Columbus McKinnon at Wells Fargo Conference: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

Columbus McKinnon (NASDAQ:CMCO) presented its strategic outlook at the Wells Fargo Industrials & Materials Conference on Thursday, 12 June 2025. The company’s CFO, Greg Rustowicz, outlined a growth strategy that includes the acquisition of Keto Crosby, despite challenges such as tariffs and order fluctuations. The acquisition is expected to enhance Columbus McKinnon’s market position and financial performance.

Key Takeaways

• Columbus McKinnon plans to acquire Keto Crosby for $2.7 billion, doubling revenue and tripling EBITDA.
• The company faces a $40 million tariff impact but aims to offset most of it through pricing actions.
• Orders increased by 4% last quarter, with strong demand in battery production and e-commerce sectors.
• The company aims to reduce its net leverage to 3x within two years.

Financial Results

• Columbus McKinnon reported a 4% increase in orders last quarter, although sales were impacted by product mix issues.
• The company expects $70 million in net synergies from the Keto Crosby acquisition, enhancing EBITDA margins to 23%.
• Despite a challenging tariff environment, the company is implementing strategies to maintain profit neutrality.

Operational Updates

• The acquisition of Keto Crosby is set to close by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval.
• Columbus McKinnon is actively managing its supply chain to mitigate tariff impacts and aims to be margin neutral by fiscal 2027.
• The company is leveraging its geographic diversity, with significant operations in North America and EMEA.

Future Outlook

• Columbus McKinnon views the Keto Crosby acquisition as a transformational opportunity, aiming to become a leader in intelligent motion solutions.
• The company is focused on deleveraging and expects to achieve a net leverage ratio of 2x by the third year post-acquisition.
• Continued investment in growth sectors such as life sciences and aerospace is anticipated to drive future expansion.

Q&A Highlights

• In response to questions, CFO Greg Rustowicz emphasized the company’s proactive measures against tariff impacts and its commitment to strategic growth.
• He reiterated the importance of the Keto Crosby acquisition in achieving long-term financial goals and enhancing shareholder value.

Columbus McKinnon’s detailed strategic plans discussed at the Wells Fargo Conference highlight its commitment to growth and resilience amid market challenges. For further insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Wells Fargo Industrials & Materials Conference 2025:

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: Hey, good afternoon. I’m Greg Rustowicz, the Executive Vice President and CFO for Columbus McKinnon. Here with me today is Kristi Mosier, our Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. So, the format for this is a fireside chat.

I’m going go through a few pages of introductions on Columbus McKinnon, in case you’re not familiar with Columbus McKinnon, and then we’ll dive into the Q and A. So and foremost, I want to point out that we do have a safe harbor statement on Page two of the presentation, and we will also be using some non GAAP financial measures. So let me take a moment to frame who Columbus McKinnon is. So we’re a global leader in intelligent motion solutions for material handling. We have a rich history of over one hundred and fifty years.

We’ve been a public company since 1996. So we’re a leader in global lifting, automation, precision conveyance, and we provide professional grade solutions for solving customers’ high value problems. So we have been enhancing our strategic positioning through expansion into secular growth categories. We’ve that we’re going to take advantage of megatrends that are out there today. And we have a growth and margin expansion plan, and we’re executing on our transformation through our growth framework, which is modeled after with our business system as well as our eightytwenty Process.

So we’re about $1,000,000,000 in sales, about a 16% EBITDA margin company. You can see on the right that we are very geographically diverse. About 60% of our business is in North America, but we also have a significant presence in EMEA, which is about 30%. And from a vertical mix perspective, we play in a lot of different verticals, including general industrial, material handling, aerospace, oil and gas, food and beverage, e commerce, to name a few. So we have four platforms that work together to solve our customers’ unique motion control needs.

So on the left, is our lifting business, which is about 60% of, the company. And it basically provides hoist and rigging materials that will lift product from anywhere from oneeight of a ton to as much as 140 tons. It’s generally used in industrial applications. So it’s composed of manual chain hoist, electric chain hoist, wire rope hoist. We have rigging materials.

And we’re known for being a very high quality supplier. And we do provide end to end solutions for our customer from a digital perspective here as well. We also, invested about four years ago in a precision conveyance platform, which started with our Dorner acquisition, but we also bought a company called Garvey Corporation and most recently, Montrotech in May of twenty twenty three. So this is a precision conveyance sector that provides very precise movement, automated precision handling that can be used in food and bev, life sciences, e commerce, consumer products as well as industrial applications. And our automation business is essentially came with an acquisition from September of twenty fifteen called Magnetek.

And so we have essentially designed and programmed drives and controls that will control the movement of material handling equipment, including our precision conveyance products. And then lastly, we have a linear motion platform, which is about 9% of the company. And so that represents linear actuators and screw jacks, rotary unions and supercylinders. So that we’ll use, the pictures that we’re showing here show us lifting high speed railcars with about a two millimeter tolerance. So essentially, these are pretty, engineered to order projects that will ensure that as you lift the train to do maintenance underneath it, it’s so precise that you don’t have anything off kilter where the train would actually tip and possibly injure someone.

So underpinning our business strategy is a business system and a core growth framework. So on the left is our business system. So basically, we identified what are core competencies that are needed to make a company that truly excellent companies have. We develop key processes around those core competencies and then subprocesses. And so we want to be market led, customer centric and operationally excellent with people and values in the center.

And our business system is modeled after a Danaher business system, and we continue to build that out over time. In addition, we have a growth framework, which is composed of strengthening our core business, growing our core business and expanding our core business and then lastly, reimagining our core business. So we’ve announced recently an acquisition of Keto Crosby. It hasn’t closed yet. We’re expecting this to close sometime by the end of the calendar year, and we’ll talk more about this.

But as we think about that acquisition, it certainly is about strengthening our core lifting business and growing our core lifting business. So they will cover this in more detail, but they have some categories where they’re a much bigger player in than we are in their hardware and consumables category, lifting, securement and hardware category. And so they will expand our breadth of offerings as well as allow us to become a one stop shop for our current customer base. And then in terms of reimagining our core, so that was the idea behind moving into precision conveyance. So we our step there was buying Dorner Corporation in, April of twenty twenty one.

And that was, at the time, the most the largest acquisition Columbus McKinnon had ever done. It was about $485,000,000 And we immediately became a significant player, if not the leading player in The U. S, for precision conveyance. And it was an area that we spent a lot of time on identifying, what were its growth prospects, profitability. It was a fragmented space, and we felt we had a right to play.

And so that led us to move into that segment. So acquisitions have been a big part of the growth story for Columbus McKinnon over time. So this chart just looks at, acquisitions over the last ten years. And generally, they’ve all been pretty substantial. So we bought the Magnetek business in September 2015 for about $182,000,000 So at the time, that was very sizable for us, and that basically gave us our automation platform.

So in January 2017, we bought Stall from one of our principal competitors, Kona Cranes. So it was a carve out, that was a forced divestiture. So Konarkranes had bought in Terex’s Material Handling and Port Solutions business. European Commission said you have to divest this asset. It was actually their crown jewel.

It was their most profitable business. One large facility in Kunzelsall, Germany, about $180,000,000 worth of revenue. And we bought it at a very attractive price of about 8x, about $182,000,000 and it’s been, very, very accretive for us. And it’s they’re known as the expert in explosion protected hoists, which means that the hoists are composed of they’re spark resistant. They use nonferrous metals, so very heavy into oil and gas and other environments where a spark could essentially blow something up.

And so they invented this technology one hundred plus years ago. And as I mentioned earlier, Dorner, we bought in April of twenty twenty one for $485,000,000 That was our entry into precision conveyance. Garvey was a bolt on, that we bought about nine months later, and it was an accumulation technology. So if you think of, say, a bottling line and you have different pieces of equipment that run at different speeds, you need an accumulator to buffer where the different speeds. And so this results in about a 29% productivity improvement for our customers.

So for instance, some of their larger customers would include people like Pfizer. So they were very heavily involved with the COVID vaccine when Pfizer needed that productivity to pump out as many COVID vaccines in 2022. Tito’s Vodka is another customer of ours. So from a bottling perspective, they are also used in wine bottling and other applications. Montertech, the most recent acquisition, was in May of twenty twenty three and brings a much higher unique technology called asynchronous conveying.

So they’re independent shuttles that instead of a conveying system where everything is moving together, these are shuttles that can move in different directions, different speeds. They can go up. They can go down. And so, lots of really interesting applications, especially in battery production and in the aerospace space as well. So that’s been a really nice acquisition for us.

And it was relatively small from a revenue perspective, but we expect it to double revenue within three years, and I’d say we’re on track to do so. And then most recently is the Keto Crosby acquisition, which truly is a transformational acquisition for us, dollars 2,700,000,000.0. So very, very sizable, probably as large of a deal as we could have done, and I’ll talk more about that on the next slide. And we have had some divestitures along the way, which you can see on the bottom. And we do an annual portfolio review.

And there were certain these businesses together were not core to who we were. And so we divested them, and essentially, it was very accretive to our margins because essentially, it was about $40,000,000 of revenue with about a and so not really core. So looking at Keto Crosby in a little bit more detail. So they’re a global material handling company as well, about $1,100,000,000 in revenue. Very strong margin profile, about 23% margin profile.

They are essentially slightly larger than Columbus McKinnon from a revenue perspective. I mentioned we’re about $1,000,000,000 They’re $1.1 And we play in a lot of the same space. So this isn’t really an adjacency. This is a business, an industry that we know very, very well. We have overlap in manufacturing, the customer base as well.

So we feel really comfortable that we know this space very, very well. When you look at their business, about 54% of it is what they call them lifting and securement consumables. So that is hooks and shackles and other items that have low average selling prices, less than about $500 and more replacement items. So it’s going to be more resilient, a little less cyclical. You can look from a global presence perspective, very strong in North America, as are we, but they are especially strong in the APAC region.

They have, so Keto Crosby was formed in 2023 when Crosby, which is owned by KKR, bought a Japanese public company called Keto. And Keto is centered in Japan. They have a world class, lean, million square foot facility in Japan. And so that’s what and they also have some manufacturing in China as well, as do we, but they’re significantly larger in the region. So that will be an asset for us going forward.

And then we’re much stronger in Europe than Keto Crosby is. So we think there’s some good opportunity for cross selling down the road. And you can see from a vertical markets perspective, very diverse manufacturing infrastructure, metals and mining, energy. At one time, energy was, I would say, an outsized percentage of Crosby’s overall book of business. And that was like in the 2014 time frame.

And obviously, with the oil and gas issues in 2015, 2016, they’ve diversified their business, I think, in a good way. And so now oil and gas is a much lower percentage of the pie. What makes why did we do the deal? And so there’s a number of, strategic and financial rationale for doing the deal. So and foremost, it enhances our scale.

So it’s going to make we’re obviously doubling the size of the company, and it’s going to give us a broader product portfolio, enhanced operational capabilities. They obviously have a very strong lean mindset, especially with their Japanese facility. And they’re also going to benefit from growth by secular tailwinds like automation, reshoring, infrastructure investments, scarcity of labor, etcetera. So that’s all in their favor. They have a very highly attractive financial profile.

So, together, we would expect that our company is going be double the size in revenue, triple the size of EBITDA and with an overall EBITDA margin of 23%. So you might say, well, how does that math work if Columbus McKinnon, you’re 16%, they’re 23%, how does the combination equal 23%? What just so happens, and we’ll cover that on the next page, we expect there to be about $70,000,000 of net synergies. So if you take $70,000,000 on top of our $1,000,000,000 that’s the extra 7%. So when we’re all said and done, this is going to be a low to mid-20s EBITDA margin enterprise.

And we see substantial value creation with the synergies. As I mentioned, dollars 70,000,000 in net synergies. We’ll go into some more details on where that’s going to come from on the next page. And both businesses are CapEx light, so we expect to generate substantial, free cash flow, roughly $200,000,000 of free cash flow in the year, even taking into account funding the cash interest, etcetera. And so where do we stand in the process?

So the deal was announced February ten of this past year. And so there’s been a lot of work involved in going through all the different regulatory filings that we need. We had, the committed financing was put in place, obviously, with the announcement of the deal. We needed that. JPMorgan, Wells and PNC Bank provided that for us.

And then we, and that also includes a new $500,000,000 revolver, so we have plenty of liquidity because we don’t typically draw on our revolver at all. We’ve gotten 13 of the 14 regulatory and financial filings approved. What’s open is, HSR in The U. S. And so we’ve been meeting with the Department of Justice.

We’ve had constructive conversations. We did get a request, as we would expect. And so we’re working through that right now, and we expect that’s about a three- to four month process. And then the Department of Justice has thirty days to make a decision. And so during this time frame, we’re advancing on a number of other fronts.

There’s going to have to be some financial, pro form a filings. So that work is underway. We’ve got to convert them from a private company, U. S. GAAP, to a public company.

And so there’s some different accounting treatments regarding goodwill and taxes that have to get, kind of adjusted for. We’re working through integration planning as well. We started that process. So we’ve got teams from both companies working together in a clean room environment. So there’s a limited number of people.

We have full visibility to information to help us understand where do we look to accelerate the cost synergies. And then we also would expect the permanent financing to be put in place prior to deal close. So the synergies themselves, dollars 80,000,000 of gross synergies, 10,000,000 of dis synergies, we know or $70,000,000 of net. We know that we need to bring them up to public company standards. There’s going to have to be some investments that we make, and that’s the $10,000,000 and that’s expected to be on an ongoing run rate basis.

But the synergies are really coming in three main areas: in the procurement area, facilities and the SG and A. From procurement, it’s really about leveraging, the supply base. And as I mentioned, we both buy a significant amount of steel. We’re working through who buys what, who pays what, where’s the best deal, and we’re going to leverage the suppliers to get the best deal, whoever has that. From a facility perspective, we’re really strong on eightytwenty.

They’re very strong on lean. We think we can put that together. They’re very interested in learning more about our eightytwenty process. But there is going to be, consolidation opportunities from a factory perspective, and those can be fairly substantial synergies. A medium sized plant will typically have 10,000,000 to $12,000,000 of fixed costs, people who don’t touch the product but the infrastructure around it.

So one big factory instead of three little ones saves a bunch of overhead. And then finally, in SG and A, there’s a lot of overlap, both from a technology and party spend perspective, right? We’re not going need two sets of audit fees. Insurance costs, we should see synergies in with broker fees. It’s pretty fertile ground.

And then there’s also on the people side, there’s a lot of redundancies from a leadership team perspective, from a selling force perspective. So we have the same in large part, probably 80% of their customers and our customers are direct overlaps. We don’t need two people calling on the same customer. We do think there is also an upside from revenue synergies. And with that, given that keto, as I mentioned, is very strong in APAC, we’re very strong in Latin America and Europe, we think we can cross sell products in these regions.

We think we’ll be able to attract new customers just given our size and scale. And we hope to capture more of the wallet share of the existing customers through a better customer experience. And so when we looked at the company, we thought it was truly a value creating combination, which will drive shareholder value. And this page, let me take you through this. So essentially, we took a look at how many public industrial companies are there, and there’s essentially twenty twenty.

And of those, how many have market caps of like $2,000,000,000 to $8,000,000,000 And there’s about two sixty of them. And if you look at, of those, how many have revenue between 1,000,000,000 and $3,000,000,000 And we’re going to be in the middle of that at $2,000,000,000 There’s about 100 of the 2,000. And if you say, of that 100, how many of those have EBITDA margins greater than 20%? There’s only 50. And so we expect, once again, EBITDA margins of 23% with the full run rate of synergies, which is going to take about three years.

And those trade at about 12x. So we do think that as we delever the balance sheet over time, we will be able to drive significant shareholder value. And from a delevering perspective, we’ve got a great track record of delevering. of all, our priority is going to be to pay down debt. We will maintain our dividend, but essentially, all of our free cash flow that’s available is going to go down to debt repayment So we can delever as quickly as possible.

We think we can get to about 3x net leverage on a credit agreement basis within two years and slightly over two, by year three. And a little bit in the year three, we can get back down to a two times net leverage basis. And on the right is just with a couple of the more recent acquisitions, you can see that we’ve delevered pretty quickly both with the Dorner and Garvey acquisitions and even with the Monterey Tech acquisition. So with that, I think we can turn it over to Q and A.

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: Okay. Great. I’m Kirk Mehan. I’m a senior investment banker at Wells, and I’ll moderate the discussion from this point going forward. Maybe just I’ll start off with some questions, and feel free to jump in as we move along here.

Have about fifteen minutes left. Greg, I think that was very helpful. One of the topics that you’ve talked about publicly, but not today, and that’s very topical, tariffs, So can you update us on kind of where things are with regard to not only Columbus McKinnon but your perspectives on what Keith O’Crosby may be doing? And just kind of

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: So we actually Johnny, on the spot, we’ve got a slide in our deck on tariffs. I didn’t know that. So, everybody wants to know about tariffs these days, And so we’re when we looked at kind of the worst case scenario with what was talked about or has been talked about, which, at the very top, China imports from China to The U. S, we said is about a would be a $12,000,000 impact at the 145 percent tariff level. Obviously, there’s been a stay.

It might be lower. But so when we look at it kind of on that worst case scenario based on the Liberation Day tariffs, we felt that there would be could be an impact to our cost by about $40,000,000 We also expect that we’ll be able to offset about three quarters of that. And so there’s roughly about a $10,000,000 headwind in the half of the fiscal year. So we’ve implemented a number of pricing actions, surcharges. The difference between pricing and surcharges in our industry is surcharges are overnight.

Effective tomorrow, there’s going to be a surcharge effect. Now with surcharges, though, if tariffs change, customers expect it to go away as quickly as you put it on. With price increases, they take roughly, in our industry, about sixty days because there’s notice requirements that because we sell probably 50% of what we sell through distribution, they need sixty days to update their price list and their systems, their price books, etcetera. And so with price increases, they tend to be sticky in our industry. They’re not generally wild up and down pricing here.

So we’ve done a combination of tariffs, price increases. We’re obviously looking at our supply chain to figure out ways to reduce the impact of tariffs for our customers. So it’s not just all passing it on through pricing. But net net, when we look at it, we think there’s about a $10,000,000 headwind potentially in the half of the year related to tariffs. We expect to be profit neutral in the half of the year and margin neutral sometime in our next fiscal year, fiscal ’twenty seven.

And then I failed to mention, we’re a threethirty one year end company. So we are going to be reporting in July our first quarter of FY ’twenty six results. So related to that,

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: KetoCrosby, what’s your understanding of how they’re responding? Yes. So for

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: competitive reasons, they can’t share with us what they’re doing. But what we do know is and because, Keto was a public company under the Japanese Stock Exchange, we know and the market knows if you went back in time and followed their earnings releases, they have essentially the one factory in Japan that I mentioned about. They sell a significant amount to The U. S. And so they are facing headwinds from Japanese tariffs coming from Japan to The U.

S. And we believe that they’re taking actions similar to us in a combination of prices and surcharges based

Kristi Mosier, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Columbus McKinnon: And I’d just add that, competitively, our industry has been very rational when it comes to pricing. So through times of inflation in the past, through times of tariff increases in past cycles, obviously not as significant as what we’re seeing today, that’s passed through pretty swiftly, and it’s been very sticky, as Greg mentioned. So over the last twenty years, price net of material cost inflation has been positive for the company all but one quarter, and it was just a small amount. So I think in general, our industry passes it through, pretty reasonably, and it’s been remained sticky. And that’s largely what we’re seeing right now.

And certainly, for antitrust reasons, as Greg mentioned, we can’t be sharing information around what we’re going to be doing with pricing until, the deal closes. But of course, we monitor the competitive landscape and what all of our competitors, including Keto across the year, doing. And largely, they’re moving in a similar direction to what Columbus McKinnon’s been putting in place.

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: Thanks. A quick check. Anybody in the room have a question? I have others, but okay. Let’s move on to maybe some questions around demand in your business.

And in your earnings call recently, you talked about the fact that orders were strong in the last quarter. They were up 4%, but sales were down given mix issues related to longer cycle and short cycle. How do we think about that near term and then heading into the rest of fiscal twenty

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: twenty six? Yes. So the impact was really so we break our business up or look at it we look at it by some of our platforms, as I mentioned, but we also look at it as short cycle versus project business because it’s two different demand profiles and funnels. And so we saw some weakness in our short cycle order activity in the October, November, December quarter. And so that kind of bled into the fourth quarter.

And so even though typically short cycle orders kind of come in and will get shipped very quickly within a week or two, we were coming from a lower base as typically, we see the channel reduce inventories in December, just as part of their normal calendar year end closing activities to maintain maybe for bank reporting purposes, they manage their inventories down, and they would typically increase it. And we saw a little bit of a decline in the fourth quarter. But, in general, things have been somewhat muted, I would say, from an order perspective in short cycle just given all the trade policy uncertainty and that there has been a little bit of destocking that has gone on, but not to the point where inventory levels aren’t healthy. Kristin, you want to add anything?

Kristi Mosier, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Columbus McKinnon: No. I’d just say, yes, I think, Greg, just building on what you were saying in short cycle, I think while it was softer in our fiscal third quarter, calendar fourth quarter, that’s rebounded. It’s been flat year over year. So we’ve seen kind of an abatement of the destocking issues. And we shared on our earnings call that it was moving a little bit more positively in the early part of our first quarter.

So moving in the right direction, but we’re not seeing a material move towards restocking. Really, what came down to in terms of orders when we talk about orders being up 4% both for the year as well as for the fourth quarter on a constant currency basis, it was because of the strength of what we can control, which is our project business. So we’ve got in place a lot of commercial initiatives, a lot of efforts towards how do we do vertical market specific selling strategies so we can bring solutions that are fit for purpose in a specific industry, bringing to bear all of our collective capabilities and product lines. And that’s been very successful for us. It’s been something that’s been ramping over time, and that actually grew 8% both for the year and then 7% for the quarter.

So it’s had a nice strong trajectory. How that translates into sales, though, is those are going to be longer time delivery orders on the project cycle business. So that’s going to be later in our fiscal twenty twenty six. So it shapes us up very well for fiscal twenty twenty six but creates a little bit of a mix shift between short cycle being lower and project being longer. So it creates a little bit of a dip in sales temporarily, but that kind of evens its way out as you go over the course of the year.

And over time, as short cycle comes back, that should actually shape up for a pretty nice next year. But of course, we’re kind of expecting a more muted short term until some of the policy volatility begins to even its way out.

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: Greg, in your prepared remarks, you talked about Columbus McKinnon focusing on secular growth, end markets with secular growth.

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: So if we look at

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: where we are today, what markets are you seeing that are stronger and maybe ones which are not as strong right now?

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: Yes. So there’s certainly a number of markets that, I would say, globally are strong for us. Battery production. And we’ve talked about, if you follow the company, that we’ve received $30,000,000 of orders from Powercoal, which is a Volkswagen subsidiary, as they’re building out two new lithium battery factories, one in Valencia, Spain and the other in St. Thomas, Canada.

And so we’re the preferred supplier to them. We’ve gotten the couple of lines, and there’s two different technologies. There’s a bridge technology and a stacking technology. So that continues to be strong, and we’re looking to take our expertise to other companies that are expanding in the battery area. E commerce is strong.

At, if you follow the company at all, we had significant business with the largest player in e commerce, in the COVID time frame. We all were getting packages delivered to our houses from them. And they were building out distribution centers at a very rapid pace. And so shortly thereafter, they had a change of CEO. They put a pause on building distribution centers.

So they canceled a number of orders. We worked through a settlement with them, received cash to offset our costs and then some. And but now they’re picking that back up. But we’re also we’ve diversified in the e commerce space, and we’re working with companies like UPS and some of the major big box retailers, Walmart and others, as they look to increase their e commerce capabilities. Life sciences continues to be strong for us.

And it’s so three years ago, it was all about the COVID drugs. What is it about today? It’s the weight loss drugs. So we’re working with Lilly on their product, and they’re it’s one of those things where you can’t make this stuff fast enough. Food and bev continues to be strong.

We continue to as a society, we buy a lot of prepackaged foods. And so you need, sanitary conveying systems, whether it’s frozen bagels, waffles, pizzas. If you think about mass producing pizzas, you want to make that as automated as possible. Aerospace, especially with Airbus, they continue to invest. Obviously, they’re taking share from Boeing right now.

And we’ve got a really good presence with our Monterey Tech product with Boeing. And we are seeing industries that have been impacted by tariffs looking to maximize productivity. So the steel businesses have been investing to automate Nucor steel, in particular, heavy equipment manufacturers. So, one of the wins we just recently received was with Caterpillar. They’re putting in a $725,000,000 expansion of a battery or of an engine facility in Indiana.

And so we won that business, and so we’re going to get a piece of that. And in Europe, entertainment is back. And so we provide entertainment hoist. So at virtually any major concert, if you look up and there are speakers, trusses and lights, they’ve got to be held up by something. And so it’s our entertainment line of hoist.

And so we’re the leader in that. So both for fixed venue and for touring shows, So we’re seeing that in Europe as a strength. U. S. Defense is a strength.

Germany is now, as we’ve all read, is gearing up to spend more on defense. Middle East is oil and gas is still the thing in The Middle East. India, there’s a lot of investment going in for with our rail projects, our rail capabilities for transportation, for high speed rail. Weaker would be Eastern Europe, still with the overhang of the Ukraine war. France and Italy right now aren’t great, but Germany is coming back.

Germany was in a recession last year.

Kristi Mosier, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer, Columbus McKinnon: I think the only thing I’d mention is that there’s a bit of a rotation, right? Some of the softening you saw in the market over the last little bit in parts of Europe are not necessarily what’s coming back, but that’s what’s great about the global presence that we have. So you think about defense spending, that’s not been a historical place of investment. So it’s a great opportunity for us to leverage some of our capabilities that we’re very strong with in The U. S.

And bring some of that expertise over to Europe where they’re choosing to invest. So we’re very excited by the potential. And by staying very focused on vertical end markets, we can see opportunities where we can potentially differentiate our offering versus others that might be a little more fragmented.

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: Great. So we have a little bit more than a minute left. Any final words, anything we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure you get across?

Greg Rustowicz, Executive Vice President and CFO, Columbus McKinnon: Yes. So I mean, clearly, the Keto Crosby acquisition, we look at it as an incredible value creating opportunity for the company. We obviously had to take leverage up. That’s created some issues in the with the stock, for sure. And we do believe that in the value creating opportunity from the cost synergies, the fact that it’s a business we know incredibly well, it’s going to increase our scale substantially and that within a couple of years, when leverage is essentially three or under three, that we are going to be a completely transformed company.

And then we will be able to continue with our strategy of intelligent motion, looking to expand further into precision conveyance, perhaps other new businesses that are related to that in the material handling space as part of our transformation journey. So some people have said, well, this seems like you’re going back to your old strategy. But the reality of it is, is we’re strengthening our current core business, which was 60% or is 60% of our business. So going forward, once we digest this acquisition, which is going to take a couple of years, we will be in a much better position to continue on with the transformation journey that we’re on. Great.

Kirk Mehan, Senior Investment Banker, Wells: Well, thank you very much for coming to the conference. Thank you. And thank you to all of you for coming.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.