NN, Inc. (NNBR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and thank you for joining us for the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Fall Investment Conference 2025. IAccess Alpha hosts virtual investor conferences featuring companies sourced from investors with a track record of generating alpha. Today, you will hear presentations from 14 selected companies. IAccess Alpha holds 4 virtual investor conferences annually, one per quarter. The next event will be the IAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Winter Investment Conference 2025, scheduled for December 9 to 10, 2025. We'd also like to take a moment to thank the many investors who have pitched in with ideas or helped source companies. These conferences wouldn't be as valuable or high quality without your ongoing support. Now let's begin with our first presenting company, NN, Incorporate. I'd now like to turn the floor over to your host, Harold Bevis, CEO of NN Incorporated. [Operator Instructions] Harold, over to you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for calling in this morning, investors, and for kicking off this conference for the fall. We have speaking today myself and Tim French, who's our Chief Operating Officer; and Chris Bohnert, who's our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to just refer on Slide 2 to our forward-looking statements disclaimer. It's your normal disclaimer that you've heard a lot. I'm not going to read it to you. Nothing unusual about it. On the next slide, for those investors who may not know our company, we are a high-tech manufacturer, and we're going to cover some of that today, and we're highly tied into next-generation product advancements. On the next slide is an overview of our company real quick. We are an award-winning developer and manufacturer of custom metal parts and assemblies. We've been in business for about half a century, and we've been public for 30 years. The NN name is primarily a corporate name. We go to market under well-known brand names that you would not be accustomed to hearing unless you've been in the markets that we're in, names like Autocam, Brainin and that type of a thing. We have a balanced business model. We serve multiple markets with our custom metal part making capabilities; automotive, where we are engaged with engine components and powertrain components; the electric grid for electricity control; defense and electronics products; commercial vehicle components, again, tied into the engines themselves; construction and industrial metal components; and then medical, which was a market we reentered 1.5 years ago. We have a competitive global platform. Really, we are located where our customers want us to be. We're local for local when that's needed or desired like USMCA and a global footprint for global low-cost solutions. Our sales on an LTM basis through the end of the second quarter were right at $434 million, and we also have another $130 million JV that we have 49% ownership of and that we run. Our adjusted EBITDA is $47 million, about 11%. 2,600 employees and another 700 in the JV, and we have about 600 customers. At the bottom of the slide, you can see our certifications. We're FDA approved, when we're making end products in medical, ISO 9001, ISO 1345 for medical, normal medical products, Nadcap for our plating business, ITAR and IATF for aerospace and defense. On the next page, it's just a quick overview of our kind of our -- what makes us special, what's our secret sauce as some people say. We have unique knowledge of metallurgy, machining, milling, stamping, grinding. We do in-house tool and die design, robotics are a big thing for us, integrated CAD/CAM structures and software where we have a global system where we can download our programs to machines everywhere. We have Six Sigma quality systems as a consequence of being in the automotive industry, and we make our products to submicron tolerances. Those are special things in our metal making world, and they make us stand out from the crowd. On the next page is just a quick look at our executive team, myself; Tim French, who's on the phone; Chris Bohnert, who's on the phone; Paul Wong is the President of our APAC operations and the General Manager of our JV for both parties, Weifu and ourselves. We have a Chief Commercial Officer, Tim Erro; Mohamad Farhat as our CTO for Electrical, Medical and Defense; Rob Ash for Machining, Automotive, Industrial; and we have Gail is our Head of HR; and Jamie is our Head of Legal. The top 6 leaders have all worked together. We've worked together in our past and at previous companies, and we're experienced in the industries that we serve. So that's kind of the top team. On the next slide is just a quick overview of our footprint. We serve -- we compete in 6 end markets on 4 continents and from 24 facilities. You can see where they are here. The size of the ends are kind of proportional to the size of the facility and sales and that global footprint that I mentioned, and we can supply chain into any location for our customers. And our China footprint has 2 wholly owned facilities in the local jargon, they're called WOFEs, wholly owned foreign entity, and we have a JV with a public company named Weifu and they're very profitable. Our China operations are accretive to our company in terms of profit rate and cash generation. So we're very proud of this footprint. And just a few facts here, you can see our machine center counts and where our employees are. So a typical machine for us is quite expensive, approaching $1 million. And we have around $400 million in PP&E in our building in terms of replacement value. On the next page, our end markets that we serve. We primarily are in 6 markets. Automotive is about 40%. That market has gone through quite a few disruptions over the last year with the change in the U.S. presidential administration. The China market for us continues to strengthen as they seek to be the global leader in exporting, and they are. They passed Japan last year, and we benefit from that. The next biggest market for us is electric grid and electric distribution, about 20% of our revenue, primarily North American, tied into the power grid, which has been growing due to data centers and electric vehicles. It's a balanced market for us this year. The defense business is about 15% of our business, defense electronics. That business has been growing in the United States as defense has taken on a higher priority with the current presidential administration, and we're benefiting from that. And then we have some GDP businesses like smoke detectors and thermostats and things like that, primarily in the U.S. It's been kind of flat, a little bit weak even at the beginning of the year due to economic uncertainty. Commercial vehicles are our next biggest market, where we're tied into making engine components for large diesel engines that go into on-road and off-road commercial trucks. That's been a down market in the United States and is forecast to stay flat at this low rate through the middle of next year. And then medical equipment and surgical tools, we reentered that market when our noncompete ended 1.5 years ago or so, and we've been making steady progress there. So overall, our markets are a little soft this year, primarily because we're heavily tied into the U.S., and we've had economic uncertainty. On the next page is our 5-year plan, and it's based on achieving organic growth, which we've been able to do in the last 2 years. And we also are focused on M&A, and we just reiterate, we've begun that program also, and I'm going to touch on that in a minute. We're launching over 100 programs this year organically that we won in the last 7 quarters. The second is about cost leadership. We do generally get engaged with annual productivity. So we have an annual offsetting cost reduction program that we lead to offset that plus give us net productivity. Our goal is to have EBITDA margins of 13% to 14%, and we're approaching that. Part of it has been to get rid of underperforming business and operations as well as adding and growing areas that are accretive and sharing our SG&A team. And then lastly, to generate free cash flow and improve our balance sheet. On the next page, we're going to hand off between ourselves here, between Chris, Tim and I, so that we can share the speaking and get to know us a little bit.

Thanks, Harold. This is Chris. Just in line with our strategic plan, we've improved our margins, our adjusted gross margins and adjusted EBITDA over the last couple of years. On this slide, you'll see, in 2023, our adjusted gross margins were around 16.3%. They've grown to 18.2% in the first 6 months of 2025, and our adjusted EBITDA margins have grown substantially from about 8.8% to 11.1%, closing in on our target of around 13% or 14%. We've been able to do this by making some significant improvements in the business, such as shedding unprofitable pieces of business and plants. We've closed actually 2 plants in the last 6 quarters. We improved our operating performance. We focused on a culture of continuous improvement and lean. We began sharing SG&A across our structures globally, and we've been pursuing accretive new business, which Harold will talk about on the next slide. Harold?

Yes. Thank you. So a big thing for us has been to prospect for and launch new business, we can advance the slide here. And it's all about targeting what type of business that we want, winning and then launching that business to add to the base revenue profile and profit profile of the company. And here, you can see the results over the last 8 quarters. And we have won through August actually, $182 million worth of business since the new management team came in at the end of the second quarter of '23. And our goal is $200 million through the end of this year, and we're on track to do that. And we are running around a 24% hit rate, and our evergreen goal is to win $60 million to $70 million a year. We generally win when our value that we offer means something to the business that we're pursuing. We generally lose when we don't meet the requested pricing, which is generally due to our landed cost structure. So we're pretty happy with that hit rate. It's above industry average. Our pipeline right now is around $750 million, and we have about 40 people in the payroll tied into this activity. We're looking at a few new areas, especially wire harnesses and in electrical products like bus bar and shielding. And then on the right-hand side is our launches that are underway, and they will help both this year and next year. We already have around 50 programs scheduled to launch in '26, and we have a stockpile of wins that are not yet in our run rate. So organically, this has been the size of the program that we've wanted to lead and it's underway now. On the next page, some people ask us about our China business. We've been in China for 20 years. We have our 20-year anniversary this year. It's been steady growth, and it primarily serves the automotive industry in China for China. And we are on track to a long-term goal that we have. We've won a lot of new business there also. And our JV also has been growing. So the JV and our wholly owned foreign entity were both founded about 20 years ago within a couple of months of each other. And they're doing quite well, and we've been repatriating cash from there for 20 years. So it's a good part of our company. One thing that's fortunate for us is that the China government is focused on winning the export markets for automotive vehicles for the countries that don't make them and also for a low-cost entry. And we're benefiting from that. So we're making parts that go into those cars that are exported. So it's a good part of our company, and it's our lowest cost operations. On the next page, Tim is going to talk a little bit about our cost program.

Thank you, Harold. We've implemented a strong operational leadership program focused in 4 key areas. As mentioned earlier, cost reduction is the primary one. Our target is 1% productivity, inclusive of any price downs that are required within the market. Our 2025 plan is on track to achieve $15 million of cost out, which is composed of 345 continuous improvement projects that are always underway, headcount reductions as well as focusing on procurement spend productivity. We spend about $200 million in our procurement program, and we're focused on driving those costs down. The second bucket would be delivered quality. Our target is Six Sigma or better. 2025, we are ahead of that goal and doing well. Third bucket is on-time delivery, 98% plus on-time delivery, which is our target going forward and having minimal shippable backlog. The success of the first 3 buckets is measured by having green scorecards with all of our major customers. Our fourth bucket is working capital management. Our target is to be at 17% of net sales. Year-to-date through Q2, we're approximately at 20%. We are continuing to bring it down. Tariffs and what's going on in the landscape right now is having a bit of an adverse effect on it, but we are managing our way through it. With that, I'll turn it back to Harold.

Thank you. On the next slide, I just wanted to highlight the investment thesis for considering us as an investment. The first point is that we are successfully repositioning the company. Our team, Chris, Tim and I, we came in just under 2 years ago. And we're coming out of Phase 1 which was basically heavy-duty focused on fixing some issues that we had and getting focused on areas that were going to be good growth areas. And I would say that our team, our people, our businesses, our customers and our plants have been sorted out and aligned. We have a little bit more work to do. We've delivered 7 quarters of results. As Chris mentioned, we've rightsized, closed a couple of plants and reimplemented a shared SG&A structure that we're still underway with and started to get new wins along the way, and they're launching now. We're entering Phase 2 to scale and grow the company. We came here to grow the company over $1 billion, and the 3 of us have done it before. So it's not a fake dream. We've done it, and we're going to do it here, and we're just getting ready to scale up. We recently hired a new set of executives from the electrical and electronics industry to help us grow faster in those areas. The second point for considering us is it's a good time. And that's because the core business and the core markets are mostly soft this year. But we are gaining net positions through our new win program. And our markets aren't going to be soft forever. Car sales are really good, but car production is a little behind. That sort of a thing. Our top customer makes commercial vehicle diesel engines, and that industry is very soft right now, and therefore, it's impacted us and people that serve it. So we're a little soft. We've been rightsizing our cost structures and footprint, and it's been dramatically improving our operating leverage. So when our volumes do begin to kick in a little more strongly, we're going to benefit from that. And as I mentioned earlier, one area that's not slow is defense and electronics. Those are strong year-over-year and helping us, and they show up in our power business primarily. And third, we're underway with the activities to scale up and grow the business. Global dynamics play into our strength as a custom part maker. And we have a large pipeline of business to choose from and to pursue, and it gives us a wide aperture on our organic growth program. On the next page, I just wanted to say a couple of things about M&A because we don't intend to be static. We are very aggressive right now, evaluating different targets for our company that makes sense. Number one, is a good culture fit. Number two, that it offers combinational synergies to help us deleverage and strengthen our company. The third is that we pick up strong teams that thrive in a lean support structure. There's -- we only have 19 people at corporate, and we intend to keep a very small team and have our resources and strengths be in the businesses and at the plants. And the fourth criteria in M&A is to really derisk and diversify the served markets of the combined company after that -- post acquisition. So we're underway with that. We're not delegating it. It's Tim, Chris and Harold leading those activities and on the way to creating a bigger company. So that's the basic overview of our company. And we allowed ourselves a few minutes at the end here for Q&A.

Thank you, Harold. We've got some questions coming into the portal, and I'll start off with the first question from Chris Meredith of Meredith Capital Group. Chris asks, Q2 sales were $107.9 million with adjusted EBITDA margins of 12.2%. What are the biggest levers to reach 13% to 14% long-term target?

Yes, it's a good question. So we still have within our reported performance, some underperforming plants. So Tim, if you followed us for a while, Tim, or nick named our underperforming plants about 1.5 years ago, a group of 7. We closed 2 down to a group of 5. A few of them have business that on a prospective basis, will make them profitable, but we still have a couple that are dilutive. So fixing the dilutive plants is a big part of it. And then the second part is launching the new business that we've secured. The new business is averaging about 5 points higher than our median gross margin. So we will benefit from mix improvement from the new business. Tim, did you want to add anything to that?

No, Harold, I think you've covered it off. That's the primary focus, and that should get us to the EBITDA threshold we're looking for.

And as a follow-up from Meredith Capital Group, they ask, you rationalize underperforming facilities, what further footprint optimization or cost-out opportunities remain for 2026?

Yes, you want to take that one, Tim?

Sure. We're looking at other rationalizations. There's nothing right now directly planned, but we are evaluating that opportunity as we go forward. We are looking at the businesses themselves, the individual product groups within those businesses to make sure that they're profitable and we can make them profitable. But there's nothing planned right now, but there are some analysis underway.

Thank you, Tim. And a question coming in from Thomas Smith. Can you provide more details into your auto business, EV versus ICE, domestic versus foreign? And what are OEs are you most exposed to? And are you optimistic about auto given the noise we've seen in the past few years?

Yes. So we have products for each powertrain, EV, ICE and hybrid. Our largest end OE exposure in North America is definitely the big 3. In South America, it would be Fiat. In China, it would be BYD and Chery. And we primarily don't serve the OEs direct. We primarily serve Tier 1s and the big Tier 1s are names like Bosch, ZF, Schaeffler, PHINIA, these type of names. And so we are heavily tied into steering and braking. That's what we mean when we say powertrain, steering and braking. And then in the ICE and hybrid engines, fuel injection. So we are engaged in the innovation that is involved with increasing fuel efficiency and lowering emissions. And the basic way to do that is to increase the pressure in the engine so that the fuel atomizes at a higher level and has less particulates that it emits post combustion. And you achieve these things by having high tolerances, submicron tolerances so that you can hold the pressures basically. And we benefit from that. So that there's a payback, if you will, to being the best guy doing it. On EV, we're tied into shielding and of course steering and braking is powertrain agnostic. So overall, we don't really -- we're not really pulling for one winner versus the other. But I will say that there's been a resurgence in next-generation ICE platforms led by the United States kind of backing off of subsidizing EV conversion. It's really taking traction in Europe big time. So we see a resurgence in next-generation ICE vehicles, and we're benefiting from that. In terms of China, China obviously is heavy, heavy going after EVs and electric and it's still heavily subsidized, and we benefit from that being tied into steering and braking.

Thank you, Harold. And we have a question coming in from Ryan Stine from Chlebina Capital Management. What end market focus for M&A would make the most sense? And how transformative would that be?

Yes, Ryan. That's Chlebina is the way you say that. So we definitely are not trying to increase our automotive exposure. We are looking at alternate industries that are consumer, defense, industrial and aerospace to some extent and a lot lesser extent having a bigger presence in the vehicle industry. And we've seen a couple of medical properties. The medical properties tend to be high priced. So we have to be careful with what we pursue there because we have a goal of deleveraging. So we're kind of looking closer at properties that we have commonalities with synergies with so that we can achieve the benefits of scale and procurement as well as sharing our footprint.

And a follow-up question. What are the biggest opportunities in the medical market?

For us, we're tied into the metal parts and the robotic surgery equipment is a big one for us because the da Vinci System as well as the Mako system, the Stryker. Stryker is the manufacturer and then the da Vinci is Intuitive. And these type of robotic systems reuse and autoclave the components up to 10x and then they're disposed of. So it's a razor blade kind of a business. And they're very precise, and they have to be perfect just like automotive. So it kind of fits who we are. So we're tied into metal components used in surgeries and then the metal components used in equipment. Those are the 2 main areas.

And it looks like we have time for one more question from Thomas Smith. The pipeline for your new business now exceeds $750 million with $29 million in new awards this year. What win rates and margins are assumed in your guidance? And does your pipeline have better gross margins?

Yes. We have a goal to achieve about $65 million of new wins per year. We have our annual bonuses tied to making that happen. We're on track to making that happen. This year would be the third year in a row. We set margin objectives in our pipeline, and they're averaging about 5 points better than our average. I see that we're coming up on time, operator.

Absolutely. Did you want to make any closing comments?

I wanted to thank everyone for listening in, and we'd be happy to have one-on-one calls with you if you wanted to discuss our business further. Thank you for your time this morning.

Thank you very much. This does conclude NN Incorporated's presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting.