Astronics Corp (ATRO) September 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for attending the Industrials Conference here at Jefferies. I am pleased to introduce the leadership team from Astronics Corporation, Pete Gunderman, Nancy Hedges, CEO and CFO, who are going to tell you a little bit about the Astronics story, and then I think we may have a little time for questions at the end. So I'll let you take it away, Pete.

Thank you, Simon, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for tuning in at this early hour. Not sure how we ended up in this spot, but here we are. So I'm going to speak for probably about 20 minutes, giving you a quick overview of Astronix Corporation, where we've been, what we do, where we're going. And then Nancy will conclude with some bit of a deep dive into our recent financials. And I guess we're going to do questions at the end, or if there's... We'll see if Nancy leaves you any time for questions. but we are obviously a public company market cap in the 3.3 billion dollar range at current stock prices 43 million shares outstanding we do have two classes of stock b shares have 10 votes but don't trade common shares have one vote so the b shares convert to common to monetize over time so they have the same economic value as common shares inside ownership about six percent pretty strong institutional ownership up over 80 percent these days a couple pie charts that give you a high overview look at the company the pie chart on the left here talks about our two segments we typically run about 90 percent aerospace we are about 10 percent test our comments will skew that way we're going to spend most of our time in this discussion talking about aerospace relatively little time talking about tests the pie chart on the right looks at our major markets and you can see pretty easily that about 70 percent of our volume comes from commercial transport. A smaller percentage, about 20%, is government or defense, and about 10% is business jets on a trailing 12-month basis. That 70% commercial transport is critical in understanding the journey we've been on. Obviously, that kind of exposure was an unfortunate place to be during the covid pandemic when the worldwide travel industry shut down if you look at our historical financials if you do any research into where we've been you can see that we took a really big dip when the pandemic hit and have been since climbing back out we bottomed out at about 445 million we are this year expecting to be over a billion dollars for the first time in our company's history in terms of revenue. There are a bunch of tailwinds driving that. We'll talk about most of them as we go through this presentation. They're listed here in summary form on the right side of this chart. I'm not going to go through them in too much detail here, but they're available on our investor presentation if you want to look at them more closely. With the rising volume comes becomes a pretty strong improvement in margins. This has been a focus of ours. A bunch of elements or a number of elements have contributed to the progress that we've made. We feel like there's quite a bit of room to run on all of these, and there's not one big thing. I guess the one big thing would be just the overall volume increase, but beyond that, there's a lot of pricing. There's been a lot of efficiencies built into the business and a lot of simplification and those processes continue. One more pie chart. This pie chart looks at our major product lines. There are five of them. The biggest one and the one that we are probably best known for these days is as a supplier to the in-flight entertainment and connectivity business. We'll talk about that shortly. our second largest one is lighting we are active as an aerospace lighting company lighting in the cockpit lighting in the cabin and lighting in the exterior of airplanes and then three smaller product lines one is flight critical electrical power these this is not power that's a passenger amenity but power that is that basically runs the airplane there obviously are generators on an airplane those generators generate electricity and distribute it and we have some advanced technologies which have positioned us very well in some emerging markets seat motion is a product line that we've been involved in for a long time but we don't haven't talked about it a whole lot but these days there's a real revolution going on in high-end business class and first class seating and we're doubling our revenue in this area this year and we made a little acquisition in germany at the end of last year so we're a pretty prominent supplier to seat companies around the world we'll talk about that briefly when we get there and then finally our test systems business which is our second segment is ramping up as we speak on a on a recently awarded a significant volume production contract for the U.S. Army on a radio test program that's really going to revolutionize the way the contribution looks from that business. We're pretty excited to get into that. So we're going to go through these in sequence. In-flight entertainment and connectivity. we're involved in basically what people do in the cabin of the aircraft with entertainment and connectivity our premise is that everybody wants to be entertained everybody wants to be connected everybody wants to be powered and that's a secular trend that is accelerating and is constantly evolving. And the constant evolution means there is a continual opportunity for retrofits. A system for entertainment and connectivity that was modern five, six, seven years ago isn't modern today and is prone to being upgraded long before it wears out, which provides a significant retrofit string of opportunities for our company. We got into this many years ago by inventing, really, the in-seat power business. If you sit in an aircraft and you plug in your computer or you plug in your laptop, there's a very good chance, we say, about a 90% market share probability that you're using our system. And it's both 110 volts, originally it was DC, but 110 volts, and increasingly USB type A and USB type C. We say we have about 90% market share. It's a global business. You can see some of the characteristics here. We would say today that 90% of the wide-body fleet that's flying in the world is outfitted with some form of in-seat power and somewhere in the neighborhood of 65% of narrow-body airplanes flying around the world today are outfitted with some form of in-seat power. And again, 90% market share. This presence or market position led us into some other areas that we've developed by both product development and by acquisition, and that's both connectivity and in-flight entertainment or IFE hardware so again the wireless access points the file servers the antenna systems and mounting hardware the certification systems that goes along with all that we are basically capable of developing our own system if we wanted to from nose to tail for entertainment but for the most part we sell to other companies that provide those kind of systems. Major customers include Panasonic in the IFE world and companies like Viasat and SES, for example, in the connectivity world. Lighting and safety, again, I mentioned that cockpit lighting, cabin lighting, exterior lighting. There are some examples on this slide. There's a cockpit of a business jet in the upper right. That's an F-35. We do the exterior suite upper left. Lower left is a passenger service unit on a 737 interior. We provide all those, and then there's an Embraer business jet in the lower right. Again, exterior lighting example. Flight critical electrical power. This is a pretty exciting part of our business. We are specialists in advanced electrical power generation and distribution systems, primarily for smaller aircraft. smaller aircraft can be business jets that's where we started it can be helicopters it can be military helicopters or fighters and these days we're spending a lot of time working in drones not the small little handheld drones but the CCA collaborative combat kind of drones and also electric aircraft, eVTOL. The key to our technology, I'm not going to get too nerdy here, but electronic circuit breakers and very high reliability generation devices, spinning machines, instead of a traditional electrical motor, we use, with windings, and we use permanent magnets and induction topologies, which allows the machines to have a significantly longer life, like up to 30,000 hours, as opposed to less than 1,000 hours. I fly a business jet, and it's got a couple generators, and those generators get replaced every 700 hours, because that's how long they last. But with permanent magnets or induction, those types of machines could last, do last, up to like 30,000 hours. The electronic circuit breakers are critical. Again, I'm not going to get too nerdy here, but instead of a bunch of thermal breakers like you see in the cockpit on the left, which is a traditional Learjet 45 cockpit, you see this airplane all over the place. It's very common. Look at all the circuit breakers on the left side and the right side of that cockpit and compare it to the pilatus pc24 the picture on the right where there are no such panels there actually are a handful of circuit breakers in that aircraft but for the most part they're all electronic circuit breakers the advantage to electronic circuit breakers is that they can be remotely operated or automated so that fault resolution or a drone type of aircraft can be controlled remotely we've we've started creating a pretty good platform here and I think it's something that's going to have a lot of power going forward some of the aircraft are listed here you see rotary wing you see small turbo props you see some drones or a couple I guess the MQ 25 anyway. But the one that's getting people's attention is the MV-75. That's the FLARA aircraft. We are doing the entire distribution system on that aircraft. It's really a program where, as a company our size, we're really punching over our weight. We're in the development phase at this point as a prime to Bell, and we are scheduled to have the thing completed in about almost a year a little less than a year and we are telling people to model although pricing is not finalized yet something in the neighborhood of a million dollars in aircraft for us it's about a hundred and twenty million dollar development effort that is being funded and we're really excited about this as it takes off and people always ask well how many airplanes are they going to build and we don't really know there are 4,000 some Blackhawks out there this is the replacement for the Blackhawk and a lot of people in the industry think that the number could get to like 2,000 aircraft over time not all at once obviously but over time and then again not a lot of programs of record here so it's a little hard to talk about but we are actively involved in the drone development effort that's going on with a bunch of defense OEMs these days both the kind of the new wave of defense companies and also the traditional players our system is very well suited for remotely piloted or autonomous aircraft so we're excited about where that market could go and an eVTOL electric aircraft we've developed an off-the-shelf capability that they all need and we're working with many of them most of them and it is increasingly apparent that these aircraft are gonna fly they are gonna be certified the business models vary so and the architectures vary so it's gonna be interesting to see how this all develops over the next few years but we expect to be playing a pretty nice role in that area next product line again aircraft seat motions I'm sure you know everybody in this room flies fairly frequently you've probably noticed that there is a lot of upgrading going on in the front end of aircraft in particular so if you think of the the powered surfaces that move we make the motion systems that drive those surfaces and it's a pretty dynamic growth area again we're looking at like 100% growth over the course of 2026 and the backlog is supporting continued growth well into 2027 and 2028 we're pretty excited about that there's in our I'm not going to go through all this but for a smaller company a billion dollars in sales we are we have long fingers we're involved in many of the major programs on the transport side certainly in seattle but airbus is just as important to us we put less product on average on each airbus airplane but they build more airplanes so boeing is important airbus is just as important we're on a wide range of business aircraft and we're well distributed also on the military world these days test systems i'm not going to go into this in a whole lot of detail we have a test systems business that has struggled during the pandemic after we sold a semiconductor test business back in 2019 maybe 2018 and then the pandemic hit we have refocused the business on two lines of work one of which is testing radios for the military or for first responders municipalities things like that and these are complex communication devices obviously it's not always obvious when they're working correctly or if they're not working correctly but they're mission critical for soldiers and first responders in an active theater so the u.s army in particular carries or operates like 28 different families of radios and they want one test box that is capable of verifying performance on those 28 families and they hired us to do that they just gave us a first of a anticipated four or five year run for high volume production it's about a it was a 44 million dollar award expected to push deliveries over the next year year and a half and we expect continued awards like that so if you look at our over the next four years IDIQ of about 215 million so if you look at our financials the test systems business has been a drag but you need to for modeling purposes layer on like 30 40 million dollars of additional revenue a year that's very well priced and we expect that margin wise the test business is going to catch up to our aerospace business in terms of contribution uh like immediately like this quarter or next quarter and be there for the next four years at least while that program runs so we're pretty excited about that So I guess just to summarize, you know, we have increasing aircraft production rates. We've got some very nice market positions with good follow-on aftermarket potential. Our test business is coming around. We think that flight-critical electrical power with the FLARA program, with drones, and with eVTOL are kind of all pushing us in the right direction. uh so with that 15 minutes left nancy this might be a record all right so i'll cover some highlights on the financials uh second quarter set records for sales bookings and backlog gives us confidence in both the underlying demand environment and our outlook for the for the back half of the year

our sales were a record 260 million dollars in the quarter which was up 27 percent from the prior year's quarter, and our growth was led by aerospace, where the demand remained strong across commercial transport, military aircraft, and general aviation. Within our product lines, IFEC sales increased 19%, but as Pete mentioned, seat motion more than doubled to $22 million in the quarter. That included $6 million from the acquired business, but organically, seat motion grew 59%, which reflects the growing demand for premium seating as the airlines continue to reconfigure their long-haul aircraft. Flight-critical electrical power grew 49%, primarily on stronger airframe power demand in military aircraft. That includes the MV-75 program, which we expect to contribute about $35 million in revenue for the year, with about half of that already recognized in the first half. Test system sales also increased, though the prior year comparison included a $6.4 million revenue reduction related to EAC revisions on some long-term contracts. In the second quarter, though, tests included approximately $4 million associated with the Army and the Marine Corps radio test set programs, principally material purchases that didn't bear any margin in the quarter. Bookings were a record $306 million, producing a 1.18 book-to-bill ratio, which lifted our backlog to a third consecutive record quarter of $781 million at the end of the quarter. Some important contributors to bookings included a $27 million MB-75 development booking and that $44 million first production order on the U.S. Army radio program that Pete mentioned. Orders can be lumpy quarter to quarter, but the trailing 12-month book to bill still is above one, and the strength of backlog supports our raised full-year revenue outlook of $1.02 to $1.04 billion. and we're expecting third quarter revenue of 265 to 275 million dollars with the fourth quarter modestly higher. Second quarter was an important demonstration of our earnings power in our model as volume grows and our operating initiatives take hold. Gross profit was 86.9 million. Gross margin was 33.4 percent which was an increase of 760 basis points from the prior year quarter. The improvement reflected a combination of higher volume, improved productivity, and a $2 million IEPA tariff refund. It's also important to recognize our prior quarter included some aerospace simplification initiative charges, as well as that EAC charge adjustment in the test segment, which I mentioned earlier, so that creates a bit of a difficult comparison. R&D remained consistent with our expected quarterly run rate, which is about $10 to $12 million. that supports our strategic product and program investments at the same time though sgna declined to 13.7 percent of sales which illustrates the leverage in the model as our revenue grows operating income was a record 40.5 million or 15.6 percent of sales while our adjusted operating income was 43.2 million or 16.6 percent of sales the performance reflects the operating leverage we expected from stronger revenue together with continued progress on pricing workforce efficiency and our simplification efforts aerospace generated a 20.3 operating margin on their record sales and an adjusted operating margin of 21.4 percent the restructuring actions taken in 2025 have returned our test system segment to operating profitability they reported about $600,000 of operating income in the quarter. That margin was held back, as I mentioned earlier, by about $4 million of no margin revenue for the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine radio test programs. But as production advances in the back half of the year, we expect the economics of those programs to become increasingly visible in our results. Turning to earnings in EBITDA, the operating progress I just described converted into substantially stronger earnings power. While the quarter clearly shows this, I'll point out the first half results as further demonstration of the measurable progress we've made. As you can see, adjusted net income more than doubled to $32.6 million, or 70 cents per diluted share. Likewise, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $51.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 19.8%. That's compared with 12.4% in the prior year period. That 740 basis point expansion underscores the impact of higher aerospace volume stronger execution across the company productivity gains and the benefit of actions we've taken across the organization on a trailing 12-month basis adjusted EBITDA was 168 million or 17.8 percent of sales compared with 115 million dollars or 13.9 percent of sales a year earlier that's meaningful progress in a relatively short period of time and reflects a business that's increasingly benefiting from both the operational improvements we've made pricing initiatives and scale the tariff refund did provide a benefit but even if we excluded that item the quarter demonstrated continued improvement in the underlying profitability of our business as we move through the back half of the year the focus remains on sustaining disciplined execution converting backlog into revenue and continuing to improve the earnings profile in both segments and finally our operating performance is translating into cash generation and an improving balance sheet. In the second quarter, we generated $30.1 million in cash from operating activities and $24.4 million in free cash flow. That compares with the use of cash in the prior year's quarter. On a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow was $60.7 million, up from $36 million a year ago. The quarter's operating cash flow reflected stronger earnings, partially offset by working capital investment, particularly in inventory, as we positioned the business to support anticipated revenue growth in coming quarters. We view that inventory build as appropriate in the context of the demand environment and our backlog. Capital expenditures were about $5.7 million in the quarter and $16.9 million year-to-date. And for the full year, we continue to expect CapEx to be in the range of about $40 to $45 million. That's an elevated level, and it includes capacity expansion and consolidation at our largest operation, along with catch-up spending on previously deferred maintenance. We also incurred $4.1 million of capitalized ERP costs that run through as cash outflow from operating activities. Despite those investments, our total debt did decline by about $24 million from our year-end to $310 million, while shareholders' equity increased to $198 million. We ended the quarter with $253 million of total liquidity with $238 million available on our revolver. We expect to be free cash flow positive for the remainder of the year, which provides us the flexibility to continue investing in growth initiatives while strengthening our balance sheet. Just quickly touching on our convertible notes, neither one is currently callable. The 5.5% notes have a soft call date in 2028, while the 0% notes have soft call in 2029. under the terms of the zero percent notes which which is the larger of the two issues we will cash settle the 225 million dollar principal balance when that time comes for the conversion premium on both notes as well as the principal on the on the on the five and a half percent notes we retain the flexibility to settle those in cash shares or any combination subject to the note terms and our capital allocation priorities at the time looking beyond the quarter, though, our capital allocation priorities are clear. First, we're investing to support the significant organic growth opportunities already in front of us, including the capacity, operational, and technology investments needed to execute against our record backlog. Second, we intend to continue using our improving cash generation to reduce debt and continue to improve our balance sheet. M&A will remain under consideration, as it's historically been a big part of our growth strategy. However, we'll be disciplined and selective with a focus on strategic fit, returns and preserving the flexibility to fund the organic opportunities that we see today. And with that, I think we can turn it to questions.

The question has to do with exposure to Starlink or Amazon Leo. Is that the question? I can't talk specifically about those situations at this point but I can say that there is a major geo to Leo transition happening in the connectivity space and we're working that hard so I expect by the end of the year with the battle lines will be drawn and we'll be able to talk more freely about it but I will point out that that's an example of how the technology churns in the in-flight entertainment and connectivity part of our business. And that slide that I cruised over pretty quickly talked about penetration rates. If you think about the 90% of wide-body airplanes that are connected today and the 30% of narrow-body airplanes that are connected today, and you think that LEO might be a heck of a lot better user experience for passengers you can expect a major retrofit opportunity in the industry and you can expect penetration rates to increase and those are the kind of thing that historically have driven our business on a retrofit side to significant new highs so we're pretty excited about it it's a little bit of a cryptic answer but it's a it's a good question it's a critical question someday

we'll be able to talk more specifically question on the retrofit for IFE mentioned how like five or six years ago it was modern now it needs to be potentially replaced what's the price uplift when that happens and then also just trying to get more of a sense in terms of how you're winning in the market across your other various categories like who are you competing against how are you beat in them. Thanks.

Okay. The IFEC, IFEC upgrade cycle, is something that's just constant, and we compete pretty successfully. I'm not sure there are pricing opportunities, but we think that's a smaller part of our margin uptick opportunity, as opposed to volume increases and everything else. I mean, on the IFEC world in particular, I just talked about Geo to Leo, that transition. There are many others that you can look at and see pretty obviously. Power, people think of power as being pretty stable or stayed. The electrical outlet in the wall has pretty much looked like it's looked forever. But in an airplane, you've got transitions in electronics going from 110 volts to USB type A to USB type C, we think there's going to be another trend coming on with wireless charging. We've got some applications in development there that we're pretty excited about. And if you think of wireless access points and security protocols, those all need to be regularly updated and changed. And we've got probably 60%, 70% market share in wireless access points in aircraft. So we benefit from the various technology churns that have continued to happen, and we expect will continue to happen. So we're excited about that. How do we compete in other areas? The lighting part of our business, we're actually one of the world's largest lighting companies. And as many of you know, there's been a lot of consolidation among the supplier base over the years. Boeing and Airbus, the major OEMs, recognize that consolidation. They don't always prefer it. so we've got we've earned a bigger spot on their you know opportunity list going forward than we had at one time in the past because they'd like to develop more of a competitive supply chain so we compete well on aircraft lighting systems all across the aircraft we have lots of opportunities there we're pretty well-established in North America. We're less well-established at Airbus, but we're doing the A220 currently for a major interior lighting program that we hope might someday spread to A320 or A350. The flight-critical electrical power I talked about, our key there is the electronic circuit breakers and the high reliability power generation systems we have a system capability that very few other companies have comprehensively across the airplane for small aircraft we're not going to do you know the next big Gulf Stream or we're not going to do the next narrow body we could do subsystems on both those airplanes but where we specialize is in smaller aircraft, like the Flera program, like a drone program, like the MQ-25, like the Pilatus PC-24, those kinds of aircraft. And I think we're building a franchise there which will have a lot of value over time. It's not a quick retrofit kind of opportunity, but we're on the ground floor of a lot of very nice development efforts. So I like to think that we're a big enough company to compete with the small guys very competitively and we're small enough and nimble enough and we have the resources to compete competitively in our chosen markets with the bigger with the bigger suppliers i like our competitive position short question long answer but i've got 16 seconds so anybody else all right thank you for your time have a good day