Karman Holdings Inc. (KRMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure to have Steve Gitlin from Karman to talk about the company. He's going to go through some slides, and then maybe we'll get into a little bit of Q&A. But exciting company, certainly within the realm of a lot of strategic priorities within the department and maybe a new one to talk about, a little roots in my background when I saw Seemann, I was like, hey, wait a minute, I know those guys. So some interesting stuff. So Steve, thank you so much for being with us, and please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you very much for having us, Roman. It's great to be here. We appreciate the opportunity to engage with investors and tell our story. I just want to say at the outset, I'm happy to represent the more than 1,500 teammates of mine who work every day to accelerate, access to space, to enable the war fighter and to help protect the nation. And if we go to the next slide, please. Do I have them? That would be helpful. Thank you. That's right. That's right. That's me. That's our forward-looking statement. So we really think of Karman as a new kind of space and defense company. We IPO-ed in February of last year. So we have just about a year's experience in the public markets. And in that time, as we've engaged with investors, with analysts and with a variety of other folks, it really has reinforced this idea that no one's ever seen a company quite like Karman. And we think of ourselves as an enabler of the primes. We're basically a merchant supplier. We work with more than 80 prime contractor customers on more than 130 programs. And our goal is to enable our customers to be successful so that their ultimate customers can be successful. We focus on highly engineered IP-rich system solutions that support missiles, missile defense, space launch, hypersonics, drones, counter UAS and a variety of other missions. And of course, with our recent announcement of the closed acquisition of Seemann and MSC, Seemann Composites and MSC, we're very much into the maritime market as well for maritime defense systems. We're vertically integrated. We can -- with our more than 200 engineers, we can take on any kind of problem that our customers present us with. We can come up with the right solution, and then we can take that all the way through prototyping, testing, development, low rate initial production into full rate production. So completely vertically integrated that helps us solve problems for our customers. And as you see on the right, that diagram that really attempts to describe visually the role we've created and we play in the marketplace. We were specifically designed to provide speed, agility and integrated solution, integrated system solutions at scale for the market. And so far, that's proven to be quite effective at helping our customers succeed. We have a wide variety of capabilities that I'll talk about shortly, and we're really driven to drive efficiency and supply chain productivity and effectiveness through optimal technical solutions. And if you look at our history, we have demonstrated mission success, and we've been able to successfully identify, acquire and integrate a number of very attractive companies to join the Karman family so that we can offer more capabilities to our customers. Just really briefly overview of our results so far. We finished fiscal '25 at the end of last year, but we've not yet reported those numbers. So the numbers here are limited to our '24 results. We had significant revenue growth from '22 through '24, about 24% top line CAGR, very healthy profitability, 31% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2024. And we're continuing on that path of delivering high rates of growth and high rates of profitability. Our revenue base is diversified very broadly, as I mentioned before, across customers, across programs, but also across the program life cycle of different products. We have qualified positions on a number of very high-profile key national security programs, but we're also positioned across a number of very important development programs. And so those development programs, if successful, will ultimately transition into next -- the future production programs and drive production revenue for us. We consider ourselves to be a pure-play exposure -- offer pure-play exposure to some of the highest growth segments of the space and defense marketplace. If you look at hypersonics and strategic missile defense, tactical missiles, drones, also submarines now with our Seemann acquisition, these are all very, very high priority segments of the overall market, receiving a lot of attention, a lot of funding and driving -- driven by a lot of demand from end customers. And our expertise is really to address the emergent requirements of combating near peers and peer nation states. So the solutions we support are instrumental in addressing that kind of a threat environment, which is something that our nation faces today and well into the future. If we look at the 4 end markets that we serve from left to right, hypersonics and strategic missile defense, these are very -- national security-focused types of programs, some of which are still in the development phase, some of which are already in production. Tactical missiles and integrated defense systems, think of loitering munition systems, think of counter UAS systems, think of tactical missile systems as well. The newest end market in our portfolio is maritime defense. That's enhanced by our recent acquisition of Seemann Composites and MSC. Seemann and MSC have qualified positions on some of the most important maritime programs of record, including Columbia and Virginia-class submarine programs, which are multiyear programs with significant sustainment tails associated with them. And then space and launch, that's really driven by our support for all of the major launch providers and by an increase in launch cadence across the marketplace. So across our portfolio, we're primarily focused on the United States market. There is a very small amount of international revenue there. Of course, through our existing production programs, we support certain programs that are sold to our allies through FMS, for military sales programs. We, of course, don't have visibility into where our solutions are heading, but we know after the fact, of course, that some of that content ends up in the hands to help protect our allies. All of these markets are experiencing significant growth, and all of them are very high priority -- highly funded items across the DoD and the space landscape. As we look at our traditional Karman core business and how the Seemann Composites and MSC business complements that, it's important to note a couple of interesting dimensions of that. On the Karman side, when we talk about missiles and rockets, we talk about content of subsystems from tip to tail from the shielding systems, the shrouds, the nose cones at the tip of the rocket and missile all the way to the propulsion systems at the back end and interstage aspects between them. It's the exact same diagram, if you will, or paradigm on the maritime side. For submarine, Seemann Composites and MSC work on bow domes, which are essentially the shields at the front of the submarine. They provide solutions for interstage across the body of submarines and also critical subsystems for propulsion systems at the tail of the submarine. So there's a very nice alignment between what Seemann and MSC bring and what Karman is already doing. In addition, obviously, the maritime market, it's not new to Karman. We've been involved in some programs in maritime for a number of years. The Seemann and MSC contribution obviously significantly expands that exposure, which we think is a very important part of our overall diversification strategy. So from Tip-to-Tail, from Bow-to-Stern, from deep sea to deep space, that's what the Seemann and MSC acquisitions integrations do for the Karman platform. If we look at our integrated capabilities across the organization, I spoke before about a very large number of engineers, a very deep design and engineering capability in the company. We think that's incredibly important to us because it helps differentiate from what a lot of other players in the supply chain do. A prime contractor can come to us with a problem, and we can provide the end-to-end solution for them as opposed to them having to go to one company for design, another company for machining, another company for integration, another company for testing. We pull that all into a one-stop shop that ultimately, we think makes it easier, faster and cheaper and more effective for our prime contractor customers to succeed in their endeavors. So those advanced technology and significant IP portfolio that we bring and that we acquire through our M&A strategy help us to have the ability to solve those complex problems for customers. We're able to integrate those into unique design solutions, trading off a variety of different capabilities across a wide range of materials, across a wide range of domains and that allow us to do then the development, the testing, the qualification, which is very important on all these major programs that we have a position on, these are qualified positions. So we're spec-ed into these programs. It's very difficult to gain that position, and it's very difficult for another supplier to devote the time and energy and resources to try to take that over. So far, as far as we're aware, we've never lost a qualified position that we've bid on a program. And that vertically integrated manufacturing capability allows us to do most -- everything in-house. So again, it's a one-stop shop, complete solution provider to help our prime contractor customers operate more effectively and successfully. M&A is an important part of our strategy. We were formed in 2020 as a result of the acquisition of 4 companies that founded -- that were the founding companies behind Karman. Each of those companies had a multiyear, if not multi-decade track record of successfully supporting prime contractors on very important programs, ranging from some of the most well-known missile programs to the most well-known missile interceptor programs. Most recently, we've done -- in 2025, we did 3 acquisitions. MTI brought us a very rich portfolio of refractory metals capabilities. These are metals that are extremely useful in high temperature and highly corrosive environments that we can now use in cross-selling to our existing customers and add more value to what our customers are trying to accomplish. ISP brought energetics capabilities that help to enable us to capture more of our supply chain and again, offer more capability to customers. And then in late 2025, we announced the acquisition of Five Axis Industries, which put us for the first time into the liquid-fueled rocket engine space. Previously, we've been focused primarily on solid rocket motor technology, which we're still a major player in. Liquid fueled engines is a very attractive market that expands our TAM. Recently, of course, I spoke about Seemann and MSC. What we look for in M&A is, first and foremost, proprietary products. We're looking for IP-rich assets, unique assets with a unique position in the marketplace and on key programs. And as we work with them and understand them better, we've built relationships with many of these companies. We've known the folks over at Seemann and MSC for a number of years. We've looked at that as a key part of the Karman portfolio for quite some time, and we were fortunate enough to finally come to the point where they were willing to become part of Karman as we announced last week. So we're common situational characteristics. These are typically proprietary transactions. We think we're quite effective at negotiating these deals in a way that's to the maximum benefit of our shareholders. And we're able to create value -- incremental value by making them part of the Karman family as opposed to them being on a stand-alone basis. Our footprint is also growing as we grow and as we acquire new companies. With the Seemann and MSC acquisition, we're now in 8 states from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, and we're now in about 17 or 18 different sites. This is a list of just some of the unique manufacturing capabilities that we offer. And these are all in and of themselves, there are other companies that do composites. There are other companies that do filament winding and some of the other things. There are very few companies that can combine all of these capabilities together with the design engineering and the IP to deliver complete end-to-end system solutions. And that's what we think helps to differentiate Karman from many other companies that are in the marketplace, again, helping to define us as a new kind of space and defense company. But that idea of speed, agility and seamless execution, it's something that's always been part of the strategy. It's the reason we exist, and it's extremely aligned now with the current government requirement for scaling the supply chain rapidly, effectively and in order to protect the nation and protect our workers. All of this activity has produced very strong financial performance. Looking again through 2024 since we haven't reported '25 yet, 24% top line CAGR for those years. We can see how our end markets. Now these are not segments under the accounting standard. These are end markets. So we report revenue at an end market level, not anything beyond that. Our adjusted EBITDA has grown quite healthily at a 33% CAGR over the last several years. And in 2024, we delivered about a 31% adjusted EBITDA margin. And funded backlog has also grown quite healthily from the mid-200s to more than $500 million at the end of 2024. In Q3, we announced that we had somewhere on the order of $750 million, $780 million in funded backlog. So the trajectory on all of these financial performance metrics continues to advance and the execution -- the effective execution of our team continues to drive those results. Diversification, as I mentioned before, is a very important part of our strategy. By end market, in 2024, we were roughly evenly diversified across the 3 end markets that we serve. Generally speaking, if you look at our hypersonic and strategic missile defense and tactical missiles and integrated defense systems markets, we see those as constituting roughly 2/3 of revenue in any given year. Of course, now with Seemann and MSC, we're adding that fourth end market, which is going to add further diversity to the mix. By program, we're very well diversified across these 100-plus programs, 130-plus programs. The largest program in 2024 accounted for about 11% of revenue. And as we add the Seemann MSC program, that's going to enhance that diversification further. And then finally, we -- at a summary level, we really think of ourselves as the new kind of space company because we're delivering high profit margins, high growth rates. We're highly diversified across the Space and Defense portfolio. We're a merchant supplier, and we like the merchant supply position. We don't have any aspirations to be an end solution provider. We want all of our customers to succeed, and they like doing business with us, and we support them all. We provide a full solution, as I mentioned before. And our inorganic growth process has proven to be quite effective in helping to grow our company profitably and consistently. And with that, I'll turn it over to questions.

All right. So the first one is easy one, obvious one, and we just finished with it. No desire to be a prime [indiscernible].

We're very happy as a merchant supplier. We think it's a very attractive profile. It delivers attractive financial profile. We're supporting all of the customers. We're increasing our diversification. They rely on us, and we're very happy in that decision.

Right. When you think about those areas -- and I do want to get into the maritime aspect, I think that's pretty critical and interesting. But I mean, as you think about those areas, space, what -- we kind of have our view, but I mean what do you think -- what is the fastest growing area? I mean you kind of almost all of them [indiscernible] but where would you rank those if you had to think about the next couple of years?

So it's -- we're lucky to be in a position where every one of those end markets is growing rapidly. We're very well positioned to grow as the demand for those end market solutions grows. And if you look at each of those end markets, you can find significant funding. Just looking at the maritime space, for example, in the programs of record for Columbia and Virginia-class submarines, there's about $25 billion total in funding in FY '26, just for those 2 programs. That's very attractive. It provides exceptional long-term visibility through that business. And importantly, the sustainment tail associated with the maritime market is very different from what we have with missiles and rockets and those other solutions that are effectively onetime use types of solutions. So again, further diversification of the business model, attractive across the board, and hard to pick one that we think is more of a winner than any of the others.

I was just trying to think through some of our estimates about budget and what we've seen in recent budget for the [indiscernible]. So sort of blessing and curse or I guess some of your customers have recently been working towards large production expansion agreements with the partners, right, in program that you discussed publicly that you're on. How do you meet all that? Like I mean that is a pretty -- over the -- let's just say, 7 years over multi years. And that's just counting domestic and not even counting international, [indiscernible] involved. What do you all need to do that either from [indiscernible]?

Well, first of all, it's a high-class problem, definitely. But we are very, very cognizant and we've been all along of how we're positioned and what we're positioned for. We've been talking publicly about the demand signals that we've been receiving from the market, from our customers for some time. And as those demand signals evolve and mature into stronger demand signals and eventually purchase orders, we're not waiting for those purchase orders to make the investments needed to ensure that we're able to satisfy the demand that is emerging. So for example, in 2025, we started out the year guiding to 3.5% to 4% of revenue and CapEx investments. Over the course of the year, we ended up increasing that. In Q3, we said it would be about 4.5% for the year. That's one example of how we've been leaning into preparing for that. But we really look at about 3 or 4 different levers from a capacity perspective. One is obviously what we're willing to spend? Now what are we going to spend it on? We've got headroom in our facilities. We think we've got a fair amount of headroom based on the fact that there's space we can redeploy for production lines based on which are ramping sooner rather than others. There's equipment and CapEx, capital good -- capital items that we can literally move around to accommodate shifts in demand. There's automation that we're integrating across our organization to increase efficiency, productivity, quality and that helps us, for example, machine 35 different parts overnight by just inserting the aluminum blanks before we leave. So you put them and load it up at night in the morning, you got your finished parts ready for you. So we're doing all of those kinds of things to invest in expansion. We're also definitely expanding our hiring activities. We've got a number of dedicated recruiters across the organization. We're looking for the right people to join our team across our footprint. And then we're very focused on the supply chain because we want to make sure that just like we don't want to be the bottleneck for our customers that we don't have any bottlenecks in our supply chain that could inhibit our ability to satisfy customer demand.

I mean, frequently in the missile production [indiscernible] challenging area. Is there anything within your product line or SKUs that are more challenging than others or as you mentioned your supply chain elements of that where you need some more redundancy or expansion?

We think we're on top of it. We bought a technology called MG Resin a few years ago that gave us organic ability to develop and produce our own resin systems to support our composite business. Of the acquisition of Seemann Composites and MSC, they bring with them a very rich portfolio of composites expertise, resin formulations and systems that's only going to enhance our capability to provide the right composite solutions for our customers across -- pretty much across our entire portfolio. So that's an important area we've invested in and we've acquired to make sure that we have the expertise needed to continue to push the capabilities forward for our customers across -- certainly across the composites domain.

As you think about M&A it seems kind of like I'm curious, did you look and say, wait a minute, naval and maybe unmanned that's an interesting vertical or composite business and that's sort of foundational kind of what we do in some of our other manufacturing processes. Like what's that thought process like? And maybe thematically, how do you think about future [indiscernible]?

The answer to the first part of the question is yes. It's an attractive market segment to be in. It enhances our ongoing involvement in the maritime market, which is at a much smaller level, of course, but of course, we have some experience with that. But strategically, it's that materials capability that is extremely attractive to us and extremely powerful in terms of enabling us with more capabilities to satisfy more customer problems. So as we look forward in M&A, as I pointed out in that one slide, IP-rich assets are key to our M&A strategy. We're not just going out and acquiring capacity. We're not going out acquiring customer list. We're acquiring assets that have deep IP that are unique, that help to deepen and expand our moat, our competitive moat.

And just -- I mean, about that moat, I mean, obviously, I think I'm sure there are competitors you suggested maybe not as unique as yourself or kind of rolled up with the sort of vertically integrated capabilities. But what are the challenges as maybe there's maybe more entrants into the initial programs of record, right, diversity unmanned, what do you see the competitors in the marketplace emerging or adopting similar strategy?

So the way we look at it is our main point of competition is not so much other companies trying to replicate our model. We wish them luck. We've got a pretty good head start, and we're finding the attractive assets to preserve our competitive position and the value position -- the value offering we provide. But it's more so the prime contractors' willingness and ability to in-source some of those activities. Do they want to take some of that on? Now in some cases, the trend has been, look, they're coming up with the big ideas to solve these big problems. We're coming up with a small part of that solution, integral to the success of the solution, but it's not the big idea. It's not the big problem they're trying to solve. So them focusing on that big problem and integrating the right inputs to make that happen makes a lot of sense. To the extent they want to integrate back into the supply chain, of course, they could always do that is -- in some cases, it might make sense for them to do it. I'm not aware of any instance where we won a competitive position, had a qualified position on a program and our customer decided to then in-source it, for example. So as long as we're able to do our job well, as long as we're able to satisfy their requirements for schedule, for timing, for cost, all those kinds of things, we don't want to give them any reason to have to do that.

Right. And I think -- and again, maybe just to be a little earlier. I mean you talk about being qualified, right? So I mean that is not just, "hey, you look like you can do this, like we're going to start using your [indiscernible]? I mean can you talk a little bit about the -- how embedded that makes you into that manufacturing process as [indiscernible].

It's very important. It's -- the qualification process can be very time -- take a lot of time, take a lot of resources, take a lot of money, talk to a lot of people's timing, and it can divert attention from one thing to another thing. So anybody could choose to do that when the opportunity arises on a program. Maybe it's a block upgrade, maybe it's a new development type of a program that people are trying to compete for. But we're expanding our capabilities. And when those block upgrade opportunities emerge, we may now have the ability to go after more content on that solution than we had before prior to some of the acquisitions that we did. Similarly, when we're working on new development programs, our toolkit is expanding. We're able to show up the ability to solve more problems for those. So we think over time, it's a competitive environment. We like competition. It's good for the customer. It's good for the nation. That's why we're strengthening our moat, deepening our moat, widening our moat because we want to be able to offer more and more value to our customers and create more value for our shareholders.

You talked a little bit about new product development, but are there programs out there that you're sort of actively -- over the next year or 2, are there things that you're excited about that you think are strategic wins anything that you can talk about?

So there are a number of programs. We're very, very careful about talking about customers and programs publicly mainly because they're not our programs. They're our customers' programs, right? And in some cases, there are actually requirements that sort of restrict our ability to discuss those publicly. But yes, we are excited about a lot of different programs. Some major national security programs are evolving from the early development phase into sort of towards low rate initial production. We're very excited about those. We're very excited about the role that programs we support currently are likely to play in the Golden Dome layer defense system and on the role we have on some key development programs that are likely to play a role in the Golden Dome defense system. So across the board, we're very happy with our positioning. We're partnered with the right customers on the right programs. We're really able to lever the capabilities of our people to add value to the entire end market.

Maybe just talk about the diversity of that customer base, right? Because I think there is a view and earlier, we had [indiscernible] from an industrial base policy, but -- and he sort of talked about [indiscernible] and tripling and quadrupling production rates for some of these things, but at the same time, DOW is looking at other low-cost, right? And there are nontraditional companies sort of startups, [indiscernible] What's your experience, exposure, relationships with some of those?

So it's a great point because I talked about 3 dimensions of diversification before; customers, programs and product life cycle. Within customers, we're diversified across both the incumbent prime contractors, the folks that have been around for a long time and also the emerging companies that are attracting a lot of attention, doing some very interesting things. We tend, again, not to speak publicly about those companies. I'll only mention one because I used to work at AeroVironment, and they won't hold it against me if I mentioned it. That's another one of our great customers. We're very proud to support them and proud to be a part of the mission that they're working on.

No, I think -- I mean, I guess the challenge, I mean, you've got a whole diversified set of customers across these mission sets. And I mean, I guess have you seen much -- I mean, you mentioned, again, role as a prominent supplier of the foreign military sales piece of it. There has been some, I guess, international [indiscernible] foreign adoption or U.S. adoption. Are there any foreign [indiscernible]?

We're doing some work there. It's nascent. It's limited, but there's an opportunity there, we think. If we think about the international market at large, the near-term opportunity for us is really primarily through FMS, which is I know is something you report on in your great weekly reports that come out here that I read religiously, and I encourage everybody to read. So those FMS -- so the NATO allies are being -- are going to be spending more on defense, on acquisition. Their industrial base is not as developed as the United States is. In the near term, it's quite likely they're going to rely on continued, if not increased FMS activity to sort of fill the gaps until that industrial base is ready. So when we get orders from our prime contractor customers, they don't say this is for this country, this is for Golden Dome, this is -- they just say we need more of these, and we deliver against that. We find out either before through contract announcements or later that those may have ended up in country X, country Y, country Z. At the same time, we think there is an opportunity to build relationships with some of the allied industrial companies who are looking to scale up their capabilities because we think we can be very helpful in enabling them to do that. But again, that's very nascent. That's very early stage. And we're -- the high-class problem of having so much demand coming at us domestically, resourcing that is not trivial, right? Because if you do it, you want to do it right.

I won't ask you to be specific on [indiscernible]. But I guess maybe more so on space, on the capabilities and maybe opportunities there. Can you just talk a little bit about that? I mean because that I think is also a longer-term market that is growing significantly and sort of how can you take advantage of that?

Yes. The constituent companies that formed Karman at the beginning, one of them in particular, has been involved in space programs dating back to the space shuttle on structures, on subsystems, very sophisticated, complicated structures, by the way. So we've got a long heritage supporting the exploration of space, the creation of the space economy and its subsequent growth. We see a lot of drivers pushing that forward, not the least of which is the development of the space layer of Golden Dome, which -- while we're not necessarily developing sensors and trackers and that kind of technology, we certainly are very much involved in getting things up in the space. And as that contributes to an increase in overall launch cadence, that's going to benefit Karman. We're also involved in interesting programs like the integration of a Lunar lander for one of our clients because we have the ability to do that. We've got a -- we built a clean room in our Northwest operation. And that's an opportunity for us to expand in. So the integration of payloads potentially of vehicle space vehicles as that market continues to evolve and grow, we see opportunities there as well.

That's a legacy NASA business [indiscernible]?

No, that's a commercial -- one of the commercial companies. Yes.

And to be fair, I mean, I guess, I mean the launch piece of that is on the global [indiscernible].

For the most part, correct. Now there are some deployment capabilities that we're experts in also that help with that, right?

Great. Just go back to Seemann. As you talk about -- or let's put it this way, the naval segment, are there pieces there that you think you can expand into either on the manned side or on the unmanned side, given the potential [indiscernible] structures and other things?

Absolutely. Seemann and MSC have been involved in some early UUV and USV programs. So if we think about the evolution, and we were talking about this in some of our meetings today, the evolution of the drone space, having been at AeroVironment in the early days when nobody could spell drone, right, and seeing its adoption and evolution and where it is today, it seems like the naval market is sort of somewhat behind that in that adoption. It's happening, it's very interesting things in Ukraine and elsewhere that are happening, but it doesn't appear to be as widespread necessarily as what we've seen in the aerial space. That's a great opportunity for the team at Seemann and MSC because they understand that domain, they understand the material science behind mission success in those vehicles. And to the extent that, that segment of the market continues to grow and expand, that could create great opportunities for us among others.

[indiscernible] I guess just -- I mean several times you mentioned sort of that IP moat, right? But -- and so a lot of this is basic science and research. You kind of talked about some of the IRA. But how do you think about the demand of that moving forward? And again, whether you're talking about particularly in hypersonics or space launch or other areas, there does seem to be a continued demand there as well as [indiscernible]?

Yes, it's a great question, and it speaks specifically to the strategy behind the Seemann MSC acquisition because we're developing solutions for some of the harshest operating environments you can imagine. That could be a heat shield for reentry into the earth's atmosphere from space, tremendous temperatures, tremendous stress, tremendous pressures. The material science that goes into that solution is not the same as building a graphite or composite tennis racket, to make a silly comparison. It's very specialized. Having the additional IP from Seemann Composite and MSC gives us the ability to apply more of that capability to those solutions because we've got to find those solutions, and we effectively have solutions now from that reentry kind of environment all the way to 1,000 feet under the surface of the ocean. Those are completely different operating environments, saltwater, pressure, all those kinds of things, different composite solution entirely. Within a submarine, there are different formulations for different subsystems across the submarine depending on what they're doing and how they're doing it. So that diversity of capabilities really sets us apart and gives us a lot of firepower to help solve very, very difficult problems that customers bring to us across the entire Karman portfolio.

Now I mean, I guess -- and kind of -- I realize this is an integrated idea. But do you think that as you look for M&A, right, is it -- we develop the technology in-house or do you kind of acquire [indiscernible]?

So we don't invest a great deal into IRAD, internally funded R&D, but we do acquire that IP. And it's not just IP in terms of formulations, it's also process IP. So as an example, Seemann Composites, they've developed a composite curing process that doesn't require autoclaves, right? A lot of the work we do at Karman for missiles for rockets involves putting those devices, those subsystems into autoclaves and curing them. Seemann's developed a really interesting vacuum-based, infusion-based system for doing that. And that's really the only way you can produce monolithic 30-foot diameter [indiscernible] for some, right? There's no autoclave on the planet that can handle that. So there's a good deal of manufacturing and process IP that we have, that we continue to refine and develop and that we acquire in addition to the sort of classic IP, we know how to make this kind of a thing. And we'll continue to exercise M&A to expand on that.

Right. I guess just last one, we talked about this great problem you have in terms of capacity expansion, orders from [indiscernible] to you guys. But it looks like you guys have also done a very good job on margin expansion [indiscernible].

Yes. If you think about what the government has communicated about its desires of doing business with defense -- space and defense companies, a, we don't issue dividends. Yes, we don't -- it's not part of our business. We're growing. B, we don't do stock buybacks. C, about 90% of all our revenue from Karman is from fixed price contracts. So we're very comfortable and used to operating in that environment. Now Seemann MSC has a higher mix of cost plus fixed fee contracts. That's going to change that a bit. But still, the majority of our business and our revenue will remain fixed price contracts. And so we're very, very comfortable operating in the desired environment as communicated by the Department of War and effectively serving our customers and, of course, the government in the process.

Please join me in thanking Steve for [indiscernible].