Conference Transcript - INTT 2025-11-19

Nick Grant, CEO

thank you and good morning everyone appreciate your interest in intest corporation as noted i'm nick grant president and ceo and with me today is duncan gilmore our cfo and treasurer excited to share with you the journey that intest is on we will reference some forward looking statements and key performance metrics which i advise you to review our forward looking statement comments here as well as we will include some non-gap financial measures in our And our materials, please, you can visit this information as well as our website to learn more about that. So, like I said, I'm happy to tell you a little bit about the journey we're on here. And I was brought in five years ago into NTEST, this sub-$55 million business, predominantly serving the back-end semi-test market. It's where it originated back in the early 80s. and was brought in to really unlock the potential of this company. How do we grow this business? How do we diversify the business? And really capture what we believe the business should be as a partner of choice for innovative test and process technology solutions to our customers. We've made tremendous strides over the last few years, growing the business to about $130 million last year, right around $130 million. and despite some headwinds and some of our end markets in that but really pleased with the diversification that we've driven as you can see here on this chart the semi which is now diversify not only back-end semi tests we've got some front-end silicon carbide gallium nitride power device semi test or semi process solutions there in that number and and but it's a just over a third of our business and we've grown our automotive our aerospace defense and our industrial markets out there which are really attractive spaces and where we have good applications for so why intests why invest in intests we just announced our q3 q3 numbers duncan will give you more details on that we did see some really nice order strength this is uh has been building up our our funnel of activities had reached record levels for the q1 q2 and then we finally saw a number of orders start to break through in q3 here which is great positions us well we've been really driving innovation strengthening our our position in the markets going after competitive accounts so we haven't been sitting idle while our our headwinds and some of our end markets were were occurring there and we are uh got a strong balance sheet very good financial position throughout this time we continue to to um have positive cash flow so we're well positioned for when uh you know for growth and you know seeing nice leverage on that growth when it comes back here we restructured the business around three technology divisions This first one is our electronic test, is where the origin of the company resides, serving the back-end semi-space, but through acquisitions of Acheologic and AlphaMation, we've expanded our test capabilities, providing automotive tests, infotainment, CCU testing, displays, as well as flying probe testers for integrated circuit boards, and battery test solutions. batteries for EVs, as well as batteries for a wide variety of applications, drones, boats, industrial applications as well. And so well-positioned with our test technologies, good synergies across some of our businesses there, and well-positioned in that space. Environmental technologies division is centered today around thermal control and testing, and we do some of the best and most stringent test solutions on the market. We're serving Defense Aero as one of our core markets as well as semi and industrial applications out there. And I'll show you a little bit more about market presence for these divisions here in a minute. But really differentiated thermal solutions, high-end solutions solving some of the toughest challenges out there. And then last but not least is our process technologies divisions. This is centered around two technologies today, first being induction heating. And this is where we've seen some nice growth in the 22-23 timeframe where our induction heating solutions were used in the silicon carbide crystal growth applications as well as gallium nitride crystal growth. and then epitaxi on these higher power, higher current devices. And that market drove a nice wave for a couple years. A lot of capacity went in place. The automotive industry kind of slowed down, and it was a key driver of that use. But it's been predominantly finding more and more applications in the market space, and capacity needs will be expanded here in the future. We're confident about that. so we're well positioned when it comes back and the other technology is image capture vision systems these are embedded cameras that we work with the end users to build board level cameras as well as some unique cameras for their applications cameras going into defense industrial medical applications out there we focus on these six markets on the top these are our target markets SEMI, OF COURSE, IS WHERE WE'VE GOT A STRONG CUSTOMER BASE, AS WELL AS KNOW HOW AND EXPERTISE, THE AUTOMOTIVE EV, DEFENSE AERO, INDUSTRIAL, LIFE SCIENCES, AND SAFETY AND SECURITY. AND WE BELIEVE THESE MARKETS WILL DRIVE GOOD GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES FOR US. THESE ARE ATTRACTIVE CUSTOMERS. YOU CAN SEE SOME OF THE THROUGH THE CYCLE GROWTH RATES WE'VE ESTIMATED DOWN THERE. AND SOME OF OUR KEY CUSTOMERS ARE LISTED AT THE BOTTOM. We're well positioned from some of the mega trends that are happening in the world today. The electronification of everything, cars continue to get more and more features inside the cars, becoming autonomous, driving, all that requires sensing, testing of electronics and we're well positioned there. Power management, silicon carbide gallium nitride I touched on there, but really these higher power, higher current needs out there, battery advancements, battery testing that we can provide. You know, we believe this trend will continue to create opportunities for us to sell our solutions into. And then last but not least, this whole complexity. Everything is getting more and more challenging. The size of chips are getting smaller, advanced packaging. It requires a higher-end test solution rather than a standard off-the-shelf, and we're well-positioned to provide those unique test solutions out there. So we laid out our Vision 2030, a growth strategy out here over the next five years to drive this business in the 235 to 285 range, both as a combination of organic and inorganic growth. We believe this is very achievable, giving more kind of bouncing off the bottom here. So we'll see a nice pickup of organic, and we've identified targets to expand and add capabilities to our solutions for our customers out there. At these levels, we'll be able to drive our businesses, operating businesses, to drive 20% division op income and should see 10% operating income margin at the midpoint there at the bottom line. Innovation is something we've really been pushing and I've put the product funnels in place when I started that didn't exist. It was very much focused on this customer need, this customer need rather than market-driven solutions. These product funnels have been developing. We've been launching new products and we're driving our new product revenue up to around 25%. pleased to see we're in the high teens the last couple quarters so we're making good progress there and global expansion again getting closer to our customers better serving the customers with the acquisition of alfamation in 2024 we've got a strong footprint in in europe now and then we've started up our malaysia facility in penang to better serve our asia customers out there and So really pleased with the progress we're making there and driving operational excellence, something that across our businesses as we've standardized more of our products, we can now drive more operational improvements and improve lead times, drive costs down, and continue to improve the bottom lines there. Just a snapshot of our global manufacturing footprint today. We've got quite a strong presence in North America. And then, as I mentioned, with Alfamation and Malaysia coming on, we're well positioned from a manufacturing geographic presence there. Just a few comments on some key products here, our new products that we've been launching. The first one, our electronic test division there, I've highlighted a couple that we touched on in our Q3 earnings call. Our oscilloscope probe, as well as our RF measurement probe. These are new technologies we've added to the flying probe test solutions that customers are very excited about and actually drove a number of tool orders in the quarter there. This is the first really first fully automated oscilloscope measurement being able to test circuit boards out there rather than having manual intervention on the board. so uh seeing some good excitement there and um the environmental test this is a bench top uh thermal stream a compact unit that sits on top of a table there providing uh best in class uh temperature ranges for cycling the products uh excited was a gap in our portfolio we were able to fill this last year and then on the right our process technologies solutions uh compact ecoheat this was launched a couple years ago probably three years ago now and this really reduced the footprint for our our customers out there by almost two-thirds of foot of space by condensing the the power state power supplies and the footprint required out there so really pleased with some of the products we've launched and we've got a healthy pipeline of new opportunities coming along. As I mentioned, as we drive our 2030 vision, the, you know, M&A and acquisitions is a key part of our growth plan, and we are targeting companies in the 20 to 40 million size range, trying to standard the radar of some of the larger strategics as well as PEs. We are focusing more on building up the divisions adding to the existing technologies that we have to broaden our solutions rather than adding another platform or division and continuing our geographic expansion looking at how do we further strengthen our footprint in certain regions and as well as in target markets. So we believe achieving our 50 to 60 million of acquired revenue over the next few years is very achievable. And with that, so this is, you know, some of our near-term growth initiatives. As I mentioned, our funnels had been at, you know, all-time highs across the company. And we did have very strong bookings in Q3. And despite the strong bookings, the funnels did not move a whole lot. So we were able to replenish the opportunities there. So we've got a very nice pipeline. Customers have been cautious about spending for various reasons, uncertainty, and, you know, pleased to see things starting to break through here. We've been working diligently to expand our channel partner network and expanding our sales footprint. I touched on new products, going after our target markets, and how do we further penetrate that. So we believe we are well positioned here in the near term to drive growth, but long-term execute our Vision 2030 strategy. So with that, let me turn it over to Duncan. He'll go through some of the financials.

Duncan Gilmore, CFO

Thank you, Nick. And great to see so many of you here joining us this morning. And hopefully there's a few people on the webcast as well. So let's go through some of the financials. Let's start with orders and backlog. So Q3 was a strong quarter for us from an orders perspective. things have been a little bit weaker the last few quarters so it's very encouraging to see Q3 coming in at 37.6 million as presented there you're on the chart where we really saw strength was in our auto EV business which has been soft the last year but we did see orders starting to really kind of come back in in in Q3 we also saw some nice strength in defense aerospace driven by some test demand for some next generation weapon systems and overall I would say it was encouraging to see customers starting to move ahead with capital projects. One area that I would say is still a little softer is our semi-business, but certainly auto EV, defence aero, industrial, nice to see that improvement. With that order increase, we started to see our backlog growing again. We ended Q3, just under 50 million of backlog. So on the bottom chart there, you can see that our backlog had been depleting for the last number of quarters but that's popped back up nicely with the strength that we saw in the order book in q3 from a revenue perspective those orders haven't yet converted into revenue q3 26 million was a little bit softer than we were hoping we had a couple of million dollars tied to three or four large shipments that ended up going out in in october so we were hoping to be a couple of million dollars better but certainly encouraged with with what we saw the delays really tied to some new technologies some new capabilities that just took a little bit longer to get out of the factory than we than we anticipated the pie charts there show some of the breakdowns by market sector that nick has touched on i would say that the semi piece the biggest piece there you're just over a third of the business that was something like a half of the business you're going back a couple of years ago. Some of that is driven by the fact that semi piece has shrunk a little bit and some of it driven by our diversification efforts, a combination of the two. And I would say the semi side on the order side of the business is still where things have been a little bit soft for us. So plenty of room for upside there. How do those revenues then convert as we walk down the P&L from a gross profit perspective Q3 11 million 41.9% gross margin relatively comparable to what we saw in in in Q2 which was slightly higher on the on the revenue side again you know that softish revenue number as we walk down the P&L slightly weaker numbers than we would like to see and have seen in the past when things were ticking over a little bit a little bit higher on the operating expenses we have been managing spending over the course of the last year q3 on the far right there just over 12 million of total operating spend so down 700 000 from the prior quarter and we have been working that down as we have seen slightly slower demand across across our businesses and from a profitability standpoint the left hand charts there show eps and adjusted eps q3 in the in the gray we were from a gap perspective an eight cent loss two cents on an adjusted basis the only adjustment being adding back tax affected amortization you can see that's down a little bit from q2 if you remember q2 28 million of revenue q3 we only came in at 26 with a couple of million dollars of revenue you're missing the missing the cutoff we would have been relatively comparable in Q3 with Q2 had we seen those shipments recorded in in Q3. On the right hand side showing adjusted EBITDA and net earnings. Q3 even with the 26 million revenue number we were still positive adjusted EBITDA. We use that as a proxy for our perspective on the cash generation capability of the business. Now if I move to the next slide on cash flow and capital structure you can see that even though the P&L is a little bit softer than we would have liked we're still generating cash and driving strong operating cash flow as the businesses work their working capital efficiently so in Q3 we generated 3.1 of operating cash through the nine months 2025 seven million dollars of operating cash so far this year and we've been steadily reducing debt we took on some debt to acquire a couple of businesses in 2021. We've reduced that by just over 6 million this year. By the end of 2026, we will effectively be close to debt-free and have paid off the bulk of the 9 million that's sitting there at the end of September 2025. From a liquidity standpoint, we do have 20 million of cash offsetting the you know the debt we have about 12 million of net cash and we do have a borrowing facility available to us with our banking partner for approved acquisitions as and when we want to to look at that we have up to we have additional up to up to 40 million for an approved acquisition in combination with our banking partner so relatively strong balance sheet that we've been solidifying over the course of the last few years in terms of guidance we do expect revenue to pop back up to 30 to 32 million in q4 strong orders in q3 generally seeing across most of our markets your things looking a little bit more positive gross margins on that we estimate around 43 percent a little bit higher given the higher volumes operating expenses popping up a little bit as we release some of the discretionary spending constraints that we've put in place, and things like amortization and interest expense expected to be similar. With that, I am going to hand it back over to Nick. I thought there was another slide here for you to wrap up.

Nick Grant, CEO

Great. Thanks, Duncan. You can stick around in case there are some questions. We'll open it up for Q&A here. Just to reiterate, we're, you know, well-diversified business, focused on really strategic target markets. We've been driving innovation and customer penetration, competitive accounts, and order books healthy, and it's just a matter of time. So appreciate your all's interest, and we're happy to address questions. yeah yeah so uh the question was uh over the last five years what percent of your um revenues from new products and new technology so when i started um we weren't really tracking that but when we did put this metric in place about three years ago we were in mid single digits we are now up to like 17 percent the last two quarters and our target is to get 25 plus which we believe is very achievable here yeah so there was two challenges there one at our alphamation business which was about two-thirds of the of the revenue miss tied to two tools and this was a new product a new project that they acquired for a new market that we they're predominantly an automotive business test solutions company and we've been pushing them to diversify as Otto's been kind of weak they want a large order in the med technology space and their development of that solution for that medical tech company took a little bit longer than they anticipated they thought the order came in in Q2 they thought they could get the units out by the end of Q3 it slipped into October so couple tools missed the other was the Acheologic which was around the technologies that I mentioned the new tech and the new products the RF probe and the oscilloscope probe so took the engineers a little bit longer for that particular application for that customer their unique programming around their devices and as we measure on that and so once again the technology challenge just Delayed that shipments a little bit out there and it went in October as well So units solved I mean the challenges were solved that now that the repeat orders are anticipated In fact, we've got an LOI from the customer at Alphamation for the next few tools that will be coming And should have a hard order this quarter on that. So yeah, even though it was disappointing We didn't get the shipments out the the new technology and getting the application solved and and you know positions as well going forward yeah no yeah they absolutely we learn from these and we can apply those but they are unique because it's their circuit boards their their devices that we're testing and our test points and our measurements are are you know unique to their customers but we can what we've learned there will certainly carry over to the next applications and allow us to streamline that it just with these newer technologies just takes a little while to to work through all the the application challenges yep which group Vichay no not really haven't heard of them as a one of our competitors key competitors out there we're testing chips back-end chips whereas we are induction heating solutions are used in the actual growing of the bullets for that it gets sliced into wafers and then the epitaxi that gets supplied on building up the wafers on that so we aren't testing wafers so yeah there

Nick Grant, CEO

questions yeah before the slump yeah no absolutely so the question is uh more about the auto ev kind

Nick Grant, CEO

of where things are so you're exactly right auto ev um really slumped down as as customer preference shifted dramatically in 2024 as evs fell out of favor and um the oems really started prioritizing the hybrids combustions going back to combustions out there so what it meant was for 2025 this what much of 2024 and a good portion of 25 they had to reshuffle programs that they had planned for the next model years to these these other technologies and so we saw lull in our auto EV orders there which is now starting to flow through because they're releasing these projects for 2027 model years they have to do that now and in order to get these lines up and running now of our orders in that space booked at our formation in Q3 50% of them were for new displays new infotainment systems new computing systems in the cars and the other 50 were for existing displays tools and that we have our solutions for because what they've done is they've basically said we were using these displays in this model we're gonna put it over here in this model we now need to ramp up and they're just spreading their technology across the vehicles so we're seeing that benefit us from you know these we can just repeat when it rinse and repeat these will work and solve the the new testing solutions for for these new applications and it's a nice mix so really pleased with that But auto itself, I would say, still hasn't bounced back in a big way. Just that timing-wise, they have to cut loose on a number of these projects. And the pipeline is very healthy as they've got to continue to invest to build out these lines. Well, thank you all for your time today. We appreciate your interest and look to see some of you in one-on-one sessions, hopefully.