Ducommun Incorporated ($DCO)

Thank you. Well, Ron, appreciate your saving the best for the last, right? I know you guys have been through three days of the conference. But we have an exciting story at Ducommun, and I'm really happy to be able to share that with you. As Ron said, I'll just quickly go through a few slides so that for those of you who are new to the story, you have an overview of the company and what we do and what, kind of, the key investment thesis is for the business. So our disclosures. For those of you that don't know, we are the longest operating company in California. We've been in business for 176 years. We started back in 1849, even before the state of California was formed. We did a bunch of things. We weren't in commercial aerospace then, of course, but got into that in the 1920s and '30s supplying metals into the industry as it was really born at that time. And then we moved out of being a distributor of metals in the '80s and started getting into both aerostructures and into various other components for the aerospace industry through the '90s and 2000s through a series of acquisitions. In 2017 is when the current management team came on board. So Steve Oswald, who's our Chairman, President, and CEO, came on board then, and we embarked on a new journey then. It was kind of a sleepy small cap company prior to that, viewed primarily as an aerostructures business. And Steve took on the leadership then. He brought about a different culture of accountability, a focus on driving the business for profit versus just for growth. And we had a great run from 2017 through 2019, growing the business as well as improving profitability until the pandemic hit. And that's when we had to refocus the business. Defense became a bigger portion of our portfolio, and that business grew really well through 2020, '21, '22. And it really saw us through the pandemic years, and we were able to maintain our EBITDA within a 10% range, EBITDA dollars within a 10% range, despite commercial aerospace being 50% of our revenues going into the pandemic. So that is a, kind of, reflection of management's ability to kind of deal with that adversity and be able to make adjustments in the business to maintain and the profitability. In 2022 is when we felt like there was, or we thought we had enough visibility into the future of the industry to be able to come out and present a five-year plan, that's what we did. So we presented in December of 2022 what we call Vision 2027. It was a roadmap for us to grow from $700 million in revenue to $1 billion in revenue and take EBITDA margins from 13% to 18%. And I'll talk about that in a little bit, but that was kind of the outline of that strategy. And we have made great progress in being able to meet those targets. If you look at the market capitalization of the company since Steve took over, we've had a growth of 569% in the market cap. Our TSR is more than 400% over these nine years. Great performance, and the best is yet to come. The EBITDA margins, if you look at them, 700 basis points of expansion in EBITDA margin under the current management team. Even going back to 2022 when we were laying out our Vision 2027 strategy and margins were around 13%, up from where the management team had taken on the business, people were skeptical. They said, "Okay, how can a business like Ducommun get 500 basis points of expansion?" The customers would never allow you to be able to get your profitability to that level. But we were confident. We had a sound plan. We executed on it, and we are at 17% right now. What does our business mix look like? 58% of our revenues come from defense, 38% from commercial aerospace. So defense is a pandemic. There is a lot of opportunity in commercial aerospace. We, where we sit in the supply chain and for what we provide, the inflection point in commercial aerospace is yet to come as we still see destocking and the benefit of rate ramps with the OEMs not yet reflected in our P&L. So there is opportunity there. So we will see that mix move a bit more favorably towards commercial aerospace. Defense is growing really strongly too, and we have a large missile franchise. So if you look at the different platforms where we have exposure, on the right, you can see the different military aircraft, you can see the commercial aerospace platforms, but the missiles and radar are going to be kind of the big opportunity for us going forward. And they generate, if you look at missiles and radar and electronic warfare, they are more than a third of our defense business, almost 20% of the total revenues for Ducommun. And we believe that there is going to be significant growth opportunity. We are an incumbent supplier on most of the key missile platforms where the Department of War has entered into framework agreements with the Raytheon and Lockheed and others, and we are in a great position to benefit from the expected growth on all those platforms. I won't spend much time on this slide, but this kind of shows you, and this presentation is on our website. It shows you the different product lines within each of our reportable segments. And we have a good assortment of both electronics, which largely go into defense applications, as well as structural products. And not just kind of the legacy aerostructures, as many of you may know, but also engineered structural products that are part of our portfolio where we own the design IP and have great strategic pricing power and margin opportunity. So vision 2027, I, kind of, talked about it already a little bit. What were the key drivers behind us being able to execute on this margin trajectory? It was a shift towards engineered product. What is engineered product? We define it as product where we own the design IP, where we are spec'd in, we're sole-sourced, we own the aftermarket. We love those kinds of businesses. Many companies do these days. We do, and we have had a good track record of growing that portion of our business. When the current management team took over, it was only 9% of our revenue. In 2022, when we laid out our Vision 2027 plan, it was 15% of our revenue. Today, it's 23% of our revenue, that has been that shift in mix towards more engineered products, which we have achieved both organically and, to some extent, inorganically, has helped with margins. The second piece has been cost takeout. So we do have manufacturing services in our business where taking out cost to improve profitability is important. We have reduced our footprint. We have shut down two facilities, one in California, one in Arkansas, and we have moved our production into existing facilities in the United States and in Mexico and been able to take cost out. And we committed to taking $13 million of cost out through those moves. We've already achieved two-thirds of that saving. It's in our P&L, another third to go over the course of the rest of the year. And then the third key element to drive margin has been pricing and discipline around pricing and making sure that we are protected from cost inflation. So if you look at our margins back in 2020 and 2021, part of the reason why we saw some of the margin go down a little bit was because we had firm fixed price contracts, and we saw a lot of inflation due to the supply chain issues during the pandemic. And we learned our lesson, and when we enter into LTAs, first of all, we try to keep the tenure of those LTAs short. And where we do enter into longer-term agreements, we make sure we have the appropriate escalation clauses so that we are protected from cost inflation and can maintain and grow our margins. Those have been the key drivers. We believe that there is a lot of runway ahead of us when it comes to margins going forward. We're going to be back in the city in September to host an Investor Day where we will lay out what we call Vision 2032, so the five years beyond 2027, and what we intend to accomplish there, both from the perspective of growing top line and revenue and the numerous opportunities we have on that front, but also things we will do to improve margin. This is the last page that I'll go through. I won't go through the remaining deck, but this tries to capture some of the key elements that drive our business and are going to drive performance in the business. So first, I talked about it, is growing the engineered product mix, right? It has gone from 9% to 15% to 23%. We're going to get to 25% of revenues by next year, and there is much more opportunity there for us to continue expanding that portion of our revenue. And so that -- and that will help a lot with our margin as well. Cost reduction initiatives, I talked about the facility consolidation that we have done. We continue to find ways to take cost out through automation, and things like optical inspection through automation to be able to take the cost out of our business and become more profitable. M&A strategy and execution linked also to our intention to grow our engineered product business, buying businesses that have that engineered product content to be able to grow that mix and shift that mix faster than just the organic growth that we are seeing. Commercial aerospace recovery, that is still an inflection point that is yet to come for us. Today, if you look at our commercial aerospace business, we are seeing the impact of destocking still for parts of the supply chain where we play. You still have several fuselages at Spirit that are waiting to get shipped out. We have internal stock as well that we need to get through. Today, we are recognizing revenue on the MAX at around 30 aircraft a month. Production at Boeing is at closer to 42 with the intention of getting to 47 middle of this year, eventually into the mid-50s and higher next year. And so with us being at 30 today, the opportunity is significant for us on the revenue front with commercial aerospace. Similar situation on the 787, where we have significant content, as well as with A320. And then last but certainly not the least is our missile and electronic warfare and radar exposure. As I was mentioning earlier, it is today about 33% of our defense revenues. It's just under 20% of our total revenues. And there is a lot of opportunity there as the Department of War, through its framework agreements, looks to ramp up production anywhere from 2X to 10X on a lot of these key platforms where we are an incumbent supplier today. And the growth opportunity is enormous. We are today in active discussions with the defense primes, with Raytheon, with Lockheed and others, to support them under these framework agreements and be able to help them get to the production rates that they have committed to the government. So that's really the most exciting part for us right now and will be a key driver for the business going forward. I'll leave that page up there.

So as we think about the business as you go out a couple of years and presumably commercial aero's working, right? Boeing and Airbus are building closer to their stated targets out there. Your 73s are where they are, higher where they are today. You've worked through your inventory. Boeing and Airbus are humming along. Defense is where it is. Organically, where do you see the mix of the business going as things evolve, broadly speaking?

Right. I think we're going to see some inflection point in commercial aerospace in 2027 as we get past the de-stocking. That being said, the big opportunity is going to be in defense for the company because the exponential growth that we're expecting to see, especially on the missiles and radars, I think is going to be a key driver. So if you'd asked me the same question a few years ago, I would have said the business mix is going to continue to skew more towards commercial aerospace as the ramp up happens, and we were pre-pandemic 50-50 between defense and commercial. Today, we are almost 60% defense and 40% commercial. We will probably stay in that ballpark just because defense is also gonna grow very nicely.

Got you. Got you. When you think about the defense growth, sort of the big primes have these framework agreements, and some aspect of that is they're gonna invest up front and get it back. How does that work for you?

That's a great question. And the good thing for us is for the products that we make for these missile programs, the capital intensity of our operation is low. We're making recognized interconnects that are going into these missiles, where there is a lot of handwork and there is -- or we're making circuit card assemblies where your SMT line is $1 million, $1.5 million. We're not talking about $10 million of investment that we need to make and then be worried about volume sustaining beyond five to seven years. We're talking about investments that will be just part of our regular CapEx budget that will be able to support the significant ramp up.

Got it. On that ramp, when we think about from a margin accretion point of view, how should we think about that?

There is going to be -- there's certainly an expectation that with these higher volumes, some of that efficiency is passed on to the customer and eventually to the government. I think that is also the framework of these agreements that Raytheon and Lockheed have with the government. So I think there is an opportunity for us to share some of those efficiencies and yet continue to benefit from the operating leverage these much higher volumes will have in our existing facilities. We're going to use our existing facilities. The low capital intensity allows us to be able to have incremental drop through because we're not gonna have a lot of incremental depreciation running through the P&L or as a result of huge CapEx that we need to put into these projects.

Got you. The transition from -- I'm familiar with your comment of old, long time ago, right? That airplane skin thick. Continuing down that road, when you think about maybe inorganic things to add, where in the portfolio, not to give away any figures, but broadly here in the portfolio, where it makes sense? Is there adjacencies or areas that could make sense?

Yes. When we look at M&A, we tend to be fairly product line agnostic. We're focused on A&D. That's what we know best, and we are going to stick to it. We're not going to go buy an industrials business to get the deal done. So we're focused on A&D. We're focused on engineered products. We want products where we own the design IP, we're spec'd in, we have access to the aftermarket. We like businesses where we can be a number one, number two player within a niche market. If you look at the businesses that we have bought, we bought a company called MagSeal in the last few years. They make magnetic seals. They're the only provider of magnetic seals in the A&D space globally. Small business. It was a $70 million enterprise value transaction. We bought a leader in a segment where they have content on several rotorcraft platforms where they're spec'd in sole source, and there is -- they're the only solution for that particular problem that they're solving. We like a business like that. The first deal we did under the current management team was a business called Lightning Diversion Systems. And they make lightning protection for radomes on aircraft, both military and commercial. And they are the foremost in that space. The next player is 1/10 their size in that segment. It was a $60 million transaction, we bought this business that was very profitable and has become even more profitable since then and has grown well just given the proliferation of electronics and communications on board aircraft. Protection, there are more radomes, and more radomes need more lighting protection, and they are the go-to supplier in the space. So we like businesses like those and, those are the kinds of, properties that we intend to continue to acquire.

When you think about the pipeline for those kinds of properties, how is it? Because I would imagine there's others who want them too, right? So it's...

Yes. Competition has always been intense for those kinds of product businesses. I mean, you've had TransDigm, HEICO, Loar, looking to do acquisitions for more than a decade in that space. There are additional players that have come in today, both private equity and strategic, that are now pursuing similar assets. Focus on growing our proprietary pipeline has become more important to us, and we are investing to do that. And we feel like there is enough in the pipeline for us to be able to get deals done. But I do acknowledge that it is a more competitive environment today than it was maybe 5 years ago.

When you think about places that you can do it organically, that you can invest your own money and develop your own hit, if you will, for lack of better words. What areas are, if you can say?

Of course. We're definitely doing that. So if you look at the mix shift that we've had in our business from 2022 through 2020, first quarter of 2026, we've gone from 15% to 23%. Only a couple of hundred basis points of that has been inorganic. The rest has been organic growth. So we've been investing, and this takes time for you to get an engineered product qualified on any platform. It doesn't happen in weeks or months or even quarters. It takes a while. It takes years of both product development and engineering and getting the buy-in and getting specced onto a platform. So we have been making that investment for a while now under this current management team, and we're beginning to see the fruits. We're beginning to see the success there. We're doing that with our businesses which make, for example, motors and resolvers. We have a lot of engineering capability and technology there, so we are finding additional applications where these motors can be used, including missile applications, for, like, tail fin actuation. Motors are used, and then electronic motors are used in various parts of the value chain in A&D. That's one area where we're looking at. We have a lot of capability when it comes to push button switches that are used in both commercial and military aircraft. And so we've been continuing to grow that product line. We have a business we bought called Nobles, which makes ammunition chutes, and they are the leader globally in making ammunition chutes. Since we've acquired them, we have moved them to making entire ammunition handling systems, so expanded the scope of that product. That product had a ship set value of $3,000 to $5,000, maybe $10,000 at most, depending on the application and platform. Now that they're providing the entire solution, it's tens of thousands of dollars per ship set for them. So that investment in engineering and production capability to be able to move into an adjacent space and grow the business is something we've been investing in all our engineered product business.

Maybe frame it as a percentage of sales. What do you think the proper level of spending on R&D and product development should be?

So we don't publicly disclose our R&D spend. 77% of our revenue today still is contract manufacturing. It's manufacturing services. So it is not a metric that we are publicly talking about. But as we grow engineered products further, it definitely is something we will highlight more. But I can tell you that it has been a focus for management to invest in and design engineering in our engineered product businesses. And today, I would say the reflection of that is in our results, even though we may not publicly talk about the engineering spend, is the fact that organically, the engineered product businesses are growing so nicely.

Yes, that's clear. I mean, that's going on. Back in the day, the aftermarket exposure was pretty low. When we think about a percentage of revenue that's either aftermarket or recurring, in defense maybe it's different. What percentage is that, and where would you like to see that go over time?

Right. So in our Vision 2027 plan, we said we want to take our aftermarket business, which largely is a subset of our engineered product businesses. That's where we have access to the aftermarket. We said it was about 10% of our revenue. We want to take it to 15%. I would say that we are past the halfway mark on that. We're probably around 13%, 14% of revenue today coming from aftermarket, and we feel confident we're gonna get it to 15% by next year. And then there is and as we keep growing engineered products beyond 25%, the aftermarket is naturally gonna grow with it. It's, as I said, it's a subset of that engineered product portfolio. We expect it to continue to ramp up.

So if one wanted to sort of dream the dream. Could you think of a 1/3 of the company maybe one day being aftermarket, or is that just a bridge too far?

So we'll have more clarity around that. I think, we certainly are, very keen on growing that business. We know that you can't have a good aerospace and defense business without having an aftermarket, big aftermarket component. And we are going to have aggressive targets to grow that. I don't want to throw a number out there, but we will have more on that specific thing, topic, in our Investor Day in September.

Maybe it's -- maybe a different way to ask it or a different way to get at that is, are the things you'd want to divest that don't have that are maybe more structural? They're fine businesses, but just not maybe been the vision that you guys have.

So we're always looking at our portfolio. Right? We're a public company. Nothing is for sale, but yet everything is for sale, right, at the right price. So those businesses have a lot of upside today where they stand. So we want to make sure that we realize that value for our shareholders. Our commercial aerostructures business is at 13 MAX aircraft per month that's. There's so much more potential in that business. We're continuing to grow ship set content as well, for example, on the MAX, with additional content on the fuselage skins and things that we do for Spirit as well as for Boeing. There is a lot of opportunity, untapped potential there that we want to make sure we extract and provide to our shareholders. So, no, there isn't an intention this time for us to sell any portion of our business, but we constantly, on an annual basis, revisit our portfolio to see what makes sense for the shareholder, and we're always open to all options.

Got you. The Spirit brought back into Boeing's fold. I mean, just as an outsider, one would think that's good for you. But I mean, I don't know. Like, I don't want to put words in your mouth.

It's good. I mean, Boeing, under Kelly's leadership, has got so much more operational discipline and greater ability to execute, and I think that's gonna help Spirit, and it has been helping Spirit, and it's already visible. So that's a net positive for us. None of the things we do for Spirit, Boeing does in-house, so there isn't any threat for anything moving in-house as a result of the combination. We feel like it's going to provide more certainty and predictability in build rates and in demand coming from Spirit. So it's a good thing for us. Also some of the opportunities to grow ship set content that we were pursuing with Spirit, which was for a period of time in a holding pattern, I think is now going to open up now that they're under Boeing's ownership and provide us with more opportunities to grow content.

Yes, you would think that stability would be a very good thing.

A net positive.

And then you didn't talk much about Airbus, but you do have content on A320. Is that right?

We do A220 and the A320, those are the key platforms for us, and they've been performing well. I mean, in Q1, we saw strong demand on both those platforms.

Yes. They just sold about 120 A220s, right? I don't know. Is that right? Going forward, when you think about the business, and maybe you can't answer this, 10 years out, where are you guys?

I see us as a business with a much higher engineered product content. And again, I don't want to kind of steal the thunder from our investor day, but it's a big number. It's gonna be a big number. It's going to be much more engineered product. It's going to be a much higher margin profile than what we have today. People were skeptical of us, as I was saying earlier, getting from 13% to 18%, and they were like, they have the legacy perception of Ducommun, and did not believe that we could be an 18% margin business, right, just structurally. But we've proved that wrong. We had a well-thought-out plan that we executed step-by-step, and we have a really strong plan for the next five to seven years for the business, and what we will call Vision 2032.

So how did you all get buy-in from the employees, right? I mean, if you've got a workforce that's, "This is the way we do it, this is what we've done. I've built a career doing this," how do you get them to change, to go that direction? Clearly, you've been doing it, you've been working. What did you have to do to do that?

From a people perspective within the organization? It's the -- that's something it is difficult to change culture overnight. And it has been a slow process. And it's been nine years in the making now, where we have the right people in the right places who are results-oriented, very performance-driven culture. People are rewarded for strong performance. Everybody in the company is entitled to an annual bonus. And it is linked to performance metrics that they can get their head around and that they can understand. Steve, our CEO, does a great job at converting complex business strategy into simple messages that someone on the shop floor can understand, right? That they can take that message and do something about it to drive results, whether it is doing things to improve margin, whether it is reducing inventory that's sitting in the warehouse. He does a great job at being able to get into the minds of the shop floor worker, so that everyone is motivated and aligned in achieving the company's objectives. So that's credit to his strong leadership and his communication skills and being able to get that message across. So we have a great workforce that is super motivated, super excited. We try to have equity incentives for a lot of our, certainly all our senior management, but also a lot of the middle-level management, so that there is alignment with the shareholder to the extent possible. I mean, Steve was a CEO at a KKR portfolio company, and as I'm sure they're all about equity ownership across all employees. So he has brought that philosophy here to Ducommun to the extent it's possible in a public company setting. And that also has a great impact on the employees see how their equity portfolio has performed with Ducommun in it over the last, four or five years based on their performance, and they're motivated to continue to drive a higher level of performance.

Yes, we've seen that work great at other companies. There's millionaires, at my desk at HEICO , right?

Right. Yes.

So I think, yes, we're almost out of time. So thank you for that.

Thank you for having us here.

Yes. Yes. Thanks.