDP. Over the past 2 years, our revenues have grown in the mid-teens and now it's approximately 10% of Curtiss-Wright's total portfolio. And it's accelerating, is really are now in 2025. And looking forward this year, we expect it to grow in the high teens. And then I think when you think about what's been happening, that increase in NATO spending, 70% of NATO countries reaching 2% or greater of their GDP this last year. And now you have NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stating that, that will increase further beyond the 2%. And certainly, that's obviously something that our President supports. And we're excited for his upcoming meeting here with his NATO colleagues in June and the outcomes there. But you also have programs like [indiscernible] Europe, and we look at that as a positive event as well, taking additional state or private capital into that equation to help stimulate that. I think that positions us well. If you step back to what we committed to at Investor Day and as Lynn had mentioned, that mid- to high single-digit growth rate across our defense markets, it's clearly in excess of what the domestic budget projections were, the international budget projections were at that point in time. And direct military sales and this growth that we're experiencing is an important part of our ability to exceed those growth rates.

Last call, I think part of the increase to guidance was also on the flight recorders, could you give us some picture as to how material that is for this year and also for the coming years?

Yes. So as I mentioned in our opening comments about product areas and industries where we've been in since the inception. This is one of those examples. We've been building flight recorders for 60 years and have that long expertise that has been transferred through generations of employees. And again, it also another example of where we work both commercially and in the defense space to leverage those same R&D dollars into a multiple customer base. So it really was the rise in the commercial aerospace guide was driven by the flight recorders. And we've been working with Honeywell for several years when we announced our partnership back at the end of -- in 2019. But it's taken time. And the European Union announced their 25-hour mandate, which is the new recorder up from 2 hours. Back at the beginning of the decade in 2021. And it was just last summer that the FAA mandated the 25-hour recording for both new aircraft and a retrofit across the fleet in the U.S. by the end of this decade. And so we are really early days of what this is going to drive to Curtiss-Wright. And as we see that ramp taking hold this year, you can see the increase in our guide that it drove. And we're not -- we haven't really sized the opportunity yet. We are certified across the Boeing aircraft, 737, 67, 77. We're working with Airbus to be certified across the A320 family, which should happen in 2026. And then there's regional jets that are also subject to the FAA mandate where we're actively working a lot of opportunities there. So it's going to be a meaningful driver within Defense Electronics going forward.

It sounds like more than just annualized this year, next year. It sounds like annualized plus gets certified into new platforms.

Yes. And if we capture Airbus and things go well there, which they are, that's another half of the market and then regional jets, I mean, there's a lot of business to be won yet.

Shifting gears to commercial nuclear 5 minutes left. This obviously an area of interest you've had and played on new nuclear power plants in China and then a couple in the U.S. and then it went away. And we're now hopefully on the front side of Eastern Europe picking up steam. Poland and Bulgaria. What is the time line we should expect for that to come through as an order and revenue? And how big could it be?

Yes. Thank you for that question. It's an exciting part of our portfolio that is very much a strong growth driver for us going forward. And just to put some context with maybe those of you don't know us, we said that, that portion of our portfolio from the 2023 baseline would double by 2028, so just around $300 million, doubling by '28 and then going to $1.5 billion by the middle of the next decade. And there's a lot of aspects of that both the work we do in the aftermarket, the work we're doing with SMRs, but specifically about your question, Poland and Bulgaria. I'm very proud that when we announced back in '22 that we have had some long-standing contract disputes with Westinghouse. We put those to bed and we're back working with them. And at that time, said 3 to 5 years and as the years have marched along, it's quite wonderful to say each year, we've taken the year off of that time line. So at this time, we believe that we're on track to get orders in 2026. And so that's pretty exciting. And you -- in Poland, just last month, they signed an agreement with Bechtel, Westinghouse and Bechtel to extend their engineering services through the end of 2025, which is really the last step before negotiating the contract with Westinghouse, which will lead to our long lead item orders. And the Bulgarian Energy Secretary is out in the press, make a noise that he wants to see Bulgaria have the first nuclear power plant, new nuclear power plant in Bulgaria ahead of Poland. And so we're all for that. So good things.

So the $600 million in 2028, how much of that growth from the $324 million, I think it was, how much of that is the expectation of [ 81,000 ] new...

So we laid this out for those of you who maybe have never looked at our investor slides. It's in the back portion of the Investor Day. We do think we'll be in production with Poland, Bulgaria by 2028. And there are 4-, 5-, 6-year programs that will take a bell curve of revenue over. We've given that in the past. So I don't think we've given a specific number, but it's one of both plant life extensions in the aftermarket that and then moving to prototyping and first production business across the SMRs are all 3 anticipated in that 2028 time frame.

I think it goes to -- once you get the order, the revenue does start to kick in pretty quick.

Yes. We'll, take it over time revenue and begin working so.

Capital allocation. So you've done share repurchase tactically. You've also been active on M&A over the last few years. How is the pipeline today. What are the areas of focus with the size that you're kind of focused on?

Okay. I mean, I'll talk about the M&A pipeline and then ask Chris to speak on our share repo. So the pipeline is very good right now. I'm pretty excited about it, and we've built up a little bit of a war chest. So we're financially ready to act if we complete the diligence process and we want to bring one of these companies into Curtiss-Wright. It's also I'm pleased that our largest acquisition to date with PacStar back in 2020, we have targets that are in that same size and some that are larger in the pipeline. And so it's excited to see it really raise the bar in the companies we bring into the portfolio. And the areas were the most purposeful about communicating to the Street that we're looking to acquire in is, for sure, Defense Electronics that companies that can come in and take part of that machine, their market reach, the engineering capabilities they have, we can always make them better. So that is one major naval, Safety and propulsion systems, is another very steadily, well-performing portion of our portfolio. And then commercial nuclear, which, would have thought the harder to find targets in that area, but the two acquisitions in 2024 were both in commercial nuclear. So we were really pleased to see that.

We're generating strong cash flow, and we certainly believe in returning capital to shareholders. We believe that share buyback is the most effective way to do that. If you look at what we've bought back over the past 4 years, it's $700 million of stock. We don't just buy stock when we don't have acquisitions in the pipeline. It's a very thoughtful analysis. We consider our growth in earnings our valuation and make a conscious decision when we're in the market to buy our stock, and we'll continue to kind of approach it that way going forward. But we are excited about the pipeline here that's in front of us for '25. I'll say that we recently went back to our Board of Directors, and they expanded our authorization another $400 million, so we now have $534 million of authorization, and that's going to position us well for the next two years under the Pivot to Growth. While the dividend is less important to us, we do believe in aligning our dividend growth to sales growth over time, we just increased our dividend 14%. It's the ninth consecutive year of increasing our dividend. So we'll continue to be thoughtful in making sure that we're putting our capital towards the highest and best use, acquisitions remaining our first and top priority. We're excited a lot of cash in front of us.

Going to squeeze one more in. I know at time, but on the SMRs, I know you're doing development work on some to quantify your size today of the work you're doing. And also from a milestone perspective looking forward, what would be the next material milestone for Curtiss-Wright within the SMR landscape?

We do work across all the major SMR providers, and we've given a range of $20 million to $120 million plus content per plant that they build. We've been the most purposeful and open about our content with X-energy, which is the $120 million content. And across the others, we've talked about our content on new scale being in the $40 million to $50 million range and the others we haven't been as specific because they don't want us to be. We very much -- it's -- of our nuclear revenues, it's about 10% is the design work we're doing now. I think it's going to be significant. I think in the next 12 months, 24 months, we absolutely will be moving into a prototyping phase where we're building the first-of-the-kind equipment for these SMR producers and that will drive some meaningful growth. And then we very much see the -- supporting them later in the decade as we build first production units for them.

About 10% today.

Awesome. Thank you both. All right.

Thank you.