Rogers Corporation (ROG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning, everyone. We want to welcome you to Rogers Corporation 2023 Analyst and Investor Day. Thanks for being here. We'll let the folks kind of come into the room as we get started here. My name is Steve Haymore, I'm the Director of Investor Relations for Rogers Corporation. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all here today with us. It's great to see so many familiar faces here in the room at the New York Stock Exchange. And we're also delighted that many others are able to join us via the public webcast. Now before we begin, there's just a few items that we want to make you aware of. First of all, the presentations that you'll see today, they will be available over the course of this morning on a dedicated website for today's event. You can access that page by going to Investor Relations homepage at the Rogers Corporation website and following that link. There will also be a replay of the event posted after the conclusion. We also want to remind you that today -- today's presentation will include certain forward-looking statements, and we invite you to go to the presentation to read the safe harbor statement that talks about the different factors that could cause actual results to be different from those that we'll talk about in our forward-looking statements and projections. Yeah, In addition, we want to make you aware that some of the numbers discussed today will be non-GAAP financials. And in that case, we have prepared reconciliations also in the appendix to the presentation. We -- I would refer you to those for those reconciliations. Okay. Let's talk about for just a minute, the agenda for today. We look forward to being able to hear from Rogers' executive leadership team. You can see the order of presenters here in just a moment, we'll hear from Colin Gouveia our -- Rogers' President and CFO -- CEO, excuse me. And once we've heard from Colin, we'll then be able to hear from the leaders of our business units, both the AES and EMS business units. We'll have a short break after that. When we come back, we'll then hear a global operations strategy update, and we'll also hear from Ram Mayampurath, our CFO. Once we get through Ram's presentation, we'll then have a question-and-answer session. So we invite you to wait until that time to ask questions, and then we look forward to hearing from you. Now for those in person with us today, after the Q&A session and Colin's concluding remarks, we will have the product displays in the gallery available for about an hour after the event. So we would certainly welcome you to come and see up close and feel and touch our technology. So with that, I know we're anxious -- all to get started, and let me turn it over to Colin, who will talk about Rogers' path forward.

Thanks, Steve. They said they -- oh they did. Is that too loud? They'll adjust it. They said they would turn my mic on as soon as I walked down the stage, but you never know if it's going to happen. So they're on top of it here. So welcome, everybody. Thanks for coming. I'm Colin Gouveia, I'm the President and CEO of Rogers. I've had this position since January 1, but I also was Rogers -- with Rogers for about 3 years before running the EMS business. And before I get started, let me give a quick bio of my background. And then I can say that the team is really excited today to share our story. We've got some exciting growth prospects ahead at Rogers, and we'll back that up today by data and facts. And then, of course, at the end, we'll answer any questions you may have. So I've been at Rogers, as I said, for about 3.5 years. Prior to that, I spent about 7 years with Eastman Chemical. Prior to Eastman, I had about 2.5 years working for Taminco, about $1 billion company in private equity owned by Apollo Group. It was actually acquired by Eastman, which is how I landed at Eastman. Prior to that, I had about 10 years working for Rohm and Haas and Dow Chemical. I was acquired there as well. And so I spent a few years with Dow before leaving. And then I had 13 years with ICI, a British chemical company, actually no longer in existence. It's broken up into many different companies. And then coming out of university, I did spend 5 years active duty in the U.S. Army as a armor officer. So I'm very excited to be here. I would say that, in my opinion, I've worked with some really good companies over the years, some very technical companies, some very -- some companies that are world leaders in their space. But coming to Rogers, I've never seen as many growth opportunities or as exciting possibilities as Rogers has. And that's why we're here today to share what we think is our vision for the future. So let me start with the question. Why Rogers? So this is our investment thesis. And what we think is we've got 3 pillars that make up a thesis that drives out a very compelling financial opportunity. So I'll start with growth first. So with growth, it comes in 2 ways. I think it's around the markets you participate and then the customers you're aligned with. So what we'll spend a lot of time today doing is breaking down the secular markets where we participate. Beyond that, we're also in several high-growth markets where we have very strong positions. And then we also have a very strong core business that supports our growth, and we'll explain how we think about it during the course of this morning. We also have very good positions with customers. You always know that if you don't have the right customers, if you're not riding that right horse, it's tough to grow. And while we can't share the OEMs we're working with, we think we're partnered with the right ones. The second piece about Rogers is innovation. We have a long history, since our inception in 1832, of driving innovation, bringing differentiated products to the markets that enable our customers' products to work and this continues. And again, we'll have a long discussion around our innovation capability, but we think that's a key growth pillar. Finally, we have a value creation model. How do we get business? How do we win business? How do we get design-in wins at OEMs? So this is a model that we've been using for decades. It's extremely effective, and I'll break that down so you can understand that. And that all comes together to a compelling financial position. We put that out this morning. We believe we can grow to a $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion company by 2025. Our objective is to drive our EBITDA margins from currently 16.5% to north of 23%. And our objective also is to take our gross margins, which we finished the year -- last year at 33.1% and drive them to a range of 38% to 40%. So I want to touch on innovation right away because we have a rich history of innovation, developing differentiated products to meet the next generation needs of our customers. This timeline shows some of our impactful moments since our inception in 1832. At Rogers, we don't stand still. We look around corners to solve difficult technology challenges. And as a company, ourselves, we are resilient and durable. So I'll use an example here. I won't go through every one of these on this slide. But let's go to the circuit materials that enable space missions. So you may not know this, but Rogers invented the high-frequency circuit. And we've been on every Western spacecraft since Mercury 1 to today. And our materials are extremely durable. They enable radio communication between space and earth. So when you think about durability, there was 2 craft launched in 1977 VOYAGER 1 and 2. And they are now billions of miles away from earth in interstellar space, yet still communicate to the earth today, and that's enabled by the Rogers' material in their long-range antennas, still working in space since 1977. And I think that reliability is one reason that our customers like us and our products. As for today as a company, we are ready to move forward, and we're happy to share our story. Can you still hear me in the back? I think they turned it down a little bit, but is it still okay? I thought it was too loud before, to be honest. So I was hurting my ears. Okay. So Rogers at a glance. So here are some facts and figures. You can read those. The key takeaways are, we're a global business with a diverse mix of customers. We have strong geographic coverage in North America, Europe, and Asia. We have 3 innovation centers, and they -- and those centers develop technology for global innovation, but because they're regional, we also use them to tweak technology for regional needs. We also have a technical service organization around the world to support our customers in using our products. That's a really important part of our value proposition. Having been in companies that innovate for years -- for 30 years, it's one thing to invent something with R&D in the lab. It's another thing to commercialize it and get it to work in your customers' products. The technical service group at Rogers is first class at doing this, and that's one of our key competitive advantages. We'll have a little model at the end to show how that works. Before going any further, just a quick comment on ESG. I want to share that we are very committed to ESG, and it is embedded in our culture. We're also proud that our technology enables vehicle electrification and clean energy, both of which are sustainable end markets where we participate quite strongly. I also want to mention that our Board is deeply supportive of ESG, and they provide oversight for this critical initiative at Rogers. For a few specifics on this, we plan to publish a 2023 ESG Supplement very soon and will have an entirely new updated report for publication in early 2024. So we started with a question, why Rogers? Now we'll get a little bit into who is Rogers? So for those of you who are new, one way to think about our company is that we help our customers solve complex problems. And here's a few listed. And we're going to have the business unit leaders, later in the day, really get into the detail. So think about my presentation as sort of being a higher level. But by the time you finish with us today, you'll have heard from all the BU leaders. And then you'll have been able to go in the back and spend some time with our static displays and the real technology experts are back there. So I would encourage you, as Steve did. Please don't leave until you spend some time talking to the Rogers folks outside at the show and tell displays. But let me just give you a few quick examples because you probably have experienced Rogers technology already today. One example is if you have an EV vehicle, and if you forgot to plug it in, that's okay. If it's got Rogers technology, it will still work. You don't need to plug it in every night because we have our ROLINX, Busbar technology and our ceramic substrate material in that vehicle that makes it more efficient. Another way you might have seen our technology this morning. I'm sure a few people drove into the city this morning, a nice pleasant commute into Manhattan. I grew up in Connecticut, so I've been driving into the city since 1981. And it always kind of would raise my blood pressure, I'd rather present here than drive around Manhattan, to be honest. And so anyway, as you're coming into the city and you want to change lanes, you put your indicator on, but then a light comes on in your side view mirror. That's the radar in your car, telling you there is an automobile in your blind spot. And that's ADAS, Advanced Driver Assistance System radar, ADAS is -- for short. And Rogers' technology enables that. We have a market-leading position in that space. And so that light comes on, and you know you have a car in your blind spot, so you don't make that move, you play it safe or if you're from New York, you'd probably just move over anyway and force the individual off the road. But at least you have the opportunity to know someone who's in your blind spot. Another good example is your cell phone. So a cottage industry of cell phone cases have sprung up where, if you drop your phone, hopefully, that case will prevent it from cracking. What was really important is the material inside the phone. And that's really specialty highly engineered foam from Elastomeric Material Solutions. And so what you would have in that foam are -- or excuse me, what you have in that phone are a lot of foam. And maybe around that camera gasket or that camera array, there's a gasket. And so after you the phone, even if the grass clack -- the glass cracks, that phone is still going to work, and you can take pictures because of the Rogers' foam. So those are just 2 quick examples. So what I'll try to do now is talk a little bit about our technology and how our businesses are broken down. But we try to solve these complex challenges. Our materials are highly engineered, they're differentiated, and we have market leadership. You see some of these key markets in this slide, but we'll get to that later on in the presentation. But what I wanted to say is we have really 2 business units. The first one is advanced electronic solutions. And we think about it in some cases, as having 3 main brands. So the first 2 brands, you'll hear from Jeff later on about Ceramic and ROLINX, and we have these displays out back. And they're a little complicated. And talking to a few folks -- just this morning, they came to me and said, hey, Rogers can quickly get into these complicated electronics discussions. So we're really going to try to break that down so people can take away what we actually do. So for ceramic, what that would be is these are ceramic substrates bonded together with copper. And they're basically a super high-performing heat sink. So when you have electronic components like, for example, an inverter, which is going to take direct current electricity coming into it, and then it needs to convert it to alternate current, to say, run a motor. Well, inside the inverter, the heat is tremendous. And that makes the inverter less efficient, and it doesn't work as well. So our customers take our ceramic technology and put it in there. And it's super efficient at drawing heat away, improving how that inverter works. And that's one of the key value propositions of our ceramic product. For ROLINX, you may wonder, how does the power get from the battery -- and again, here, we're talking about an electric vehicle, but it could be a windmill or a solar array. How does the power get from one place to the other from the battery to where it needs to go, to a motor, for example? Well, that's our ROLINX technology. That's highly engineered busbars that provide connectivity within all the different power components to make them work. Our RF solutions business, I commented on that a bit earlier. So that's up in the Voyager spacecraft in interstellar space. What they are is they're copper clad laminates, and then they go through to printed circuit board producers who make them, and then they go forward and then they become components in radar or antennas. And so you'll hear more about that from Roger, but that's our RF solutions business. And those 3 product lines make up our AES reportable segment or business unit. Now there's a little bit of a different model here on EMS. So what you see are a whole bunch of brands there and what those brands are, are different technologies and they're phone technologies, they're films, a few other different things, but they could be polyurethane, they could be silicone, they could be fluoropolymers. They could be ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene technology. And the way EMS works is that the sales engineers for that division will go into customers and ask them what problems are you trying to solve? Is it a gasketing problem? Is it a battery design? And then listen, and then we have a huge toolbox of technology that we could bring to bear to solve the customer's problem. And our team tries to be technology agnostic, just what's the best solution to fit the customers' needs. And what we like to say is, even though Rogers is somewhat of a small company, we actually have the broadest array of technologies than any of our competitors with all these brands. And each one does something a little bit differently. Brian Larabee is going to spend some time going into more detail. And of course, again, the static display out back, we'll have some really good examples of these things. So that's our technology. So one of our key pillars of our strategy is market focused. So here's just an introduction to some of our markets, and we'll spend the next few slides talking about market focus. But the point is the brands and products from the previous slides are deeply rooted in these end markets and together combine for a powerful growth story. So this slide is our attempt is our view in terms of how we assess growth across our end markets. So when you look at this slide and you go to the far right, we call it significant growth. So this is the EV space. And this is estimated to be growing at about 20% to 25% a year CAGR. At this moment, about 20% of our business is in this end market, and we really are excited about it because every single one of the technologies I just spoke about on the last slide goes into EV electrification. In the middle of the slide, we've got this high-growth market rate. So these 4 end markets: renewable energy, portable electronics, aerospace and defense and ADAS, the radar I just mentioned, they fall within that category. That's about 25% of our business. And we think those growth rates average about 8% to 10% CAGR. And you will hear more from folks on why that is. I mean the whole point of today is to provide data and facts to back up our investment thesis. Finally, we have what we call our core business, that's about 50% of our business. That business grows at roughly GDP or GDP plus. And I have a slide on that, which I'll comment on in terms of why the core is important to Rogers and why it's just as important as our significant growth markets as well. So first, a quick comment on EV. So pretty much everyone I talk to now all agree that this is a true secular market. It's going to grow rapidly for many years to come, and you have the data. One thing is we know that by 2023 -- and by the way, these numbers are from third-party market research. We know that by 2023, there's going to be more than $1 trillion in CapEx spend in electrifying the world of vehicles. Already at this moment, there's probably over $0.5 trillion already spent. So the investments there, the commitments from all the major OEMs are there, 0 emissions out of the tail pipe, et cetera, and that's driving that growth. And you can look. So this graph, in 2021, those bars are from the third-party market research and just go to 2023, they predicted 8 million electric vehicles, full electric from 2 years ago. So just recently, they updated it. Now they're saying, oh, we think there's going to be 12 million sold in 2023. So that's a 50% jump in 2 years increase. So again, we believe the data is here and that this market is for real. And we have great positions. We changed a lot of our strategy to participate, right? We reorganized, we reallocated. We drove further innovation faster. And we feel like we've got just a great position here. Now EV is a large segment, but I wouldn't say that's our only horse we are riding. Beyond EV, there's solid growth potential in these high-growth end markets. And what we like about these are their diversity. So you've got ADAS, aerospace and defense, mobile phones or portable electronics, including tablets, renewable energy. That's really a good breadth of applications for Rogers' materials related to connectivity, radar and clean energy, wind and solar, where there's a lot of diversity. So they're not interconnected. So what you'll see is we have a lot of end markets, but we like that because it gives us diversity, and we're not dependent on one end market to do well to do well. And if there are some macroeconomic issues affecting an end market or 2, we feel like we've got a range of end markets that can help buffer that. And then that's part of our strategy. And then for core market, we've got general and industrial. This in itself has a lot of diversity. So it's a catch all. In some cases, when we drive out technology into an end market segment, it comes out of general industrial and then becomes one of the others that we discussed. But in here would be medical, HVAC, appliances, lighting, semiconductor a lot is in this segment. And our folks will talk about this more in detail as well. And then this is where we consider wireless infrastructure, where stable outlook, consumer adoption of 5G is progressing, and it's quite stable. And then we do have some supportive policies up here. I'll mention this. The Chips Act, infrastructure bill. We've spent some time drawing bright lines between these bills and then connecting it to growth with our business within general industrial. So just want to switch. My last section is here. And so what is our path forward. So we've done a lot of work on this in the past few months, and we're happy to share this. And so we really feel like we have a 3-phase plan to drive forward to the numbers that we've shared. And so we talk about restore, accelerate and elevate. I will go into a bit more detail on each one of these steps right now. So for restore. So we're in the middle of the restore phase. It's for 2023. We have taken a lot of aggressive actions. And let me just share one of the few actions we've taken, such as we've taken cost out with a 7% workforce reduction. We reduced spending in other areas. We've closed the price road site in Arizona. We've divested our low-margin rubber business. That deal closed last week, so I'm happy to report that. We've bolstered our ops team quite significantly, and Larry will explain more about this during the presentation. And many of these benefits will be realized in 2023. Overall, we're going to remain laser-focused on getting our margins back to where they need to be and beyond. One thing to point out, though, we are a growth company, and we have to manage for the long term as well. So despite making these aggressive cuts, a few folks have asked, well, what did you do with R&D? And what did you do with tech service? Well, we didn't cut there. We can't because we need that innovation. In fact, we've invested in a few areas because they're growing so rapidly. So it's a balancing act, but we do have to be laser-focused on margins for this year and in the restore phase. But we are planning for the longer term. A piece of that is getting to accelerate. So in this particular phase, we plan on seeing our design wins, particularly in the EV space, get converted into commercial revenue. We're also going to focus a lot on capital deployment to make sure we have the right capacity in the right spot for the right customers. As volumes increase, we are anticipating that the commercial revenue ramp will drive operating performance leverage taking gross margins and operating margins back to prior historic levels by 2024 and 2025. And we'll also continue to build the team and improve capabilities as we scale the organization. Quick comment on the financials we have shared and will share this morning. It's all organic. So we're not talking about M&A in terms of the numbers we're sharing, but M&A is a key pillar of our strategy. So Rogers in the past has made some very attractive M&A acquisitions, and they've been very beneficial for us. Most recently was the silicone engineering acquisition we made that was just a quarter -- October 2021. Yes. Sorry. Thanks for that assist. And so it's been a wonderful addition. From a strategic perspective, we did not have a silicon manufacturing facility in Europe and many European OEMs want regional production. And so it was a brilliant move for us to acquire them. Culturally, they're a great fit. And they've added to the breadth of our silicone technology. So we're on the lookout for those types of acquisitions. M&A markets have changed a bit. We do have a very, I'd say, detailed acquisition road map by business, and we'll execute when the right deal comes our way. And then finally, in the elevate stage. So here, this is we plan on delivering our 40% gross margin, 20% margin -- operating margin and 20% OpEx ratio promise. This will happen. The opportunity pipeline continues to accelerate. And what we get is a mix of products in this opportunity funnel. Please note that about 35% of our opportunity funnel is in the late stage, which means it will have a higher probability of delivering. And we don't share the size of our opportunity funnel, but what we try to do is keep it in the range of about 2x our revenues. But beyond that, so think about the opportunity funnel, which are locked in design-in wins, which are progressing. We also have an innovation pipeline developing new and differentiated technologies. All our businesses are required to have multi generation plans because we know that to maintain margins and to maintain market leadership, you can't stand pat on your existing technology. So this is one place, I think everyone would agree, Rogers is superb at in terms of being a technology company, and so we're not losing focus on that. A quick word on our repeatable process to drive growth. So here's how it would work. So I've been in the industry for about 30 years, and I've seen some very good sales representatives and very good technical folks. But I'm super impressed with the Rogers' talent in this area. Our sales engineers and our technical service folks are experts on our products and applications, and I'd hold them up against anybody in the industry. And our model is our sales engineers call directly on their OEM counterparts and engineers. And they get in there, they understand from their counterpart, what CTQs the company is trying to understand or solve. And there's an iterative process where we're coming back with our technology, perhaps we need to make it tweak on our technology to make it work. That's where tech service and development comes in. I'll give you a quick story on that. But then we follow this model. So we want to be in the -- number one piece, growth markets; two, we want to have good relationships with customers. If the customers not talking to you about where they're going. And if they're not sharing their technology road map, that's not a good thing, but we have good relationships. So our customers do talk to us and tell us, this is our technology road map. Talk about the unmet need, like I mentioned, do this iterative back and forth exercise around finding the right solution and then make it work in our customers' products. So a good example was just recently, we had a design-in win with a European automotive OEM. And our sales engineer and our applications leader, our tech service applications leader was there. And they just couldn't get our technology to do exactly what this customer needed in terms of providing separator pads in a battery cell pack. But our applications engineers knew what they wanted. Flew back to the States on a Thursday, Friday was in the lab, fired up our pilot line, ran off a couple new products, had them FedEx to the customer over the weekend. Our sales engineer shows up on Tuesday back at this customer, and we get a design-in win. And we think we're really good at that because we're lean as a company. We're very nimble, people communicate. And I think we're just the right size to get things done quickly and more efficiently than maybe some of our competitors. So that's the example I wanted to share. So I'm just about over time here. The business leaders and Ram will take you through these targets where we aspire to get sales to $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in 2025, at 38% to 40% gross margin and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 24% to 26%. So I just wanted to close again with why invest in Rogers? We believe that growth, innovation, a solid and repeatable and proven value creation model leads to a compelling financial opportunity for our company. But it's our responsibility to share a lot more data and facts this morning. And so we're going to do that, starting with Jeff who will take us through ceramic and ROLINX. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Colin. Truly exciting time. Good morning. I'm Jeff Tsao, Vice President and General Manager for Power Electronics Solutions under Advanced Electronic Solutions division. I've been with Rogers for more than 5 years, with 20 years of prior experience, in the telecom, semiconductor and the various electronic materials businesses. So I'm extremely excited to speak to you today about our Advanced Electronic Solutions, or AES division with my focus, starting with power electronics and my colleague, Roger Tushingham will speak to you about radio frequency in just a moment. As you're about to hear, AES is well positioned to capture the growth and value in the dynamic markets we serve, leveraging our decades of strong leadership positions, deep customer relationships and application expertise. Utilizing the growth engine model that Colin just referenced a moment ago, we have developed a strong innovation pipeline to capture differentiated growth. AES cells to be break down our revenue stream, it is -- we're driven by strong secular tailwinds in several dynamic markets, including EV/HEV, automotive radar, aerospace defense and renewable energy. We work closely with a broad customer base and has a well-balanced geographic sales mix. Roger and I will go into depth to talk about how we solve our customers' most challenging problems in high power and high frequency. With that, let me dive into Power Electronics. I feel this is a less understood part of the Rogers growth story. But our technologies are the critical enabler to what goes on and around this every single day. Have you ever thought about how power gets converted and distributed from an EV battery to the motor that makes the wheels turn or from a solar panel to the grid that powers your home? Power Electronics Solutions is at the heart of the power conversion and power distribution, enabling maximum efficiency, reliability and safety. In a nutshell, this is what we do. Our ceramic power conversion technologies provides solutions to enable reliable and efficient power conversion from direct current to alternate current or DC to DC (sic) [ AC ] at voltage levels over 1,000 volts. Our ROLINX power interconnect technologies provide efficient and safe power distribution solution operating at thousands of volts. We pioneered both of these technologies, taking them from concept to mass scale commercial applications decades ago. And today, we -- over the past 35 years, we have worked closely with our customers to custom design, engineer and manufacture solutions across industrial, renewable and mass transit applications. We're extremely proud to say that because of our offerings, high-speed trains are able to run at 180 miles per hour around the world, uninterrupted. And our technology also enable offshore wind turbine to operate efficiently and reliably 24/7 in extremely harsh environments. Today, we're leveraging that decades of know-how, leadership and customers' trust to enable efficient and reliable electric vehicles. To bring all that to life, over the next couple of slides, I'll give you specific examples on how power converse -- how we're solving power conversion and power interconnect challenges in EV. Let me start with example of power conversion. As many of you know, 3 main barriers to EV adoptions are range, cost and safety when you think about battery catching fire. The PES team is developing differentiated technologies to tackle all 3 these of areas. Inverters in electric vehicles, which converts DC power from the battery to AC that powers the motor cost somewhere between $500 to $1,000 per car, one of the most expensive systems in the vehicle. A main impediment to efficiently convert power is heat, as Colin talked about earlier. For an automotive OEM, excessive heat in EV inverter ultimately drives up cost reduces range and increase safety risks. What's shown on the left-hand side is a typical design, where -- inside of the inverter power module, you have the expensive silicon carbide chip packaged on top of ceramic substrate go through some interface layers and attach a bulky, clunky and heavy heat sink. All of that is to pull heat out of the system to allow the silicon carbide chip to operate efficiently and reliably. On the right-hand side, you see is the unique ceramic power conversion solution where we're integrating our decades of leadership and know-how in ceramic power substrate and our unique active cooling technology. This solution provides a compact and reliable package offering to our customers that helps to improve the speed of heat removal by up to 25%. And allowing each expensive and scarce silicon carbide chip to work harder. And therefore, the system designer can use less silicon carbide chip to achieve the same performance and improve efficiency at this time. This solution also is able to reduce the overall inverter volume by 20% and improve the reliability of this inverter due to a much simpler assembly process. Even visually, you can tell it's probably a much more elegant design compared to the typical solution on the market. What this ultimately translates into for -- OEMs is that this can drive down the inverter cost by 10%, a $50 to $100 savings per car when you multiply that across hundreds of thousands, if not millions of vehicle, each OEM is just targeting to sell. That is an enormous statement. And not to mention, a more efficient and reliable inverter also helps to improve range allowing the car to go longer distance on a single charge. Today, we're working with a number of global leading customers to integrate this design into the next-generation EV inverter power module. Let's go to another example of how our ROLINX power interconnect technology brings significant benefits to arguably the most expensive and critical system in a car, the battery. I'm sure you have come across this picture on the left-hand side showing the EV skateboard. What that does is actually just making the car move, turn, break, et cetera. It is extremely important for OEMs to have a compact design, allowing the ultimate flexibility and helping to lower the cost when they roll out multiple models, utilizing the same chassis design. But how do you interconnect thousands of battery cells in such a compact space reliably and safely? And when OEMs talk about, you can improve range without increasing the battery size, what kind of levers can they pull? The answer is the ROLINX power interconnect technology. What's shown here is a great example of how our engineers work directly with our customer engineers to custom design and develop a power interconnect solution that connects thousands of synergical battery cells, reliably as well as the ability to integrate power management capability and safety features to address thermal runaway. Our customers know that every single connecting point, if not designed well or manufactured consistently, wastes battery power during power distribution. This solution, coupled with our manufacturing process technology, delivers superior efficiencies, optimizing the overall system performance and improve safety by integrating features such as the ability to isolate an overheating battery cell to reduce the risk of fire. The efficient, reliable and integrated design allows a 3 to 5-kilowatt hour reduction in battery size, while maintaining the range. To put that into perspective, a typical EV car today has a battery size somewhere in the 80 to 100-kilowatt hour, costs on average $10,000. According to the Department of Energy, the 3 to 5-kilowatt hour reduction in battery size can reduce $350 to $600 per car and while maintaining the same performance. This integrated design also reduces assembly cycle time, improves reliability and manufacturing costs. Now that I've given you specific examples of how we solve customers' challenges to address barriers to EV adoption. Lets turn to the next slide on why we win in our key markets. Facing the government mandate to significantly reduce carbon footprint around the world by 2030 and EU regulators signed into law to transition 100% of the passenger car to clean energy by 2035. Automotive OEMs are racing to develop EV models and gain competency in power electronics design -- system design in a very compressed timeline. This rapid transition to EV has dramatically shifted the automotive manufacturing landscape. The environment has created a greater reliance on suppliers such as Rogers to help to develop efficient and reliable solution. We became an indispensable partner to our customers because of 4 things: our decades of experience, our proven reliability and performance, our broad portfolio of solutions and our custom design and manufacturing capabilities. Our customers know that when partnering with Rogers, not what -- will we only put them with a reliable, efficient and cost of the solution they can also count on us to scale manufacturing with the right quality in a very compressed timeline. This is why we win in the marketplace and how we have helped a U.S.-based pure-play EV manufacturer to bring their models to market. Turning to the market. As Colin talked about, we expect an acceleration of EV/HEV and also renewable energy demand in the coming years. In order to meet the government mandate to transition 25% to 30% of the passenger cars through EV and incentive by half of the new energy generation to come from renewable sources, the market segment we participate in would have to grow by 7x and 4x, respectively, to be able to meet the overall industry demand. I'm not here to suggest that power electronics are going to grow by 7x over the next 5 years and going after everything that gets my CFO and my ops VP a little bit nervous. What we are targeting here is the higher power application across EV/HEV and across industrial and mass transit, the traditional markets that we serve, where our customer sees clear advantages in the technology and advantage that we offer to the market. That market segment is expected to grow at greater than 30% CAGR through 2028 according to IHS. In the past few years, we have broadened our reach and leveraging our success and market-leading position to expand with a global customer base. With this strategy, we have seen our opportunity pipeline increased by 2.5x to 3x in 2022. Many of these opportunities, we expect to ramp starting in 2025, driving continuous capacity investments to meet our customers' demand. To sum it all up, just as we were the pioneer for mass transit and industrial applications decades ago, we're once again at the forefront of a once-in-a-generation opportunity, in EV and renewable energy growth. Across high-power application, efficiency, reliability and safety are the most critical requirements. For the PES team, we partner directly with our customers' engineers to create innovative power conversion and power interconnect solutions to increase the speed of heat removal, improve overall system efficiency and reliability while helping to drive down the total of ownership. Due to our strong relationship and technical expertise, we -- customers have worked with us to identify a clear short-term and a long-term technology road map, and it's tailored to their needs. We're focusing on 3 areas of innovation, product innovation, such as the examples I've illustrated earlier; material innovation, such as higher temperature materials required to -- be using those solutions; and manufacturing process technology innovation to ensure our products are delivered with the highest level of quality and more importantly, consistency in high-volume manufacturing. This is the winning formula to drive differentiated growth in the market segments we target. And I believe they are extremely difficult to replicate. I hope that I've now provided you with a better understanding of this part of the Rogers' growth story. I know my team and I are excited about the future of power electronics. And with that, I'll turn it over to Roger Tushingham to talk about RFS. Thank you for your attention.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everybody. My name is Roger Tushingham, I'm the Vice President and General Manager of our radio frequency or RF solutions business. Prior to joining Rogers 6 years ago, I spent more than 25 years in the semiconductor capital equipment and specialty chemicals industries. So what do we do at RF solutions. At RF solutions, we enhance road safety. Our materials enable your Advanced Driver Assistance Systems to make more informed proactive decisions and that results in less accidents and reduced lost lives. Over 1.3 million people die each year in road accidents, and our technology helps reduce that. On the left-hand side, you can see a Gen 5 long-range radar made by a leading automotive Tier 1, and that cream-colored material that you see up there is our low loss materials. At RF Solutions, we enhance national security. Our materials enable air and missile defense systems to detect, classify and eliminate threats at a longer range, which is becoming increasingly important as we look at the area of hypersonics. In the middle, you can see a radar that sits in the node cron of a fifth-generation fighter. That radar actually contains 4 of Rogers' materials, each one to perform a specific function. And at RF Solutions, we enhance global communications. This one is my personal favorite. Colin's talked a lot about it already, but our materials enable the Voyage satellites to communicate with Earth from beyond our solar system. I checked this morning, there are actually 14.8 billion miles away from earth, which is quite incredible. And that's 45 years after system launch. So these are just a few examples of how we help to protect and connect the world around us. But I think they provide some valuable insight into why our customers continue to choose Rogers. Each of these applications require extremely high performance. Each of these applications requires extreme levels of reliability and consistency across a broad range of environmental conditions. And as you can understand, by just talking about some -- or thinking about some of these applications, failure is not really an option. You can't send the satellite repairman out 14.8 billion miles away to fix the Voyager, for example. And then in each of these cases, we work directly with our OEM and leverage both our applications knowledge together with our material science knowledge to solve their most critical problems. So now I'll just talk a little bit more about how we do this. We're the industry leader in low-loss dielectric materials. And low loss dielectric materials are really the foundation upon which RF systems are designed and built. Our low loss materials enable customers to maximize signal strength by minimizing the power loss due to heat generation. And we can use this little illustration of an automotive radar system to kind of talk about the benefits of signal strength. As you can probably imagine, just by looking at the diagram, if we can increase the strength of that transmit signal, we can detect vehicles at a longer range or further away. And the benefit of that is it allows the car more time -- it gives a car more time to make a decision and take a base of action. The stronger the output signal also means the stronger the return signal to the system. And the more information you get back, the more resolution that picture has and then you can detect, you can say, okay, this is a car. This is a motor bike. This is a pedestrian. So you can kind of classify the objects, which is another advantage. And in communication systems, increased signal strength means that you can transmit more data over a longer range. Again, going back to the Voyager. We're transmitting data over almost 15 billion miles, which is, again, blows my mind, to be honest. Optimizing power efficiency and we're therefore, reducing heat generation -- also has some benefits in terms of -- it reduces the design complexity for the entire system. It reduces the running costs. And in systems that require batteries as their source of power, it extends battery life. And again, as you get more and more radars on cars and in battery electric vehicles, the lower -- you can reduce the power consumption, again, it helps extend battery life. So why do we win? I think there's 4 real reasons and kind of levels of differentiation that we have within our RFS business, and we'll just go through step through each of these to start with. The first is brand reputation. And for over 60 years, we have been a trusted partner for RF design engineers around the world. They grow up with using Rogers materials when their at university. And then they go into industry, and we're the first people they call. They trust that we can solve their problems not only of today, but of tomorrow. The second level of differentiation is around our performance. We already talked about our low loss capability. And over our decades long history of innovation, we've developed the leading breadth of portfolio of low loss materials. And this library of solutions allows both our applications engineers to work with the customers to solve their problems. The third level of differentiation and Jeff talked about it, is really reliability and consistency. Our materials performed consistently day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year and decade-to-decade. And this is extremely important for our customers. And it's a testament to our -- not only our material design expertise, but also our process and manufacturing capability. And then the fourth level of differentiation is this OEM engagement model, which we're all going to be talking about a lot today. Our years of experience working directly with the OEMs has given us a deep knowledge of their applications. We can combine this applications knowledge along with science to solve their problems and their most critical challenges. And often by engaging early with the OEMs, we can solve problems before our competition even know they exist. So now we talked about what we do. Let's talk about the markets that we serve, and we'll start with our automotive radar business that goes into the ADAS systems that Colin talked about. And as ADAS transitions from being an optional to a standard feature on more and more vehicle models, what we see is more cars with radar. And each of those cars has more radars on it. If you look at SAE is an organization that kind of defines levels of autonomy and motor vehicles. And SAE Level 1 car would typically have between 1 and 3 radars on it. And SAE Level 2 typically has between 3 and 5. So we're seeing more cars with SAE Level 2. And so that's more radars in general. So this is driving a volume increase in radar systems. And then also as we get advancing levels of autonomy, it means that the system needs to be able to create a full 360-degree view around the car. It needs to be able to do that at extended ranges and also be able to detect. We talked about detection between a truck a car, a motor bike, a pedestrian. So the level of complexity around performance is also increasing. So these 2 things combined, and we get this increased penetration rate of ADAS. And that means that even though light vehicle production is only predicted to grow at approximately 3% CAGR over the next 5 years. Radar unit shipments are predicted to grow in around the 10% range. And based on our design wins that we already have and our design opportunity funnel, we're expecting to grow at or slightly above that Radar system CAGR. Again, just talk about some of the challenges in our solutions. As our dependence on ADAS increases so do the requirements on performance and reliability. We have a portfolio of solutions for this market that spanned the breadth of capability from the relatively talking relatively simple blind spot detection, which Colin talked about, you can see this diagram blind spot detection is the radars on the back of the car, detecting vehicles coming up behind you. And then we have capability all the way up through the early state-of-the-art 4D imaging radar sensors, which are typically looking far down the road state of the art right now, it's about 150 meters. So we have a breadth of a portfolio that spans that breadth. And we have an installed base across the 20 years that we've been supplying into this market of more than 500 million radars that have used Rogers materials in them. And that amount of reliability -- proven reliability really gives our customers the peace of mind that we can be a reliable supplier for them. In a few minutes, I'm going to introduce you to a new technology that we've got for next-generation radar. We have some samples in the back as well. But first, let's talk about aerospace and defense. Aerospace and Defense was where RF Solutions began 60 years ago, as Colin talked about, and it's delivered stable growth over its long history. As governments move to modernize their forces and their focus of spending is shifting more from volume based to capability-based. And this has provided a benefit for us driving higher growth rates, and now we consider the aerospace and defense market to be a strong growth segment. Governments are enhancing their radar capability. They're spending more money on these actively -- active electronically scanned array radar. The example we showed the radar that's in the nose curve of the fifth generation fighter is an AESA radar that uses a lot of our technology. And also the Pentagon has a vision for a fully connected military. So it's where information can flow freely and securely to and from all assets, whether they be in the air, land, sea or space domain. And this really drives the need for advanced communication capability and that advanced communication capability has to be mobile because it has to be on asset. So while the CAGR for defense electronic spending is in the 5% to 6% range, which is already above the baseline defense spending CAGR. We expect, based on the areas that we're playing in to have a growth rate above this -- this electronics CAGR in the high single digit to low double-digit range. And just again, just to touch on the challenges in our solutions as adversaries become more sophisticated, incoming threats are moving faster and they're smaller. And that really plays in our ability from a performance standpoint to detect objects at longer ranges. And again, we have a very, very long history of providing stable, reliable, high-performance in these mission-critical applications, again, peace of mind for the customers that we interact with. And again, we'll show you in the demonstrations you'll be able to see that we have a unique portfolio of solutions that can be molded, formed or even deposited into multiple shapes, and that allows for deployment on asset, which helps with these applications where more and more communication systems are going on asset. And in the next slide, we're going to introduce you to a new platform of materials that's really changing the game in terms of miniaturization capability. We're expanding our reach and utilizing a portion of the electromagnetic field that no one else is able to use and that really drives miniaturization capability. So now with that, I'd like to turn to your attention to some of the solutions that are coming out of our very, very close collaborations with our leading customers. As we just mentioned, to address the need for miniaturization in aerospace and defense, we recently released -- commercially released this platform of unique materials and an operational field test by multiple armed forces across the world. Our MAGTREX platform has demonstrated improved communication clarity and an ability to reduce antenna size by 75%. You can see in the top right, is kind of an example of what the military has to use today from an antenna technology to what we see. And this antenna is actually -- again, it's in the back of the room. So very excited to talk to you about that today. To address the challenges of both performance and cost in the automotive segment, we've developed an antenna solution that has 3 distinct advantages. First, it enables a 40% increase in range. So if we reference back to before where you could detected 150 meters, you can now detect it beyond 200 meters. Again, it allows the system to make an earlier decision and take action more proactively. It reduces the total cost of ownership of the radar in the system by 20%. And it also gives some customers some new capabilities to deal with interference issues. You can imagine as you go from 3 radars on a car to 7 radars on a car or 5 to 7 radars on a car, there's a lot of interference within that vehicle. And then if every car on the road has 5 or 7 radars, there's a lot of interference taking place. And this solution enables some greater degrees of freedom for our system engineers. And in a relatively new market for RF Solutions, we are looking at ways to address the challenges of size and efficiency in wireless charging. We're combining our high frequency and our high-power knowledge to provide solutions that are again looking at the -- showing the potential to reduce size by 75%, which if you can think of a coil mounted on a vehicle has obvious advantages for the OEM. So these solutions all have some things -- some common themes, right? They all maintain our ability and our reputation for delivering extremely high performance and extremely high reliability. They leverage our years of RF knowledge combined with our system and applications capability to solve our customers' most critical challenges and they really drive the next level of growth for Rogers well into the future. So with that, I'd just like to wrap up on the key messages for the Advanced Electronic Solutions business before I hand it over to Brian. AES is very well positioned in multiple markets that have strong secular tailwinds. And this is no accident. This really is no accident. Our established model of engaging with OEM customers early and often has resulted in a sustainable trend of market-led innovation. So that ensures that we have the high-performance, reliable solutions our customers need, when they need them and where they need them. So I really thank you for your attention. I look forward to engaging with you more at the back of the room later on. And with that, I'll hand it over to Brian.

Thank you, Roger. Good morning. My name is Brian Larabee. I'm the Vice President and General Manager of our Elastomeric Materials business. I've been with Rogers for just under 11 years. Prior to being in Rogers, I spent more than 20 years in specialty material markets for semiconductor, solar and the medical space. This morning, I'll talk to you, we'll try to talk to you a little bit about the EMS business to kind of explain what we are. What you'll see in our business is we actually have very different products and applications, and you see on our AES business. But you'll also see that we have this almost exact same business model and why we win. So our business approach is very similar. It's good connective tissue between us and the AES business, but the products are going to be very different. So we'll do best to walk you through that. So as we talk about some of the key messages for today, I ask you to kind of watch out for a couple of key pieces. We have a very loyal customer base, just like our AES counterparts. We've got a very, very strong relationship through our markets. We're focused on some very strong growth markets with powerful secular tailwinds. We've got a very loyal customer base. And then we do that by leveraging our deep materials, systems and applications expertise. And Colin talked about some of this a little bit earlier. So we'll get into some of this here. So at a high level, let's talk about where EMS fits in the Rogers organization. So we're $420 million of our top line revenue. And we talked about a really broad range of markets. And we'll go into some of those in some of the coming slides, and we'll talk about some of the applications and kind of give you a good demonstration of how we participate in those markets. Our business model and our global footprint allow us to grow and meet where our loyal customers are. So you can see the regional distribution up here that we're spread wherever our customers have both design houses and manufacturing. We have our product and our superior reliability, our bio products, very similar to what you're hearing from our AES counterparts, brings that strong loyal relationships. Our customers rely on us for the reliability and the performance over a period of time. A diverse portfolio of polymers. Colin talked about a few of those are highly flexible and allow us to customize them and to create new solutions on an ongoing basis. Great applications expertise, and we actually always are focused on finding those places where just like Roger was talking about, places that our customers cannot afford to fail. We'll show you some examples of that as we go into that. So the following slides, we'll go through why Roger -- why customers choose Rogers. Simply put, we make foam and we make films. It's not a very sexy thing to talk about. So how do you turn that into something that's interesting. So what we actually do is we actually solve problems that are pretty easy for us to relate because they are actually things that we encounter on a daily basis to. We protect your cell phone. The breakage issue that Colin was talking about earlier, we protect your kids on the sports field from impact. We protect travelers from fire, smoke, toxicity in their environments. We improved the experience of our customers' products with their customers. A good example of that is the cell phone that you probably came in here with. So the acoustics, the clarity of sound, how well that speaker works, how well you hear the sound out of your phone, how well and how good is the sound that comes out of your smart speaker at the house if you've got a smart speaker at the house. How clear is your television or how clear is the screen and the resolution on your smartphone. These are all things that Rogers in our EMS business actually design solutions to help solve those issues. And we'll get into some examples of that. So as we go through our business model, again, we make foam. We don't just make regular foam, we actually do the customization of this. And so as we work with our OEMs, as Colin was talking about before, we've got a deep, deep, deep applications expertise. We have very strong sales engineers in the marketplace who understand our materials, our polymer solutions and then how to apply those to our customers' problems that they need to solve. We take that broad applications expertise, like Colin was mentioning before. We take that problem back to the house and so the example of the German OEM was actually from one of our applications. We work with our formulations, we go back, we tweak them, we can turn them around and customize those to meet those unique applications. Once we get through that, we solve all of these issues. But then we actually sell to what's called a converter network. And so we don't sell. We sell big roles of material. We sell those to converters. And those converters will actually take our parts, they design them to meet unique design specifications. They take those and then laminate with adhesive, they put foiled or put some other unique factor on there that we've designed with the OEM. So remember, as Colin said, we design in with the OEMs. We get Rogers part numbers put on their blueprints. Our converters will cut those to those specifications and they sell those to the end customer. So that's how our business model works. But again, it's very similar to what you saw with the AES business, where we sell -- we work with the design engineers, we get on their spec sheets and then we sell through a channel. So why we win and how we win are almost redundant from what you've just seen with AES, but it is very significant. And how we do that is we have generated an extremely strong brand. We've been doing this on the EMS side of stuff for better than 40 years. We have brands that are in the marketplace now for 60 years in the market space today. We are probably one of the better known performance brands of products that in our space that are out there today. We are the go-to partner for most of the engineers and most of our customers when they go to market, and we'll talk about some examples of that. We do provide the highest quality, most reliable products in our space. We have an extensive well-trained team. We leverage that as we go through and work with our customers. And what we'll talk about is this is we've actually built for a 40 years a bank or we refer to it almost as a library of application design tools that allow us to marry a customer's unique specification to a part number that goes with this. And we have access to this and many of our customers and converters have access to this, and they leverage that. We have a very trusted network of loyal channel partners. We actually work with the top 200 manufacturers who design and die cut and convert these particular parts. And why that's important for you to understand in the investor community is that we call this a force multiplier of our business. We have about 80 engineers that are in the field on a daily basis. We have 200 folks who lead with Rogers project -- products on the converter side of stuff. That is if you think of it from the perspective of multiplier, they have anywhere from 10 to 100 sales engineers themselves. We estimate we have 300 engineers in the field representing Rogers products and identifying problems to be solved. And this is exactly how we've grown and how we've created the brand reputation that we had. This makes a very profoundly robust business model that makes it really hard to replicate by our competition. EMS is focused on some very powerful growth places. We too are also in the EV space. But what's different about what AES does and what EMS does? As EMS is really for around the power source. We are focused on around and in the battery. Now as you'll see in the back, we actually have products to go all around the electric vehicle. The highest growth space for us right now is around solving those issues around the EV battery. Our AES colleagues are really taking the battery and then having efficient transfer of that out after the drivetrain. So we're right next to our friends at AES, but we are different than how we solve the issues and how we participate in the market space. We have a lot of different applications, and you can see the different types. There's 3 basic types of batteries and there's a lot of discussion going around that. There's new evolving types of battery types that are out there. We participate in our designing with the leading OEMs on all types of those formats, those form factors. And so as we take a look at those right now, we'll talk about the pouch cell, which is one area that we probably have some of the greatest participation in the longest work done. We'll talk about the problems that we solve in that particular space. But an important point that I will repeat a couple of times in this message. EV battery is a very nascent in its technology life cycle. It is very early. The battery form factors, the designs, the problems they're solving today will be different in 18 months, 24 months, 36 months. And we continue to work with those guys and helping them work through those evolutions and changing those designs. And so we -- as you'll see our Rogers business model actually uniquely positions us to be a good partner for them as we grow into these spaces. And we'll go through some examples of that in the next slide. So if you take a look at the growth rates of the EV batteries, you can see that's 20% to 25%. Our sales funnel over the past 2 years is growing at the exact same rate as those battery launches. So there's new programs, there's new projects, and we're actually growing in alignment with those market spaces. So let's talk about the battery. This is the battery design. I'm not going to go through in great painful detail, but we'll talk a little bit around how we participate in a more simplified way, if you will. All the green spaces you see up there and there's a great video in the back. I encourage you to go back and see Brian Ninness back there. He can explain all the different places we participate. I want to talk about really where we drive the greatest value in the battery design space today. So I think it's important to understand that for dealing with the issues like range anxiety, which is one of the largest issues they have, we'll talk about range anxiety and safety. But range anxiety the major issue that you have right there, too, is the ability to have constant charge and discharge. And so one of the biggest components to that is whether it's a cell or a pouch, we use the pouch as an example. That pouch actually expands as it takes to charge and contracts as it discharges. Now it's in a very small level, and you'll see the foam in the back is very thin. But what happens is the ability of that charge and discharge to be able to be even and consistent so that they're throughout the life of the battery is pressure. We apply pressure on the outside of those cells or those pouches as they expand and contract. They will expand and contract 10,000x the life of that battery. And the ability of that to do that at a consistent rate is critical. And what we do is apply the same amount of pressure on that cell as it expands and contracts, you will say, well, that doesn't sound like a big deal. Any foam that you have, whether it be your seat cushion or something in a house or a pillow, the hard you push into it, the harder it pushes back. We've actually designed foams that actually give that exact same rate of pressure throughout the entire vacillation of that. The other piece that's in critical piece is, we've also designed that same set of foam, the inability to take a set. Now what does that mean? You go out to the store and you buy a brand new set of sneakers. You wore those sneakers for a week, the first day you put them on, they got great cushioning, they're super comfortable. About after 2 to 3 weeks, you start losing the cushioning. That foam is taking a set or crushing. It's losing its ability and it's losing its thickness to give you that pressure. So we've designed foams and you see very thin foams that actually do not take a set. Why do they care? Because as you go through 10,000 cycles in that battery design, the life of that battery -- you need to have the same amount of pressure the day they bought the car to the day they're done. And so as they look at doing these designs, we've actually been able -- a couple of designers show that we can actually give them better than 15% better life on that battery. Remember, Jeff said it, the battery is the most expensive thing in EV. If you can actually reduce the footprint, increase the number of cells, you creates the range. Or if you can creates the life of that, it's a significant cost of ownership benefit to the OEMs who design with Rogers materials. So these are some of the challenges. We'll go into some other things too. On the back booth, I won't go to them to hear around venting and environmental sealing and pressure management. There's a lot of different applications we formulate to that, but we won't get into that here. To give you an example of how we continue to work with our customers, it's no surprise to anybody. Safety is becoming paramount in these batteries. In the past few years, we first started working with these guys 10 years ago, it was around performance. There's a huge piece of -- I need that same performance, but I need to not have fire. I need to prevent thermal runaway. How can you take your same things in formulating fire retardants, change your polymer systems to either prevent that fire, prevent runaway or at least slow that down in a catastrophic event, so somebody could escape their vehicle. So these are the types of things that Rogers are doing to continually develop our polymer systems. The systems that we have are very unique, silicones and polyurethanes, those are just chemical words for most people. Those are some of the most flexible systems. If you do the base chemistry like we do, you can really, really expand the capabilities of those. So we'll go on to the next slide, please. Portable electronics. So you've heard mostly about portable electronics from EMS, if you've been watching us for a long time. Portable electronics is actually one of my favorite examples of how Rogers participates in the market space. We participate in a lot of spaces, but I think this is one of the best demonstrations of how we work with our OEMs, why we're important to our OEMs and why we win? And so we'll go through this because we are the go-to problem solver for all the major OEMs for their handsets. We're the people that they lead with their new designs. The reason is when you are actually designing a new phone and you release that the success of that or the absence of failure of that is critical to their brand reputation. It's critical to the cost based on warranties. Putting in a Rogers foam, these folks know that they are going to have a reliable product they can stack their brand on. And so this is one of the differentiated pieces. The second piece is they're always looking to solve new problems. I use the next slide to address that. And they rely on us to solve them so they can focus on things that they care more about it, they have the skill sets in-house and we'll talk about how we do that. But it's really critical to understand that as we work with them, we work very closely and partner with them on all their new releases. I will go back one second. The other piece I want to do is, so as we track our business too, so I know that's what most people are looking for. So as we track our business, too, we actually are always looking at what the next generation looks like. Because to us, that is where we do. And so think of it as a surfer, we ride the front of the wave. We're with those guys when they go to the market. We actually take advantage of that when we go to and so we're actually trying to stay out there with the front-leading stuff. 5G brings new problems, brings new opportunities for Rogers and helps us increase the complexity and the content that we provide those suppliers, and this is how we differentiate with the portable electronics. This is why they still lead with this after all of these years. So let's talk about how we participate with them. And I want to just use a little time to take do a little history lesson, if you will, because I think it's the best way to demonstrate what we do. We've actually -- so if you look at all of these materials that are in green here, too, these evolved through the evolution of the Portable Electronics business. And so if you take a look at what we've taken today, so if you think back to the '90s, for those folks who are actually old enough to remember the big bag phones and the big [indiscernible] phones that you used to have, we've actually provided them an environmental seal. They started with us to provide that environmental seal. As they quickly went to the handheld. So remember, your Nokia's and your Razors and your Blackberries and all that kind of stuff, they had a new problem that wasn't easy to solve. But it sounds easy today, especially when you look at the material in the back. They needed a material that gave them the same characteristics, but much smaller than it was available in the market, much thinner. Their ability to shrink that, but still not give up and compromise those at the integrity of the phone and integrity of the performance in there. So they came to Rogers, and we actually started working on ultrathin materials. That was part of our monologue 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago. talking about how we're doing ultrathin materials. And so then we end actually started doing that they move and they start adding more complexity. They added the screen in there, then they had issues around light and dust sealing and they've been able to have light leakage is what they used to call it. We created new materials that did that. You went to the -- now we don't have touchpads most of our phones or maybe somebody here who has a phone with a touchpad, but most people don't have touchpads on there the touch screen. When they went to go to this, they started adding things like OLED screens. The OLED screen when you first put it on if you ever got one of the first generation when you pushed it ahead, but they call water ripple. And so that water ripple effect. They came to Rogers and said we have to get rid of the water ripple. Now remember the example I used in the EV side around pushing and the constant pressure that was derived by solving water ripple, it's how we got there the first time. Pushing on that screen, we gave the exact amount of pushback that you actually pushed into the screen. So it actually gave that good response but also kept the clarity of the screen. So we've been able, we solved those issues. And -- but the reason I bring that up is you'll see that as we solve one problem, we find other ways to replicate that across our space. This is going to go to the library of solutions that we have in a few minutes. So as we go through this, then they needed to have a better speaker. So we actually remember some of the earlier good and hear very good. The clarity wasn't very good. They said we need the same qualities, but I need better acoustics, I need it smaller, I need it thinner. And so if you think about each of the generations that come to us, Colin use the camera example. We put batteries -- we actually put battery pads back there to do this. When you drop that, so the battery doesn't rattle. So battery is loose in your cell phone because it moves. Remember, the one of those that got really hot, those are expanding and contracting. It's Rogers foam that keeps that in place, but also helps manage that and keep it together and keep that same compressibility. So if you take a look at, we've got a very large content and most all of the leading smartphones that are out there. And it's because we saw all of these unique little problems, and they're all tiny, tiny little parts. They go into this. This is why that converter network is important for us. So I'm going to go ahead and move on. I'm starting to run out of time a little bit. And so I want to talk about general industrial. So in general industrial is a broad range. This is HVAC. Actually, we've got aerospace and defense and footwear and sports impact protection. Actually, we have some of our consumer electronics business. It's a big, big bucket for us. It's 50% of our business. But this is really -- instead of thinking about those applications, think about what that means for Rogers and what it means for our customers. First off, we've talked about that toolbox or the library that we've come up with. This is where that library starts to take root. We have all of these solutions that we've created. As new inquiries come in, we create new solutions for that and application-specific. And that's really what fuels and funds our ability to go off and solve a lot of diverse problems quickly is because we have these libraries of data, understanding which polymer systems and additives and fillers and thicknesses and all that. You guys don't really care about that but I spend my day there. So I mean -- but this is what we do to make those solutions. And this allows us to replicate those examples. So if you have a smart speaker I talked about, this acoustic foam that we designed for the smart speaker originated in your cell phone. The designer who put that in this mic speaker probably the same guy. And so if you think about some touchscreens that are in our vehicles today, most of the touchscreen manufacturers, especially in Europe come from Nokia. Who do you think content is in the touchscreens in your vehicle is because we have the solutions already in the library, and we're able to replicate them or quickly adjust them to meet another set of requirements. So this is kind of -- that's one of the pieces it does to us. The second piece for us, and this is really important to understand, this is our incubator. We're already working on next-generation fuel cells and power sources and electronics and all these different types of applications. They come to us when their technology is nascent. We help them to develop. As their technology matures, they go to market, they lead with Rogers because their brand and their reputation and their business is at stake on that. So they lead with Rogers in these applications. And for the finance folks in the room, the third place that's most important. This creates that really stable base. When one market is up and another market is down, we've got a lot of stability. It's 50% of my business. It also helps us do a very nice contribution to our gross margin. So quickly to kind of hit these -- the technology piece, we hit the same things with Jeff and everybody else and so I'll speed up and move on, I'm almost out of time is on a material innovation side of things, we actually do 2 things. We leverage what we have. We talked about those flexible polymer systems and continually have our R&D organization looking at new capabilities. We're actually looking at our portfolio expansion. We are always on the look for new capabilities, new polymers, new technologies. We do those from licensing M&A. So a lot of the M&A you've seen in the past few years is in to help feed this piece. We need these capabilities. We need this regional piece. We need these kind of polymer systems. This is how we do this inorganically and organically, and we always are focusing around expanding our applications capability. Very similar problems. We talked about these already. I think there's similar what you've seen before, but we're addressing these. And again, we're very much like our brethren at AES. It's where efficiency, reliability and safety is where we live. So again, just as a quick recap. We're very well positioned and to grow in some very exciting markets with powerful secular trends. EMS right now continually solves very complex problems that customers can afford to fail in a very collaborative relationship with our OEMs. We have a very loyal customer base, and we rely upon that, and we appreciate that. We leverage our deep material systems and applications expertise. So hopefully, I gave you a little bit of a flavor of how we both connect with AES, but also the differences in where EMS participates. So hand over to Steve.

All right. Thank you, Brian. We're going to take about a 10-minute break, and we'll resume about 35 minutes after the hour. Thanks. [Break]

Okay, everyone, we're ready to resume the presentations. We'd invite you to come and take your seats and we're going to begin just in the next minute here. All right. So next up, we have our Senior Vice President of Operations, Larry Schmid. And with that, let me turn it over to Larry for his presentation.

Come on back end folks, let's get started. So Nancy, can you help shepherd some of the folks back in so we can get started. Thank you. All right. It looks like we got the critical mass back. I'm going to go ahead and get started. Good morning. My name is Larry Schmid, and it's great to be here with you today. Given that I joined Rogers 2 months ago, actually today is 2 months exactly. Let me briefly share my background with you. I bring 35 years of operations and supply chain experience to Rogers. The first 25 years with the Rohm and Haas Company, supporting a number of different specialty chemical businesses where customer centricity, innovation and responsiveness are certainly key requirements. I joined the Dow Chemical Company in 2009 through the acquisition of Rohm and Haas and continue to grow into larger operational leadership roles there, where I deepened my experience in the areas of operational excellence, operating discipline and certainly managing scale. In my final role with Dow, I had responsibility for a number of different businesses that spanned about 70 sites with about 8,500 manufacturing and engineering employees. I must tell you that I'm very excited to be here today with Rogers, a company that has an outstanding lineup of products playing into leading-edge markets as you've seen already, and with great customer relationships. Let me jump in now and talk a little bit about the global operations strategy and give you an update on what's going on here. And I want to start off by grounding you on the 5 key strategic operational objectives critical to support our businesses and our customers. And I'll start first with our global footprint here that you see on the map. Our network of assets and personnel are really well positioned to serve our customers in North America, Europe and Asia. In terms of competitive market access, our footprint allows us to be close to our customers so we can provide the support and the customer service levels they've come to expect. Just to go back to the model that Brian shared a few minutes ago and just to talk a little bit about the importance of how we connect. That model have -- we work very closely, as Brian said, with the OEMs, but we sell through channel partners. Those channel partners introduce another step of potential complexity in the supply chain. So it's really important that we're close to our customers and right in market. Flexibility in terms of product availability and qualifications at multiple sites is really an important trait that we need in our performance for us, performance improvement area. And I'll just talk a little bit our experiences in the past couple of years exposed some weaknesses in this space, and I'll bring some more color to that shortly. We drive value for our customers by leveraging scale, operational excellence and supply chain robustness. And then finally, in the manufacturing optimization space, our technical teams are continuously driving improvements in cost, yields and throughput, and I want to share just a couple of quick examples there, just to give you a little bit more information on what that looks like. If I look into the AES business, in a product line where the demands are fairly robust. Our technical teams have done a great job in the past 6 months to a year, unleashing capacity, debottlenecking assets to the tune of about 10% to 15%. If I jump over to the other side of the house, on the EMS side, our teams there have done similar work. In one of our lines, they've been able to improve line speeds on the order of roughly 10%. Why do I share those examples? Those are really high-return productivity improvements that are being done with low to no capital. So we certainly want to continue to take advantage of those. Let me shift now to talk a little bit about some of the historical challenges that we faced and Colin touched on this briefly, and I want to give you a little bit more color here. I think having visited all the sites in North America at this point, I feel very confident that the team really understands exactly what work we have to do. I think at this point, it's about executing and delivering on the results. So at a macro level on this slide, you'll see that the global challenges that Rogers faced were not much different than many other companies. We've listed on the left side of this slide, some of those global challenges, about 7 or so examples, and I'll let you peruse those. I do, however, want to amplify on the company-specific challenges that we faced, and those are on the right side of the slide. If we look at some of the demand disruptions that were going on during the pandemic and post-pandemic, it definitely had an impact on our asset utilization and in some parts of our business caused a shift in the product mix. The lower plant utilization resulted in stranded fixed costs and the shift in mix had an unfavorable impact on margins in some product lines. As the demand began to snap back, we realized that some of the highly dependent people processes that actually served us well over the years, struggled with the complexities and the magnitude of changes that were at play. And probably a good point here is to pause to say that when -- as I talk about this, this wasn't a pervasive issue across the network. We had probably 3 to 4 sites that really had some struggles. And you might be wondering what are those struggles. I'll give you an example in the production planning and scheduling area. We had -- when the demand began to snap back, we saw a lot of variability in that demand. The signals were very mixed. As we were trying to map those signals back to raw material requirements, we were certainly facing challenges there where suppliers either kept us on allocation, we couldn't get products in the quantities needed or they would come in late. We go into the process. We do the best we can at that point to schedule production and some of those plants had a fair bit of turnover at the operational level and in their staff levels. So it created some difficult times for some of these plants. And then further compounding those challenges was the DuPont transaction that was in progress. Planning for that deal to close, resulted in significant extra workload for many within the organization. and it also resulted in some attrition at the staff level, early attrition. So let me shift now to talk a little bit about what we're doing in the restore efforts relative to some of the challenges I just outlined. Then I'm going to speak about this as it relates to people, processes and tools. And what I want to share with you to leave you with is that some of the actions that we have taken at this point are well along and moving on. When we look at some of the things that have been done and Colin touched on this, we've [ idled lines ] to match capacity, we've had headcount reductions. You saw the recent announcement where there was a 7% reduction in headcount. So we've been taking cost out. You've also seen the recent announcement on the divestiture of the Griswold Rubber business in Connecticut. So as we work on further restoring our position, we will be investing heavily in human capital development by selectively adding talent and driving operational discipline throughout the fleet. In parallel with that, what you can expect to see are certainly more robust work processes and systems as part of an end-to-end integrated business planning process. And I want to come back to the challenges that I shared a few minutes ago with the 3 to 4 sites that were a little bit more challenged than a number of the others. We have brought expertise. We have brought tools. We have brought the processes to those sites to help them drive improvements. And they are in a weekly mode of driving those improvements. We see those improvements. In fact, one of the sites that I think was probably more challenged in the early going. As of last week, their metrics showed that they had knocked down the order backlog by more than 70%. So the key will be to leverage the processes, the systems and the discipline that we've put in place to really embed it to make it sustainable as we go forward. And obviously, that's very critical. So as people move around, we can continue to run plants in a very disciplined way without losing any focus. Let me shift now to take a look at it. So as we continue to work through this restore phase, supporting the growth of the businesses, what are we going to transition to. And we talk about this as the accelerate phase. And I want to be clear that the emphasis will be on supporting growth by first exhausting all available capacity within the sites. So debottlenecking, finding hidden capacity options. You'll see shortly in Ram's presentation where he talks about the plan to reduce capital intensity through the 2025 period. As we do this, we're going to leverage process automation and other tools to improve productivity and yields, while continuing to partner with our businesses and the customers to align with their growth and market-specific needs. So let me come now to just to talk a little bit about what if you -- we have a lot going on within the organization. And I want to leave you with 4 key takeaways so you have an understanding of what it is that we're really going to focus on heavily. We're going to continue to focus on the footprint. Number one, where supply and demand are fully in balance. Adjusting and taking swift action on our cost structure when needed. And we're going to do that by building the right capabilities in terms of the people, tools and processes. Number two, we're developing more integrated business planning process, which will be an end-to-end process that drives alignment, decisions and actions that allow us to deliver on our expected financial results. Number three, we're well -- I didn't talk about this, but we're actually well into improving our sourcing strategies for both directs and indirects that align with both our regional and global business needs. When I talk about directs, we're referring to the actual raw materials that feed into our processes. And when I use the term indirects, we're referring to supplies, professional services and the other needs to run our plants effectively. And lastly, we will take a very measured approach, as I've said, to larger capacity investments by first taking advantage of debottlenecking activities. And I want to just kind of clarify here and leave you with, we certainly want to exploit those low capital, no capital options. But where growth warrants larger investments, we will review and make a solid -- if there's a solid business case to support that, we will make those larger investments. So with that, I'll pause there and say thank you for your time. And I'll turn it over to Ram, so that you can get to the financials.

Thank you, Larry. The good news is we are almost at the end. We'll wrap this up very quickly. Good morning, everybody. For those who I haven't met, my name is Ram Mayampurath, I'm the CFO of Rogers. I started with the company about 8 years back and became the CFO in May of 2021. As you heard from Colin and the business leaders so far, we are in a strong position with a clear path to achieve significant top line growth. And what I want to do now is take you through all what you have heard so far, but look at it from a financial perspective. And to do that, we'll use this growth and value framework to take us through that discussion. Starting with growth, it's all about growth. It's all about organic growth. We heard the presenters here talk about why Rogers is successful, the breadth of our portfolio. The significant tailwinds that we have that can drive accelerated growth in the coming months and years. How we position ourselves in the market, how we differentiate ourselves in the market. our collaborative strategy with our customers that makes us successful. It's a proven and repeatable model that's made us successful before. Moving to the second priority, which is gross margin and profitability improvements. As Colin said, we have set a target of 38% to 40% gross margin for 2025. That's a 600 basis points improvement to get to that midpoint from where we finished 2022. And we'll talk about the details of our path and how to get there in a few minutes. High growth and margins will lead to strong free cash flow and that move takes us to the final stop here, an efficient capital allocation model, which will let us reinvest in the business, maintain the strength of our balance sheet and create value for our customers and shareholders. Let's take each one of those one by one, talking about the revenue growth, $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion is the target we have set for ourselves, 7% to 10% CAGR, all organic growth. Now many of you know the core and high-growth product lines that we have. Those are products that made Rogers successful in the past. It's fundamental to our portfolio. The core includes mostly the general industrial product lines in our elastomer business, wide range of applications, including some very fast-growing applications like lighting, semiconductor and medical devices. We expect that to grow 2% to 4% over the next 3-plus years. The high-growth product lines are also very familiar to aerospace and defense, ADAS, clean energy, portable electronics. These are core to Rogers portfolio. We expect those to grow 8% to 10% in the next 3-plus years. So the fundamental Rogers products are intact and growing and what we have now is the significant growth opportunity on top of that in the electric vehicle market, and we expect a 20% to 25% growth there. And we have multiple products targeted towards this opportunity. As you heard from the presenters before, we've been preparing for this opportunity, the investments we have made, the sustained investments we have made and we continue to make in building capacity and capabilities will position us well to take on this opportunity. Moving on to gross margin. 38% to 40% is a target we have set. And these are the actions that will get us there. 600 basis points, I said, is an improvement from where we finished 2022 to get us to our midpoint of our goal. In our earnings call at the end of Q4, we laid out clear actions taken to improve our cost structure and improve productivity. And we said we will get to 35% in our second half of this year. That's a 200 basis points improvement, about 1/3 of the goals we have set for ourselves. The remaining 400 basis points will come -- the growth beyond '23 will come mostly from our top line growth as the volume grows is where we'll see most of that, about 70% of that 400 basis points come through. And the growth we talked about in electric vehicle market and high-growth product lines will give us the volume we need to get those margin points. In addition to that, we are also planning for product cost designs, lowering our product costs. And these can be captured under manufacturing excellence programs, procurement savings programs and design improvements. Now Larry went into detail about our manufacturing excellence programs, improving throughput, removing bottlenecks in our production facilities, getting more out of our equipment and it also has an impact on our capital intensity CapEx, but it also improves our gross margin. We talked about our global footprint and how we optimize that through the product lines and then focused action on productivity and efficiency improvements in production, scrap yield improvements that will drive manufacturing excellence. Raw material is a significant portion of our total product cost. And over the last 2 years, as you know, raw material costs have gone up quite a bit. We have targeted programs to lower our procurement costs, both for direct and indirect material over the next 2 years. And design improvements will come from looking at the compound, the combination of what makes our product, look at the products that go into what makes our product and see if there's better ways of formulating our product. It also includes simple make versus buy decisions where is it appropriate to vertically integrate. So taking cost out with the help of our R&D teams comes under design improvements. We also expect some headwinds during this time. The macroeconomic conditions, particularly inflation will drive some challenges in the near term as we navigate through the next 2, 3 years. And in addition to that, the investments we are making to build capabilities in the business to take on the EV opportunity will have an impact on our P&L. And that's the cost of investment. We estimate about 100 to 150 basis points for that, which we will continue to do to prepare ourselves there to get there. Over the next 2, 3 years, we expect about 150 basis points of cost there. So this is our path to getting to the 38% to 40%. And when we take these actions -- improvement actions, what you will see -- what we expect to see is that the CAGR growth of our gross margin and EBITDA is much deeper than that of the revenue growth. And that comes from operating leverage, cost improvements we have made. If you look at the EBITDA, it's very similar. The EBITDA CAGR is about 23% to 29% for a 7% to 10% revenue growth. In addition to the gross margin, we also got plans to lower our OpEx by 150 basis points by 2025. And we'll do that by process improvements and better tools. So we will continue to invest in commercial sales and marketing operations in R&D, business process improvements, but will also drive scale and efficiency to lower our OpEx down to 19% to 20% by 2025. We are committed to the 40% gross margin, 20% OpEx and 20% adjusted operating profit goal that we have set for ourselves. A key requirement for that is to get our OpEx to 20% by 2025, and that's in our forecast. Now if I combine all the KPIs we have discussed so far, in 1 slide in -- under building financial momentum, you'll notice that the revenue growth of 7% to 10%, all organic, $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion. It's accelerating during this time. The adjusted operating and the EBITDA improvements mostly coming from improvements in gross margin. As revenue growth and profitability improves, you see a $4 plus improvement in our EPS. Capital intensity, Larry touched upon this, we will continue to invest CapEx to support the EV growth. There's no question about that. The more -- the majority of our CapEx investments go towards building capacity production lines, in particular, to support the EV growth, but our capital intensity will go down because we drive the benefit of unlocking capacity through better throughput and removing the bottlenecks from our production facilities. So capital intensity will drop from 12% now to 7% to 8% by 2025. And a combination of these factors will have an impact on the free cash flow as well, getting us to $130 million to $150 million of free cash flow by 2025. This takes us to our capital allocation priorities. Our capital allocation priorities have not changed. It remains invest in the business to support organic growth, debt management, supporting organic acquisitions and return cash to shareholders through opportunistic share buyback. We will continue to invest in the business, not just in building production capacities, but also building capabilities in R&D and commercial side. Debt management will give us -- help us maintain the strength of our balance sheet and the flexibility that we have in our balance sheet, leading to opportunistic synergistic M&A, which has been a core part of our growth strategy. We will continue to look for bolt-on acquisitions that align with our product and regional strategies and returning cash to shareholders, mostly through share buyback will continue as a key priority. Finally, I want to leave you with 4 key takeaways. We are well positioned to take on the opportunity that is in front of us. We talked about the core growth, the high growth and the significant growth opportunities that we have, the significant growth opportunity being in the EV market, which is in addition to the traditional Rogers product lines that we always know. The investments we have made and continue to make will position us well to take on this opportunity. The profitability improvement plans we talked about, the strong cash generation that will help us to reinvest in the business and to create value for our shareholders and the continued strength in our balance sheet, which makes it possible for us to continue to go after inorganic growth and also provides the stability that Rogers has always had. We are confident that our well-defined growth strategy and focused profitability improvement initiatives will create significant value to shareholders in the next few years. With that, I thank you very much.

We'll finish the Q&A, and all good. I'm working again. I encourage everyone to get back out to the static displays, but there's also going to be lunch as well. So you can balance how much you want to learn about some of our products a bit more versus lunch. So we can come on up here. All right. I think maybe I'll stand, but who's going first? Okay. [Operator Instructions].

I am Craig Ellis. I'm with B. Riley Securities, and I want to start just by thanking you, Colin and the entire team for a real deep dive into the business. This has been incredibly helpful. I've got a lot of questions, and I'll start with one and hand the mic and get back in the queue. Colin, I thought I would start with you. One of the things that we heard consistently through every presentation, including Larry's and how an operational focus will really help enable growth is that we've got a sharp focus on organic growth through the business and given that, can you talk about where you've got incremental R&D spend focused over the next couple of years and how that can augment some of the growth dynamics that we've seen here today? Thank you.

Sure. I'm happy to do that. One thing I'll comment is, you'll notice in our proxy, we're welcoming to our Board, assuming a successful proxy vote, Larry Berger, who is the current Chief Technology Officer for Ecolab. So that is a massive win for us that he would want to join our company and talking to him, he's brilliant in terms of R&D and commercializing technology we know that Ecolab is one of the best companies in the world. We're also in the final stages of finishing our search for a new Chief Technology Officer, and we've got an outstanding candidate, which we look forward to bringing on. But to answer your question at this point, so we've put a lot of work over the past several years into R&D. We've done what I would say from an EMS perspective, we've reorganized our R&D into centers of excellence, so that we have a silicone expertise, we have polyurethane expertise, and we have fluoropolymer expertise, and they work closely with the strategic marketing groups and this is similar for the other businesses as well, driving out the innovation road map in terms of a multi-generation plan on what technologies are needed. Whether it be advancements in silicone, hybrid technology, how can we improve our films, et cetera. And that's how we think about our multiyear innovation funnel. And we look for commercialization of these products over the next 3 years. And then the model we've talked about before to bring it back to that, when we work with the customers and try to solve unmet needs that's where our tech service folks come in and help explain our technology coming out of R&D and help it function and be adopted by our customers. So the incremental technology spend we have, I think, has a very good pipeline and what I might want to do is just ask any of the other [ BU ] leaders because each [ BU ] leader, their business has a strong pipeline, they may want to comment as well. I know we've got some great stuff going on with radar, for example. So did that start to answer your question, and we can hear a few more things or?

Yes, that's a great start.

All right. Anyone else just a quick add to that. Okay.

You covered it.

I got it.

Can I do a follow-up and then I'll hand the mic off just since we're talking about the drivers of growth, I'll tie that into the target financial model and appreciating all the specificity following up on the top line of the target model and the high single-digit midpoint CAGR that's expected, Ram. How should we think about the relative growth of the 2 main segments and the extent to which they would achieve a CAGR similarly? Or do you expect EMS or AES to have a higher near-term CAGR and the other a higher CAGR longer term? Just provide some color on a segment basis, if you could to give us a little bit more optics into the business.

Yes. No, please, Ram.

So that's a good question, Craig. In the -- especially in the EV market, what we saw so far is that AES was going much faster in ceramic substrate and the power interconnect businesses. What we will see in the next few years starting in '24, is EMS pickup as well. So the growth will be very comparable there. In fact, a lot of the growth in the future will come from the EMS side.

Okay. We'll see who gets the mic next.

Appreciate it. Dan Moore with CJS Securities. I go Craig set the sentiments, great presentation, very deep and very thorough and I appreciate it. Ram and/or Colin, maybe you want to talk about, kind of near-term downside stress test and long-term upside near-term downside in terms of the range of revenue growth that you've given, I think of industrial as kind of the big -- it's obviously 50% and maybe the most economically sensitive, although diverse. So in a more prolonged downturn talk about the stress test in terms of the low end of the projected guidance range? And then a quick follow-up on the long term.

Ram, maybe I can start.

Please.

So I think -- what we have provided guidance wise was 34% gross margin in Q2 and then 35% gross margin for kind of towards the second half of this year. And we believe we've taken a lot of aggressive steps and pulled all the levers within our control to get us on that trajectory. So we feel, at this point, comfortable where we are in terms of how we see the year developing based on the guidance we've given. Now if something happens, if there's some other macroeconomic event, we can't control, whatever it may be, we'll take additional action, but this place -- at this point, we feel comfortable. And I know Ram wants to add a few more comments to this.

Yes. So I think you touched upon it, Dan. And in the general industrial segment, if you're talking top line, the macro events, macroeconomic situation will impact the GI first. Generally, that's a bellwether for us because state to capital equipment and some of the broader applications it carries. So that will be the downside stress we have to test carefully. The upside opportunity, I would think, going back to Craig's question, too, on the growth between the segments, is in our ceramic substrate business with Jeff, if you want to add anything more, feel free to do that, but the opportunity that's possible there as the broader market develops.

Maybe just a quick comment, Dan. The general industrial, what we participate is, yes, if you look at the macro, but what's also happening, we see is the automotive guys are going through a retooling cycle. If they need to get the EVs and battery manufacturers, in particular with the kind of the U.S. policies to promote domestic content by July of next year, you have to get 55% of that content localized. Our technology goes into the robotics, all that power conversion technology, even some of the power interconnect technologies that goes into that. So maybe there is some kind of downside view of that, but there's also due to the policy and due to what's happening going on, you see -- we see uplift in that segment as well.

Very helpful. And then longer term, I know the planning forecast goes to 25%, but it does seem to accelerate through the period. And if you look at the macro trends combined with the opportunity funnel that you described as we look, it doesn't look like the opportunity is there to accelerate growth to '25 and beyond. And is that a fair characterization of how you see the business going out in the 3- to 5-year period?

Yes. Yes. I think it comes back to the 3 -- the way we break our segments apart and how we think about it. And I've been here for 30 years. And maybe with one exception, I don't think I've ever seen the type of secular growth that's happening in terms of the EV movement. So we just see that continuing to grow. I mean, probably there's -- don't quote me on this, it was like 85 million cars sold a year, a little bit more, a little bit less, but underneath -- so that's probably GDP growth, but underneath that is just that 25% growth rate of conversion. And then although we don't really discuss content in any of our programs, we feel like that might be too sensitive to release. What we do say is that if you think about an ICE vehicle and you think about an EV, electric vehicle, our content is much higher in the EV space, obviously, because of all the electronics materials we have that participate there and also where foam is needed, much more foam is needed in EV cars versus ICE. So that makes us feel good about that growth segment.

Wayne Pinsent with Gabelli Funds. Thanks for the presentation. Just the major focus on operations, operational improvements and organic growth opportunities that you have, but then you also mentioned a few times the opportunities for synergistic M&A. Just wanted to what share of mine is there and where you guys will be looking in terms of focus and size?

Sure. So one of the 4 pillars of our strategy I mentioned is synergistic bolt-on M&A, along with market facing, driving innovation and operational excellence. So maybe we could just do some back-casting and look. So Rogers has had some very good success in acquiring companies over the past several years. I'll go back to Silicone Engineering. Now we never got a chance to really talk about that because just after we bought it, we were under contract with the DuPont deal. But when I think about M&A, we think about how Silicone Engineering works. So I touched on it lightly, but I'll add some context and then maybe Brian Larabee can add some more from the EMS side. So silicones is a key growth technology for us, and there's actually all kinds of silicone foam, there's liquid silicone rubber, there's high consistency rubber, there's foam, there's sponge. We can go on and on, and you can hear more about that in the back. So in our portfolio, we didn't have as strong a sponge offering in silicone as some of our competition. But guess what, that was Silicone Engineering power alley in terms of being one of the best foam producers in the world. So we knew that was a gap. We thought about it that way that we wanted to have a broader portfolio to offer to our customers. We also needed that strategic manufacturing site for silicones in Europe because they can do other things and maybe we can bring in some of our technology, et cetera. And so that was the reasoning to buy the company. And they were a high-touch model, great customer service, high margin, just what we wanted. And so when we look at our technology road maps by business unit, those are the types of businesses that we look on. So it's a synergistic bolt-on. And we're going hard for that. The M&A market is a bit challenged at the moment, but when we find the right property, we have a really solid balance sheet and we can move quickly on closing a deal if needed. Maybe Ram or anyone else would want to talk a bit more about M&A?

I think you covered it. I mean it's tied to our product and regional strategy. And like Colin said, it gave us a beachhead into Europe for silicones. Brian, you might be able to talk more about it, but.

No, that's exactly it. I mean, you didn't leave a lot of space in there for that. But yes. There -- I mean, exactly, I mean, we went out, now it's fine. No, actually, no, it's right. So as we look at our silicone for us is actually one of our faster-growing spaces. And so silicone offers us a lot of opportunities. It's much a far more flexible material. It brings a lot of characteristics that we can't get from some other polymer basis. And so Silicone Engineering brought to us a full set of capabilities that would really built on top of what we had already have, and they brought the European footprint. We needed a European footprint on the silicone side, especially with EV taking hold there. And so there's a lot of opportunity for silicones and EV. And so for us, this really kind of was a very strategic acquisition for us. And those would be the kinds of things we'll be looking for in the future, too.

Yes. One thing we like about that deal I'll mention is we maintained the leadership, so they were a really successful company for a long time and the Managing Director, the Head of Technology, Head of Operations, they're Rogers employees now, and they're part of the success, right, because we kept the talent. I think a key piece of M&A in my experience is if you buy a company, but then some of the top talent leaves. In many cases, it's always about the people and the talent you have. So we worked hard to make sure that they stayed with us, and that's helped us quite a bit. I -- here is something I won't call -- should I call on people? Or will the folks of the microphone just go to the -- Okay, we have so, okay.

Robert Maina with Cramer Rosenthal. I want to put Larry on the spot, given he's been in the role of 2 months, I'm sure he's an expert. Talking a little bit about the human capital challenges that the company experienced over the last year or so. From your view, is there an ability to add automation to the process to reduce the reliance on some of that human capital. So in the future, we can maybe in demand or supply shocks better address that situation?

Yes. Thanks. Absolutely, there is. And I think that, as I mentioned, we go back to some of the points on my slides, we're going to be looking at a number of different places where automation can help drive efficiency in terms of quality, waste, scrap material and certainly reducing cost. So that will be a key area that we continue to build out on. We have a fair bit of automation today and it's working well, but we can do a whole lot better in that space.

All right. And I have a second question, if I could. Just back on the manufacturing process and your ability to free up capacity, maybe you or Ram can talk about the ability to free up x percent of capacity versus having to spend that on buildings and facilities. Just trying to get a sense on the capital intensity going forward. I know it's coming down, but I'm just wondering if there's a mix change where you can better optimize what you have versus spending the money on the facility.

Yes. I mean, I think -- and I'll start, and Larry can continue. It's product by product, side-by-side discussion. And some of the changes we made or most of our CapEx investment now is going towards production lines instead of building both brick and mortar. We are putting the lines in our existing facilities. So that's a change that we have done to lower our CapEx. In addition to that, freeing up capacity, especially in some of our European plants as a part of margin improvements has given us a lot more flexibility in spending CapEx. So it is really a plant-by-plant discussion, and we are very stages of success there. Anything you want to add, Larry?

Yes, sure. And I think you said it well. I think what I would add is that from a productivity perspective as we drive debottlenecking that's got to be an annual part of the expectations in the process. So some plants will have more head space and more room for improvement and others will be tighter based just based on the work they've done over the years. But that productivity mindset has got to be there where we're driving at least 3% to 4% to 5% improvement on an annual basis. But as I said back on my final slide, productivity improvements will get you so far. But certainly, where there's significant growth, those larger investments will have to be made. But the productivity will be a key part of our DNA and the moves that we make every year.

It won't be as nice. I'm just joking. You really deserve a lot of credit. I was going to announce we're going to replace the entire management team. No, I'm just joking. But you have a fabulous story. You just really have -- the question I really have is -- how do you think we should look at your stock? That's really a -- we look at the terminal value in '25 and take that midpoint of $9 and let's say, I'm not talking EBITDA, I'm an EBITDA person, but let's take $9 and multiply by 20 or 25. Maybe that's the right way to look at it. And discount that back by some discount factor that's maybe something lower. Maybe that's the way to look at it. And maybe you get something higher than the current price of the stock. I'm just wondering how do you guys look -- maybe that's the one way to look at it. I'm not really sure, but tell me how I should be looking at the current equity trading value versus how value you envision being created in that $9 midpoint in '25, so I can come back and harass you people that you've overachieved or underachieved, and I'm really a big fan. I've known Bruce for years and I'm a big fan of Bruce's and I'm so pleased to be here today because I really think Bruce has done a fabulous thing of elevating -- the great thing about leadership is getting the next leadership team to be even higher that's a great trait to have. So -- but tell me how to look at the stock. What are your bankers telling you? Or what are your -- what internal things? I appreciate that.

So a couple of questions in there, but you mentioned Bruce and I did want to mention for who and I'm not deflecting, we'll come back to your simple question. Anyway, who has known Rogers since before Bruce take over in the room? right? So for those who got involved with Rogers and then see the changes that Bruce has made, I was going to say this at the end, but Rogers has had an enormously successful and extraordinary journey under Bruce, and he's been a great mentor to me for the past 3.5 years. And we talked him into coming up here because he was also very instrumental in helping us prepare with a lot of great questions. He's been dealing with these easy questions for the past 11 years. And so he really helped prep us. And I meant to say thanks in the beginning of my presentation, I was going to say it at the end, but since you mentioned it, Bruce, great job. We'll miss you, but we'll keep the legacy going. Now to the question, Ram. No, seriously, we view our stock as a growth company. So we think at the heart of things, Rogers, we'll get to the numbers in a second. But to summarize from our investment thesis, we're a growth company in the right markets. We have a proven track record of being innovative and creative. I'll draw out on that high-frequency circuit comment before. So Rogers invented that, that enables communication and space and all the radar, et cetera, in the early 60s. What's really interesting is that we still are a market leader today with that technology, not with the same technology from the 60s, maybe there's a little bit of that left around. But we've continually been able to innovate and move the needle. So that we're still seen as the best technology company in the world for rigid copper cloud laminates that have low loss. And I think that's the great thing of Rogers. And then we're in these secular end markets. So we're a growth company is how we look at it. From the math point of view, there are some things we're probably unable to comment on at this moment. So maybe Ram could give a higher-level view.

Yes. I would say, I would take you back to that 1 page here I did to summarize all our KPIs. And if you want to harass us later on, I would hold as accountable to that. What is our growth, what is our profitability? What's our EPS, free cash flow, let the stock work itself out. Those are what we manage our business do.

But you're clearly going through Three transformations going forward. One is you're going through a deassetization transformation, a free cash flow elevation and a profitability heightening that you want to focus on towards organic and inorganic opportunities. So that leads to, obviously positive and risk elements in both those processes. There's a risk element in both of those issues because, obviously, there's a capital redeployment issue heightened by one of the issues brought up earlier, are you going to be deal oriented as well. So deal guys tend to be either really good or really sh****, that's what they are. They are one or the other. You guys have a history to be really good, but there are guys who are really sh**** too. We all know that.

Right. And very prudent, right? Very, very we -- I think we have a very good model in terms of deals, in terms of what makes sense and is their true synergy. I have been in companies not to name the name, where maybe the deal wasn't as strategic as we had hoped. But I think Rogers has a great track record of being picky and just going for what we really need. Did I miss anything there?

Willis Brucker with Gamco Investors. We're focused on the EV market with how much growth opportunities there are there. Can you talk about when you don't get designed in when you don't win, what the reasoning is that your customer or potential customer gives you most often. But then when you do win, how do you think about the moat around that design win? Is it years? Is it -- is there a risk that you get designed out at a later time because they're concerned about, look, we can do this 10% cheaper through a competitor? Or is the risk of -- we talked about ultimate failure on the importance in the vehicle with that risk is so high that they're willing to pay a little more rather than go to a cheaper competitor?

Okay. There are a lot of questions there, so we'll get through this. Maybe I'll start, but I would really prefer to let the VP GMs, who are on the frontline answer that. Plus I've been doing a lot of the talking as well. So one thing I'll comment about the EV/HEV space around risk of failure. So Brian indicated in his presentation, and I think you'll hear this from most of the EV producers. It's still a nascent technology. And the EV -- excuse me, the automotive OEMs had a very tight control of their supply chain for ICE automobiles. And they've known everything about it for years and years. But now what you see is a lot of collaboration out there with OEMs, automotive OEMs with battery producers. So they're actually outsourcing kind of one of the key components of the entire automobile and risk of failure is high. You can see in some examples, there's been recalls that have cost billions of dollars because the technology hasn't worked. It's that thermal runaway issue, where hey, don't park your car in your garage, it could incinerate the house. So these are serious issues not to be joked about. And so risk of failure is high. So what we see when we engage with engineers is that's first and foremost. This has to work. And because it's nascent and there's not a lot of years of data, in some cases, this is where Rogers benefits because we've been in EV vehicles from the beginning for 20, 30 years with our foams, et cetera. So that is a key consideration. And so when you get that design-in win it more or less is locked for the cycle of the program because there's a lot of risk to change technology in the middle of a program. Now sooner or later, the whole world knows cost needs to come down. And so we're preparing for that. We can really improve our operations and other areas so that we can still compete. I've sold into the automotive industry for 30 years. So their playbook is pretty public on what they do. So we're thinking hard and have contingencies in place to continue supplying into there. Now in terms of like design in wins and how do we win and how do we know we're locked into that question. Maybe some of the [ BU ] leaders could elaborate on that.

Yes. I'll take a first stab at that and then let you guys to go next. So on the battery side of stuff, together, there is differentiation on how these -- how our OEMs are working. And if you take a look at their price point, you look at what they're offering out there too, you see and so you had asked the questions, where are we typically focus -- we are typically focused in the places that we win, our people who actually have a very strong existing brands they have range as part of their value proposition, and they're selling. And so we've had a lot of feedback from some of our top OEMs where that performance protecting their brand, making sure that, that has the life that they're looking for. Those are the companies that are designing in Rogers. There are a lot of those guys that are scrapping their way to try to get in and get into the space, and they're actually taking a lower-cost approach. Range is not part of their value proposition. They're driving price. They're less likely to be the sticky customers that we work with. We'll work with the battery manufacturers on those ends, but in the end, they're going to have to make a decision if they're going to make the exchange for life and brings in safety over price. And so we're always be staying at that front end of the curve on that stuff.

Yes. Maybe just one thing to add. If you look at the presentation that we talked about, we're very conscious about the whole industry needs to get a lot more profitable. I mean there's a lot of capital. People need to make money out of it. So our solutions are targeting not only to deliver the performance, reliability, but we're also helping to lower that total cost of ownership. And we're very conscious about that. And also, if you look at the automotive design cycle, it is a compressed time line. Typically, maybe in the past, you have a 3- to 4-year cycle, the automotive guy really compressed it down to 12-month. You really need to 12- to 18-month and then 24-month, you got this vehicle running on the road. The partnership, the -- how we get them to quicker to that market we talked about. But at the same time, it is a very rigorous process you go through, right? The design in, the design wins, they look at the cost, the ability to scale, do you have the supply chain lineup to be able to secure that. And then you also lock into a price and volume contract so that you can deliver. So we have -- when we're talking about some near term, we have a pretty good projection into kind of what that volume looks like and what that price looks like for us. And so that will be great.

One closing comment on that. Oh, sorry, a follow-on question.

I was just going to say, you talked about when you do the Silicone Engineering acquisition that you were lacking a silicone sponge, so I wonder like if you're doing bolt-on M&A, if you sell one product to a customer, are there portfolio effects? Are they more likely to buy 2? Is it a customer that buys 2 more likely to buy 3 and kind of how that factors into your thinking?

So we already have that as a -- so leveraging the channel, maybe I would call it that. We already have great examples of that. So just being a PORON business, which is our polyurethane, not now this is EMS and then also we have our BISCO foam. Those are the 2 original kind of main core products in Rogers, but then acquiring Arlon Silicone, Silicone Engineering making an acquisition of DeWAL, which was the fluoropolymers. We've been able to increase our share at customers because we've been able to cross-sell, and a lot of these producers are buying the same products, fluoropolymers, silicones and polyurethanes. And so we just have a broader share at customers. And that's been an advantage. Cross-channel selling is a key piece of what we think about when we do M&A.

And I would like to refer you back to when you go back to the booth, you'll take a look at. So if you look at the battery module and you've got the video in there, you'll actually see multiple materials that are in there in content and that is that leverage that Colin is talking about. You'll see some films in there from the venting applications. You see silicones, both sponges and foams that are going to be in those designs and you're going to see the polyurethane. So what happens is when you're in that design element, you're in solving problems. They're just looking to you to help solve multiple attributes. So when you're in that opportunity, yes, we do get leverage.

Yes. And as I mentioned, having run the EMS business before Ryan, even though we're smaller than some of our competitors, our portfolio of all these products that we just mentioned is the broadest. So we have a lot more solutions to offer through our sales engineering channels.

I think what we're seeing now is as this solution space is evolving quickly. Some of the, let say, more traditional OEM Tier 1s are looking for suppliers like us who have a broad portfolio already and they're coming to us to see what we can do across the spectrum. And kind of tying back into Craig's question before about how we're spending our R&D dollars, we're really looking at this kind of system approach. So as opposed to where before in the past, most of our hires are in the material science space. We're spending a lot more time hiring system-level engineers, application-level engineers so we can really prove that value proposition at a system level and get the conversation away from material cost and to system-level cost and total cost of ownership.

Yes. When you look back at our presentation, this is an important topic. There was a section on Jeff's slide that talked about the ceramic technology allowed the inverter to work more efficiently. So then the Department of Energy said, if you can take the power down by x amount, you can take $300 to $600 out of the battery and get the same performance. I think I have that right. So don't forget the automotive industry is an industry where they work really hard to take a nickel out of every automobile. So when you talk about being able to take cost out in the range of a couple of hundred bucks, I mean, this is exactly where we want to play, cost and use and what do we enable.

Elizabeth Barney from Beck, Mack & Olvier. Quick question. With the EVs, there comes a huge amount of opportunity -- but how do you think about the risk in that business too? Because to your point, auto OEMs will take -- will make up -- make changes to save pennies. So -- and there's tons of money being thrown at this space. So how do you think about new competition, whether it be different types of materials. And then also -- and I know that this is down the road, we consider ourselves to be very long-term investors, and we don't define long-term, 1 year. How do you think about making sure you're positioned for future battery technologies because as Brian said during his presentation, we are so early in the game of these batteries, it seems.

Yes, thank you for that question. It's something we think about all the time. I'll start and I'll talk a little bit about how we're structured at Rogers to tackle your question and then people can add on. So one thing to mention from the presentation, we have 3 innovation centers, which are global and so they're really looking out far horizon at the changing technologies because it does change rapidly, think radar and how fast that goes from each generation. And so some of these innovation centers the businesses around the steering team on where they should focus. But we have really high-quality scientists looking out across the space in terms of what's going to change, trying to see around corners, which Rogers has done for a lot of its history. We also have strategic marketing. So these folks are really good at figuring out how to play -- or sorry, where to play and how to win, using certain methodologies, and they would link closely with the innovation center and the R&D teams to make sure that our own technology road maps and our multi-generation plans match where the commercial team thinks where the market's going to go. We put a lot of effort into voice of customer, and we talked about engaging with customers and great OEM friends. So it's really -- if you're not out there with the customer, understanding what is your technology road map, and in the electronic space, it's a little "easier" where they're going to share with you their technology road maps, you can enable it versus other places, but you have to stay on top of that to also really dictate where you're going to place your resource dollars -- research dollars. So that's kind of some of the methodology in terms of how we do it. And then our sales engineers are out there all the time with good relationships, listening and trying to understand where things go. But it's a combination of high-level innovation center, R&D working hand in glove with strategic marketing and then having a really good set of boots on the ground talking with customers, voice of customer type of work to make sure we don't miss something, which doesn't mean we might not miss something, but we also have a really engaged Board of Directors, some really astonishingly good technical folks and marketing folks who know the industry and so they're also quite helpful in terms of challenging and making sure we're not missing something. Which isn't to say you can't miss something, but having worked in some really large companies who have tried to stay ahead of what you've talked about, and hiring in some folks from larger companies, combined with some longtime Rogers folks, we have a really good blend, I think, of expertise in the company to try to manage ourselves around that particular issue. But maybe I missed something here if people want to ask or add something else.

I think you hit the key point on the headset portfolio approach to innovation and making conscious decisions about how much resource you put in each area, whether it be long-term horizon or short term. And I think that varies a little bit between the 3 businesses depending on where we're at, but it's this conscious decision about which time horizons we're going to allocate our resource and then make them conscious decisions based after that.

Does that answer your question? Okay. A few more questions over here.

For a quick follow-up. Maybe high-level question, Colin. Is Rogers has always been a China-focused company, if not China-centric in that strong position significantly enhanced under Bruce's leadership over the last decade. Just how are you thinking about China as both a risk and opportunity going forward and your willingness to allocate incremental capital there?

Sure. So China is very important to Rogers. Last year, about 33%, 34% of our revenue came from China. And as we showed on our [ facts ] slide, we've got about 3,600 employees in the company globally, but more than 1,000 are in China. So view on China is and, of course, the macroeconomic risk, everyone is paying attention to this. But we're in China for China. So a lot of our customers in China are Western producers that buy from us locally and then produce goods for the Chinese market, some for export, but a lot for China. And then we also have a lot of Chinese OEMs who are our customers also. And of course, they're in China, [ forcing ] China. In terms of what you read about, everyone does around companies exiting China or derisking and moving some of their production out of China to India, Vietnam, Indonesia, that's actually been going on for an awful long time. I mean China has actually gotten "expensive" in terms of labor versus some of these other countries. And so people have been leaving China and looking for other places to manufacture. So we're paying close attention to that. I think the conclusion is we're going to be where we need to be for our customers. And when some of the big OEMs are to the point where they're like, we need you to be somewhere else besides China, we would really consider that strongly if it made strategic sense.

And then a quick -- A quick follow-up for Ram, perhaps and maybe leveraging Charlie's question, but you're basically at a net cash balance position already, going to generate $300 million to $400 million over the next 3 years. My number is not yours. Why not be more aggressive in terms of looking at stock buybacks in the near term if M&A is -- the market is a little bit more challenged, at least in the near term.

Sure. That's clearly a consideration, Dan. It is the same model that we use to analyze stock buyback and debt repayment and other opportunities. It's clearly one of our biggest priorities. We will look at that.

I think Craig had.

I want to -- and I'll give you a break Colin, I'll go straight to Jeff, and I wanted to do a multi-partner with Jeff and Ram. So the thing that struck me when I was going through the power products out in the product area, is how highly custom a lot of the power products are to a customer's individual product. And so the question is, given how custom they are, it would seem that there would be high switching costs associated with moving up at Rogers. So what is your follow-on win rate and as a way to check that thesis? And to the extent that it's high, Ram, how do we think about that maybe not as a very specific number, but generally speaking, as a source of more recurring-like revenues for the business.

Yes. So maybe it's a good observation, first of all, Craig. And I think even though the technology is highly customized. You work directly with engineer to underlying capability in technology and the manufacturing we deploy, actually, there's a lot of commonality shared across those platforms that we deploy to work with our customers. And if you look at kind of in terms of your design wins and stuff, as I mentioned in the slide, we're very selective where we go, where we have a very good understanding, Roger mentioned this earlier is we have a good system-level understanding, not just at the component and material level or understanding. So where are technology go through to enable that differentiation to offer the value. We go through a internal process. We have a process when every engagement, every opportunity we look at, we assess it. Is this something that offering differentiation against competition, and we're a little bit selective about how we are deploying our internal resource to work on those opportunities. So I think right now, certainly, the jury is still out on some of the opportunity because we're in the middle of working with them on that. Generally, I think we're where we want to be in terms of looking at our growth, that's baked into the financial, how we're converting the opportunity pipeline into that to enable that, we are right where we need to be at this point. And I think in terms of the capital, maybe I don't know. I turn it over to Ram...

Yes. No, I'll just underline what Jeff said. It's very important to us. You have to remember, we are a technology company, and we don't want to lose that the specialty business stamp we have, that we are selective about our business like Jeff said, it's important where we play in the value chain and the multiple products we have different spots we play in. So those are all considerations we take into account when we do the business case for investment. And needless to say, if we can lock ourselves to an opportunity, it is a continuing stream of revenue.

That's helpful, guys. And I'll ask one more, and I'll direct this one to Roger. Roger, one of the things we're hearing about is we do our diligence in the radar space. There are 2 things that are coming down the pipeline. A lot more emphasis on interior radar as a source of injury mitigation when airbags deploy, and secondly, more externally 4D radar. To what extent are those 2 opportunities, part of that 10% growth CAGR that we're hearing about? Are they there? Are they really something that's more second half of this decade. Team, thanks for indulging all the questions. Great day. Appreciate it.

Yes. Thanks for the question, Craig. And I think we mentioned in the presentation that we're actually designed in on the 4D imaging radar with the high-end technology that we're showing at the back of the room and that's a precursor to the next generation that we have. That 4D imaging is definitely included in the CAGR that we showed that's mainly like external radar sensors on cars. The other application you talked about where you're leveraging that technology to bring it inside the vehicle, it's a different market segment that we are also tracking. We actually have to put some focus on it. We're tracking it as a different revenue stream right now, and -- but we're leveraging the same technology that we've developed for the automotive radar to bring it internal. We -- there, we tend to go after design wins on reference designs with the semiconductor manufacturers, and we're leveraging that into this kind of more commercial in-cabin radar and those kinds of applications. There's also applications for that same technology beyond the car, door opening sensors, things like that. It's kind of the model that Brian talked about, where you develop a technology for one application and then that same technology gets leveraged into other applications. Does that help answer the question? Okay.

We've got one from -- that's coming through the virtual audience. Let me -- this one is for Larry. Let me read this one. And I think after that response, we will be at time, and we can then conclude the session. But this actually came through from a couple of different investors in a similar fashion. But Larry, the request here was just to give some specific examples of operational improvements in yield and throughput. You touched on this a little bit. If you could just share maybe a couple of examples and a little color on some of the issues related and what we're able to do to resolve those.

Yes. So if I understand the question right, they're looking for some more color on the throughput and the yield improvements. Yes. So back to the 2 examples earlier, one in the AES business, I said that demands were really strong. And I think what the teams were able to do is to go through the product lines and look for areas where there was a fair bit of inefficiency and we've seen some solid improvements there that have, as I said, drove the throughput up approximately 15%. The -- in parallel with that work, on that same product line, the teams were able to also drive yields up about 3% to 4%. So those were 2 examples on one product line where we're able to see some pretty solid, what I would call, productivity gains. And again, those were with low or no capital improvements. Just want to be clear that those are just examples. We continue to look across the entire network. And the opportunities are going to be different in different places, but we'll continue to exploit the same kind of improvements in all of the sites.

Okay. So first, a few concluding remarks. I want to start off by acknowledging Steve and all the Rogers team for all the hard work they put in to get us prepared for this presentation. It was an awful lot of work. I also want to thank our external advisers, Alpha IR and FGS Global. They were pretty instrumental in helping us shape our message. They needed a lot of polishing. And just because they know what they're doing, and they can help us position it the right way and I'm very grateful for the effort and time they put in listening to us go through about 10 different dry runs. So thank you very much on that. Thank you. I also think this room is great. The New York Stock Exchange has been great to work with. So I don't know when we'll get booted out of here if it's after lunch at 1:00. But they've been so helpful and so nice to work with. So thanks to them. And then finally, most importantly, thanks to everyone here for coming. I really appreciate your time. Everyone has choices on where to spend their time, and there's probably more to do than there is time. So it's really important for us that you would come out and take the time to hear our story, about our growth company, about our innovation capabilities, our model in terms of how we win. And we do believe certainly that we are a very good and sound investment. We've got a great story. But thank you for your time. It's much appreciated. So I hope the lunch is good and enjoy the static displays.