TTM Technologies, Inc. (TTMI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for day 2 of the UBS Global Industrials and Transportation Conference. I'm Damian Karas, one of our multi-industrials analysts at UBS. This session, we're very pleased to welcome TTM Technologies. So I'd like to introduce you to Dan Boehle, their Chief Financial Officer, who will be presenting. And for those in the audience, if you have any questions, just a reminder, you can scan the QR code on your table or raise your hand and we can bring the mic to you. So with that, I'll hand it over to Dan.

Good morning, all. I appreciate being here today and looking forward to introducing you to TTM Technologies. Let you know a little bit more about the company. And if there's any questions, as Damian said, send them in, and we can address some Q&A at the end probably. So here we go. Disclaimers, as always. Some of the information today may have forward-looking statements. Actual results may vary, and we'll also be using some non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to GAAP measures in the back of the presentation. TTM Technologies, we're a leading technology solutions provider of mission systems, printed circuit boards and specialty components, primarily focused on RF microwave, microelectronic technologies. We're a critical supplier to some of today's fastest-growing technologies such as advanced defense radar, cloud infrastructure, AI data centers, automobile technology, industrial automation and the Internet of Things. We have a significant global footprint with 24 facilities, 18 of those in the U.S., 6 of those over in Asia. And then 15,775 employees. So good scale, about $2.2 billion in sales for 2023. On the right side of this slide shows you the 5 end markets that we tend to break our sales into data center and computing or semiconductors, networking, aerospace and defense, semiconductor capital equipment and medical & industrial automation and then automotive technology. We'll talk a little bit more about those end markets in slides to come. Just a bit of a history of our company, IPO-ed in about 1999, grew from there mostly through acquisitions. So some organic growth in the PCB market, but largely grew through acquisitions. First being Tyco Printed Circuit boards. Then after that printed circuit board acquisitions, we started diversifying more into engineered products, more higher level, more complex above the printed circuit board. So you've got ViaSystems acquisition, the Anaren acquisition, more build-to-spec RF technology and then entered the aerospace and defense industry with the Anaren purchase and the Telephonics. So strategically focused on diversifying our product base, our end markets as well as diversifying and differentiating ourselves with regards to our approach to our customers. The result of that, we've got highly valued partners, satisfied customers. We like to get engaged in the design phase early in the development phase with our customers. Our name TTM means time-to-market. So we like to get involved early with our customers, help them develop a product and then help enable them all the way through manufacturing and production. The result of our differentiation and purchase of these growth through acquisition, we've grown in our engineering solutions. We've increased our technical capabilities with the acquisitions of Anaren and Telephonics and then our upcoming new greenfield facility in Syracuse for our defense industry. We'll be bringing some of the most high-technology Ultra-HDI PCB boards to the North American continent. Our footprint diversification includes mostly right now, we've expanded within Southeast Asia with some of our customers asking for an alternative to China. We opened a plant last year in Penang, Malaysia to offer a China Plus One strategy for our customers who want an alternative to China. We've also, through divestitures, reduced our exposure to cyclical, more consumer-oriented products. We divested the mobility business. We restructured and exited the E-MS solutions, and we sold a Shanghai Back Plane Assembly facility a few years back. We've also looked at our footprint across North America and Asia. We've closed some of our underperforming facilities over the last couple of years, transferred that -- those products over to some of our larger facilities in North America to make -- to improve efficiencies. So we have 3-pillar strategic focus: diversification, differentiation and discipline. We'll start with diversification. As I mentioned, we've been trying to diversify across end markets. And our near-term strategic focus is aerospace and defense, trying to grow our presence there. Aerospace and defense in 2023 represented about 45% of our overall sales. Again, we grew here primarily through acquisition over the last 3 to 4 years. We've seen increased use of AESA radar. We've acquired that technology through the Telephonics business. And the increased spending in military equipment and electronification of our defense systems has really led to opportunity for us to not only insert our PCBs within defense technology, but also with the acquisitions that where we're now doing full mission systems and subsystems within the radar, we see this as a good growth opportunity and also an entrance into a very stable marketplace for us. We've exited some of the more highly volatile markets. We want to be in a stable growth market like the aerospace and defense. You can see what we measure here. We use a third-party provider, Prismark, to look at what they benchmark the growth is over the next 3 to 5 years. Aerospace and defense, 3% to 5% growth, it's probably pretty much the stable growth of the aerospace and defense market over the long term. Our 2024 view for this end market is above that. So we've been growing pretty well this year. Our Q3 results in aerospace and defense book-to-bill was 1.26. So again, booking more than we're -- than our revenue. So that's growing our backlog. Our backlog is about $1.49 billion right now, highest we've had in the aerospace market. You can see that our sales on the right side have grown to about $1 billion a year. So having 1.5 years of sales in there, frankly, this will play out over probably 2 to 3 years, but having a good strong backlog in this area is key for us. It gives us good visibility into a stable growing market. We're aligned with key defense programs. I'll show you some of those on the next page. And then again, in engineered products focused. We are one of the largest PCB manufacturers in North America, maybe the largest, but we are also trying to enter more of the engineered products, more value-add being engaged with our customers, especially in the defense area with being designed into their platforms and staying on those for a long time. You can see that our breakout between defense and commercial aero is mostly defense, 90%, about 5% commercial aero and about 5% space in this area. And the graph on the right is to show you that we are now more than 50% engineered products within this aerospace and defense area. So as I said, we grew up as a PCB company. That got us through the door. We're now kind of climbing the ladder up to -- up the tiers to do more subsystems, assemblies and full mission systems within this aerospace and defense area. This shows you some of the large platforms that we're on, on the right, AEHF, F-35. These are franchise programs that we are a part of. But we're on over 200 programs supporting all of the major OEMs. So you can see at the top, we -- the list of our top strategic OEM partners. We do direct government customers as well, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Air Force and the Ministries of Defense. And in our future expansion, as I mentioned, we've got only 5% of space, but we see growth there to approach the space OEMs. That was our A&D market strategic focus. In the commercial side of the business, there's some sector megatrends that we all are aware of, the Internet-of-Everything, increasing electronic content. On the bottom there, you see the data -- the explosion of growth in data centers, hyperscalers, cloud computing, all the way up to generative AI. So our business -- end market that we call data center and computing addresses this, and that's one of our growth markets right now. Again, have been a very good growth driver this year in that data center and computing business. This gives you a picture of all of our top 5 end markets. We talked about aerospace and defense. Our automotive market, electric truck modification and autonomous driving, security systems, ADAS systems, assisted driving and the safety that they're built into cars now. That uses our technology. So EVs has more content and even the standard ICE cars that are now putting in ADAS systems, that has a lot of our content as well. Growth projections from Prismark on this are 3% to 5% right now. We're experiencing a little bit less than that growth in 2024. The automotive market is one of the -- has been, I think, disappointing this year for a lot of folks. China has really kind of brought -- they become insular. They do all of their production there, use their domestic supply chain. And so the U.S., Europe are kind of not as growing as we expected. So this is a little bit of a challenging segment right now, but we do have good technology there. That's a good business for us. It's about 16% of our business right now. Data center computing was about 14% in 2023. As I mentioned, that's experiencing rapid growth. We're growing above the 4% to 7% benchmark there. That represents in the third quarter of this year, about 20%. So you can see that's growing as a percentage of our overall sales. We have good technology there and got to stay on the cutting edge there that is changing rapidly, but we have -- we're in with the top customers there and really doing a good job on data center computing. Medical, industrial and instrumentation, about 17% of our business. In that area, we do patient monitoring, automated test equipment and robotics for medical services as well as in the industrial instrumentation area, industrial robotics, instrumentation is really, as I mentioned on the front page, semiconductor test automation equipment. That business is growing slowly, about 2% to 4% is the benchmark. We're kind of at or below that this year, kind of flat this year. And then networking, our last end market, primarily 5G infrastructure in the telephone business as well as networking, traditional networking like Cisco and Juniper. That business has been slow. We've been high inventory over the last couple of years. I think we're seeing the bottom of that coming through the inventory cycles and starting to see in demand there. But growth this year in 2024 has been a little bit below that benchmark of 2% to 5%. So being -- this year really being driven by that aerospace and defense growth as well as the data center explosions with generative AI and the cloud computing and hyperscalers. Second pillar of our strategic focus is differentiation. So differentiating by engineering depth, as I mentioned before, early engagement with our customers, having a breadth of technology as well as offering a global footprint for folks to utilize. Diversification across our product base. As I mentioned on the left side, you'll see that conventional PCBs was where we started. The other items where we start getting into RF components, microelectronic subsystems, full radar systems and communications and surveillance systems. That's the designed and engineered products that we've diversified ourselves into over the years. And we offer these across all of aerospace and defense. And then the commercial business, we offer PCB, conventional and some RF components in the commercial business. So again, as we climb up the scale of these more full subsystems, that's more focused on the aerospace and defense business. Again, trying to get in with those OEM customers, get on large platforms, get scoped into those. And then as we show in this next model, we like that business because it's much more longer cycle, right? So the consumer business usually has a cycle of 1 to 2 years between renewing models of consumer products. So again, you get scoped into that, you're in there, but you're locked in for 1 or 2 years, and you have to renegotiate and recompete. The automotive networking market, a little bit longer, maybe 3 to 4 years from development, prototyping into production. But then the aerospace and defense industry, much longer 7- to 10-year life on some of our franchise platforms. So that's why we've focused our strategic direction towards the aerospace and defense industry, wanting to get engaged early, wanting to get designed into those products, and then have a long, stable product life cycle for that. So that's why we focus strategically on that. As I mentioned before, we have a broad global footprint. This shows you on the left side, North America. We've got 18 sites in North America. All except 4 of them are A&D focused. The 4 that are in the green are commercial. And then the majority of our commercial products are manufactured in Asia, in China and Malaysia now. So again, Malaysia offering that China Plus One option that our customers are starting to ask for with the geopolitical tensions that are continuing to exist between China and the U.S. So we offer that alternative, that Penang facility. I've got a slide here, the next one. That was finished built. We finished constructing that last year. It's now going through test and qualification with our key franchise or what we call anchor customers that asked us for that China Plus One strategy. So we've got them invested in this, helping us grow this facility. By the end of this year, we'll have finished some of the testing, we'll start revenue -- start seeing some significant revenue coming through this plant next year. And it's one of the highest technology plants in Southeast Asia. It's about 800,000 square feet, very automated. The productivity out of this facility is probably about 150% greater than the China factories that we have throughout China. So this gives an alternative to China. We'll start developing new product there next year and ramp this up. In North America, we've also got another greenfield site for addressing the defense department's need for ultra high-density interconnect PCBs. So you're seeing some of the commercial, very complex high-technology PCB technology infrastructure moving over into the defense industry. So as the defense products become more electronic, more automated, they need faster processing. They need the high technology that we've already developed in the commercial side. So in our facilities in North America, we're doing prototyping right now, starting to build this technology. But our customer demand is such that we know that we're going to need a purpose-built facility for this coming up in the next year or so. So we are -- we've broken ground on a facility in Syracuse, which is adjacent to an existing facility that we have. We'll operate those as a campus, get some vertical integration out of that and some efficiencies there. This facility will cost us about $100 million to $130 million. We've gotten some federal and state and local assistance in helping with the building as well as some property tax abatement and such going forward. So that will help offset some of the cost to us. But we're looking forward to having this up and running by the end of next year. Most of the construction will be done by second half of next year, and then we'll start qualifying and ramping up to be ready for production in 2026, which is when the customer demand signal is coming so. Our last pillar of strategic focus is discipline. So operational execution, earnings discipline and cash flow generation. This gives you our kind of historical growth in revenue as well as operating margin. You can see the drop in revenue between '19 and '20, that was strategic divestiture of the mobile business and E-MS closure. So as I mentioned, we exited those business because of their volatility. We're trying to get into more higher engineered products as well as more stable business, the aerospace and defense industry. So we got out of that business, and then we continue to start growing through organic growth as well as the acquisitions of the Anaren and Telephonics businesses. Over those years, we've kind of fluctuated a little bit in OM, but continue to try to strengthen that OM line. We're at about 8.9% last year. We've experienced some double-digit OM this year. And that's kind of our focus. Our revenue growth, we're expected over the long term to grow about 4% to 6% per year. What we believe our non-GAAP operating margin can get to about 11% to 13%. So as I mentioned on the last page, we were about -- kind of in the 9%, 9.5%. We did see some double-digit OMs this year in the second and third quarter. And we feel like we can get there consistently in the long term. I've got a slide in the next page that will show you how we get there. But with 11% to 13% non-GAAP operating margin, that translates into adjusted EBITDA of 15% to 17%. Our CapEx long-term goals are to be about 4% to 5% of revenue. Right now, we're a little bit higher than that because of the greenfield projects that we had in Penang as well as Syracuse. So a little bit above that. But in the long term, spend about 4% to 5% of our revenues on capital. Cash flow from operations, strong generator of cash. We've got a good balance sheet right now, and we expect to generate 10% or more of revenue in cash flow from operations each year. And then that translates into return on invested capital in the 13% to 15% range. Those are our long-term targets. As I showed you, at the end of last year, we were about 8.9%. But we have this bridge of how we're going to get to as high as the 13%. And all of this is within our control and much of this, we've actually been able to achieve through this year. The plant closures drove about a 1 percentage increase in our operating margin. As I mentioned, those plant closures were about -- in 2023, we closed 2 underperforming North America plants and 1 Southeast Asia plant. Those have -- the majority of that work has been transferred over into other North America plants, making them more efficient and then now bringing up the profitability. So that brings another -- that brings a percentage point in operating margin. The cost recoveries category here, 1% really means the translation of the inflationary costs over the last 2 or 3 years into our cost -- into our pricing. The commercial market, we're able to recover that more quickly because you're able to price that in as you've got a shorter life cycle. The downside of a longer life cycle within the defense industry is that it takes you a little bit longer to price in cost changes. So the inflationary costs that we saw in the supply chain over the last couple of years, we're now starting to see that improvement in our -- in ability to price that into our government contracts. So that 1% comes in through that. Incremental revenue, this is where we need to see growth in our commercial markets. So again, when I went through those end markets, the only commercial market that's growing right now is data center computing. So we need to see some more growth in the automotive, MI&I and networking computing to generate this [ 0.7 other percent ] here. So that one, we're a little bit challenged on. The Penang plant right now is -- this shows 1%. We're about 180 bps right now challenged by the Penang plant because it's up and running. We're incurring all the cost depreciation and the management people that are there. Revenue is slow right now. So as that revenue picks up, we'll see recovery in our operating margin. But even with that, we are about 10.5%, 10.7% last quarter. So we're still going to see -- we're going to be able to get to this 13% when we see the Penang plant come in. And then Telephonics synergies, we've been able to achieve those. Last bit of that is we are closing a couple of more facilities this year and consolidating 3 facilities into 1 that we got from that acquisition. So that will help clean up or finish up those synergies. So again, this bridge from where we are to where we intend to be, the 13%, all within our control, except for probably that incremental revenue. Again, we are seeing some softness in those commercial markets. So as that starts coming through, I think we're going to get to that 13%. We are already achieving around the 11%. So with Penang and commercial markets coming back, we see strong line of sight to this 13% OM. Just showing you our cash performance. Again, our goal is to get to 10% of revenue on cash flow from ops. So again, we've -- we've shown mixed results there, but we've generated enough cash flow to be able to invest in our company and invest in the capital expenditures that we've needed to diversify and continue to be on the cutting edge of our technology and offer the China Plus One alternative in Penang as well as build the greenfield site in Syracuse to facilitate our defense contractors. So we see strong cash flow continuing into the future, and we will hit our 10% targets. Our current balance sheet is strong. Net debt leverage, our goal is to be between 1.5% to 2% or 2x. We're currently sitting at about 1.4x. Our debt is in good shape, nothing maturing until 2028 and then 2030. Our cost of capital, our cost of debt is pretty low right now. We've got -- majority of our debt is fixed. Even our floating rate debt has got a fixed swap against it. So we're experiencing good interest rates right now, good debt cost and our liquidity is solid. We've got up to $660 million of liquidity right now with our lending facilities and our cash on balance sheet. So good shape on the balance sheet and have good dry powder to make investments as needed. So our capital allocation strategy, as I mentioned through most of this, first focus is differentiation. So being able to invest in ourselves, invest in our own differentiation through facilitization, offering that global footprint as well as the U.S.-based footprint for our aerospace and defense customers, having leading-edge equipment and then making strategic acquisitions. So that as I mentioned, dry powder to make M&A acquisitions as needed. If and when we make an acquisition and we leverage up, we have intention to then get our debt back down to that 1.5x to 2x on a quick basis. And so we've managed to do that, and we've shown our ability to do that in the past, and that would be our intention if we leverage up that we will pay that back down. And then finally, we also have a third pillar of returning capital to our investors through share buyback. We have a current program in place, which is about halfway spent. We've got $100 million share buyback. We've spent about $58 million. So we've got about $41 million, $42 million still to spend on that, and we will do that opportunistically as our stock price permits. Going forward, continued focus on the strong markets that we're in, especially the growth markets of aerospace and defense and data center and computing. We do see those other markets, networking and AMII starting to come back. So we'll continue to focus on being cutting-edge technology in there. And then we'll keep an eye on that automotive market. Ongoing investment in differentiation, continuing to look for RF and advanced technology capabilities and develop our own as well as looking for acquisitions within the A&D space that has that technology and capability and then investing in our manufacturing footprint as I mentioned. Solid financial management, we have a plan in place to improve our operating margins, as I mentioned. We think that that's well within our control and power, and we're seeing that come to fruition already and staying focused on cash flow generation, working capital management and keeping our balance sheet strong. So, that's the end of my presentation. So I hope that helps you understand TTM's focus and strategic direction. Are there any questions, Damian?

[indiscernible]

Sure. Sorry about that. So maybe you could just elaborate a little bit on the opportunity in data centers. I think you highlighted that it's currently about 14% of your sales mix. I think most would look at that kind of 4% to 7% target growth CAGR and think that, that's probably a little bit below the growth rate for DCs at least at the current time. So could you just talk a little bit about how you foresee the opportunity to what effect you're participating in the data center build-out?

Yes, absolutely. That's a great question. And that is misleading to look at that 4% to 7%. In the third quarter, we grew about 20% year-over-year in data center computing. We're forecasting in the fourth quarter to grow about 30% year-over-year. So we are experiencing that above is quite a bit above of the 4% to 7%. So we are participating quite well in that space. That 14% is where we were at, at the end of last year. We're now at about 20%, 21% of revenue in data center and computing. So it's about 1/5 of our business. Still not a majority of our business, so we're still well diversified. We do like that space, and we're seeing good growth there. We expect to see that continuing into 2025. So we are a bit capacity constrained there. The facility that we primarily use that for out in China is pretty much at capacity. We've added some new equipment towards the end of this year to try to increase that capacity. We're also trying to certify a second facility out in China to do that. So we're adding about 20% of capacity towards the end of this year to go into next year so that we can continue to see the growth that's available in that area.

Okay. Great. Well, I think we're out of time. Thank you very much for joining us, and Dan, really appreciate it. Have a great day, everybody.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you all for coming.