Core Molding at East Coast IDEAS Conference: Strategic Growth Unveiled

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, Core Molding Technologies (NYSE:CMT) presented at The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference, outlining its strategic shift from financial recovery to growth. The company, previously reliant on the truck industry, is now diversifying and investing in new markets and technologies. While challenges remain, including maintaining financial stability and executing acquisitions, Core Molding’s leadership is optimistic about achieving its ambitious sales targets.

Key Takeaways

• Core Molding Technologies is shifting focus from financial recovery to strategic growth.
• The company aims to achieve $500 million in sales over the next five years.
• Recent business wins total $30 million, with another $20 million potentially forthcoming.
• A strong balance sheet with $45 million in cash and $21 million in debt supports growth plans.
• The company is investing in its sales organization and exploring new market opportunities.

Financial Results

• Capital Allocation Structure:

- Focus on organic and inorganic growth, with a stock buyback program underway.

- Over $5 million in stock purchased through 2024 and 2025, with $2.5 million remaining for buyback.

- Strong balance sheet with $45 million in cash and $21 million in debt.

• Profitability:

- Adjusted EBITDA has been around 10% for the last two years.

- Return on capital employed is within the 14% to 16% target range.

• Cash Flow:

- Average free cash flow of $17 million per year over the last three years.

- Operating cash flow exceeded $89 million over the same period.

• Sales Capacity:

- Current capacity ranges from $425 million to $475 million, with a target of $500 million in sales.

Operational Updates

• Market Diversification:

- Reduced reliance on the truck industry from 92% to 50%.

- Expanded into power sports, industrial utilities, and building products.

• Geographic Expansion:

- Facilities in Ohio, Mexico, South Carolina, and Ontario, Canada.

- Seeking acquisition opportunities in the western U.S.

• New Business Wins:

- Secured $30 million in new business this year, with $20 million more potentially on the horizon.

- $45 million in business won last year expected to contribute in Q2/Q3.

• Sales Force Restructuring:

- Investment in a new sales department, including a chief commercial officer and business development managers.

• Technology and Innovation:

- Focus on composite solutions, particularly in SMC production, with a capacity of 100 million pounds annually.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy:

- Emphasis on both organic and inorganic growth.

- Targeting acquisitions to expand sales channels and geographic reach.

• Market Opportunities:

- Exploring applications in EV battery enclosures and medical equipment.

- Revenue from new business expected within 12-18 months.

• Capital Allocation:

- Continuing stock buybacks with potential for dividends.

Q&A Highlights

• Stock Buyback vs. Dividends:

- Investors have mixed preferences, with some favoring buybacks to avoid tax implications.

• Tooling Ownership:

- Tooling is retained for service requirements; otherwise, it is decommissioned.

• Acquisition Multiples:

- Potential acquisitions are evaluated with multiples between six and seven.

• Carbon Fiber Functionality:

- Noted that 90% of carbon fiber use is for aesthetics.

For a deeper understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference:

Operator: Have that we have for you is Core Molding Technologies, ticker CMT, based out of Ohio. With us from the company today, we’ve got Alex Panda, the chief financial officer, Eric Palamaki, the chief operating officer, and Dave DeVault, CEO. So I’ll turn it over to Dave to get us started this morning or afternoon. Thanks, Dave.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: Alright. Thanks, Dave. Afternoon, everyone. So what I’ll do is I’ll start off and kinda give a little background, a little story, an elevator pitch for core molding on what we do and how we got to where we are, probably give a little context to who we are and where we are today. When we started if you look back at core molding, you look back, we’re a public I was a public company.

Help do a turnaround, help the team with the turnaround. And back in that time frame, it was real focused on what are we going to do to to get out of bank default, start servicing customers, and we started putting the processes and systems in place to grow the company. The very part of any turnaround, I used to work with Carlyle Group, do a lot of turnarounds, and every time, it’s always about the people. Right? The board or everybody would say all of us were I heard the comment we were penny wise and pound fools.

I mean, we didn’t invest in the equipment. Well, that’s really not the reason because if you don’t have people to take care of the equipment, then that’s what really happened. So we put a lot of systems in place, and we work with what we call must win battles. So our must win battle was really getting the right people on the bus, getting the right people in the operations. Eric changed up just about every plant manager.

We put in HR that we worked with in the past. We’ve laid within the organizational development system and making people feel part of something bigger than what they are. From there, we walked we really started working on the operational side, fixing the equipment, getting the operations, getting efficiencies in place, and really getting delivery quality and customer support systems in place. That took us a year there. That allowed us to get into the next muscle in battle, which was really the customer contracts.

On a lot of the large truck customers, the quoting that was done on these large contracts that were long term contracts, the pricing was favorable to them, not us. So we were losing money on a lot of the truck contracts. So what you see about three years ago, we started doing what we call the portfolio improvement, and that was really the price increase. And it takes a while to do that with some of the contracts. You have to wait for the contract to end or tell them how to end your contract.

We’re no longer gonna lose this business. Nobody likes to hear that. Everyone’s mad at the age of the time, but in the end, they realize it. And then what we’ll see today is that some of those customers that we didn’t get to do business back when we did a price increase is coming are coming back to us now to be able to redo that business. So where we are today, we have a very stable, well executed business, which is what we focused on the four years.

You know, everybody says, what’s your strategy? The strategy was at the very beginning is to be able to execute well. Because if you can’t execute well, there’s no strategy that will help you at all. So where we are today, we’re stable. We have cash in the bank, and our focus today, must win battle, is invest for growth.

That’s investing in our sales comp our sales organization, business development, account management, as well as where we see opportunities for inorganic growth to grow our sales channels. Diversify the business and grow. That’s our focus today. Everything we did before now was to put ourselves in this position to be able to grow a company. Growing a company that isn’t able to execute will only create cost.

So publicly traded, founded in 1980. Core was actually a reverse merger with Navistar as it was carved out of Navistar. So that’s why the background in the truck industry tools all trucks to begin with. We look at nine years ago, quarter was 92% truck. Today, we’re 50% truck.

So the key is to diversify the business. Looking at investment highlights, we have a market leadership position, we have about 86% market share in the personal watercraft industry, we have about 32% market share in the truck, so we’re very ingrained in those two markets. We do a lot with growing wallet share in there, but we need to grow in other markets. The two markets that are down today, truck and power source. So one one of the benefits when we talk about tariffs, we are USMCA compliant.

We had three days worth of tariffs, and that was it. So we hope that continues. We have long term relationships with big blue chip companies. All of our products are proprietary in how we manage our products. Most of our products, when the customer pays, they pay for the toy.

So the toy could range anywhere between 2,000,000 on up to $35,000,000 for a project. So one set of toy and there’s one supplier for those products. Looking at addressable markets, I would say where we are with defending growth, power sports absolutely is a defending market for us, especially for watercraft. The area we see growth is golf carts. The it’s amazing what you see them do with golf carts nowadays.

Rims, low low noise tires, stereo systems, refrigerators. Now you can really add value to a golf cart. Fifteen years ago, a golf cart was something no one cared Now they do now you can add golf cart. Like, my parents live in a one of the largest communities on the East Coast. Not every other house has a golf cart.

Construction and ag, we’re talking about what we’re doing to grow under there. We’ve introduced paint into our Matamoros facility. When you look at construction and ag, we’re combines, harvesters. There are big parts. We can mold the part, but if we don’t paint, then you can’t get to sell.

Listening to the voice of customer truck, they don’t want you to paint because they paint themselves. Con Ed, Gondier, TAC, TNAGE, AGCO, they all want paint. That was preventing us from getting to market. I look back at four to six years ago, business came to us. Right?

Business came into CORE because the truck needed another program, it came to CORE, and it was easy. Right? Now complacent, but easy. Powersports, truck, we still stay in truck. We don’t necessarily wanna grow in truck.

It’s a good business for us as far as cash flow, as far as you know what volumes are gonna be, you know how long it’s gonna be. So the consumer product, packaging, industrial utilities, and building products. Overall product sales, 34% are Mexican facility Matamoros that’s right across the border. That is by far our largest facility. Columbus, Ohio is the headquarters and then we have facilities, another facility in Monterrey, Mexico, Gaffney, South Carolina, Winona, and Coburg, Ontario.

The area that we’re missing is out in here, And when we start looking at acquisition, that’s the area that we’re looking to do with the acquisition. Our parts are very large, so logistics does matter. Some of our customers, The truck, we really do business with all the customers, more some more than others. I’d say Navistar International is our largest customer at the moment, but we still do a lot of business with Volvo, PACCAR, and we have a lot of business. Power Sports, we do it with Yamaha, BRP Polaris.

I wanna see Club Car and EZ GO on there soon. Building products, decorators used to be UFP. We do all the labs in UFP. We’ll go into later some of the new products that we’re working with UFP. You know, fake rocks.

I never knew there was more than a $10,000,000 market on faux rocks. No validation. Easy. Right? Quick sale.

And then we’re only industrial utilities, so Generac you see a lot of growth there with the generators and then also Xylem with the water treatment. So how we diversify? Growing into powersports, industrial and utilities, we do troughs that go along the rail line for data, energy transmission along rail lines, storm water drains, fan blades, even outdoor equipment, decking, and then obviously lattice and everything in the backyard. So that brings us to where we are today when I talked about kind of the story at CORE, what we were doing, we were purposely putting ourselves in a position to be able to invest for growth. You see a lot of companies say, oh we’ve got grow, we’ve to grow, but volume makes a mountain out of a mole though.

The problem back in 2019, it was a peak year for truck. Everybody wanted truck. They wanted you to run their trucks before you run somebody else’s, and we weren’t able to do it. We had too many quality problems, too many delivery problems, we were shutting customers down. So if we kept saying at that time if we had less volume we’d be able to fix it, but you can’t, right?

You just can’t stop and fix everything, you got to do it at the same time. The patient’s living is working on it. So if I look at where we are today, we have an organization of plants that are prepared for organic growth and inorganic growth, we’re profitable and have cash to invest, whether that’s acquisition or assets. We really need to drive the voice of the customer into the organization and understand the customer’s problems to solve. I think when you look back, we never really invested in sales because they didn’t have to.

Core never had a sales partner. You just had people that took voice. They’d come in and talk with engineering and you got the next truck program. Right? There was no purposeful way of going out and growing the business into the industries that are the best, that are the best ROI.

Right? So that’s what’s changed. When we talk investment growth, we’re growing our sales force. We’ve added a chief commercial officer, never had. We’re adding account managers and business development managers.

So account managers are the ones that are taking care of your larger existing customers. Business development are the ones that are hunting and going out and grabbing the new business. We have invested in the sales function. We actually had two business development managers hired this week and account managers hired prior month, and then really focused on growing wallet share with high value solutions. It it sometimes it amazes me.

We we talked with one of our customers like PACCAR, and they asked, do you use ECPD? It’s a reaction injection molded process. I said, yeah, we supply you with ECPD. It it sometimes it it really is convincing that how much you really need to tell tell them what you do and how you do So we need to do a much better job with that. So you see Eric and his team along with sales, we’re going out doing lunch and learns with customers.

We’re going out meeting with customers. We’re showing bringing them into the plant, doing, you know engineering reviews and that’s where they start seeing all the things that you can do. It really does take that. So strength in Cora’s technology function, you know we’re a solution sale. We come in, we have to solve a problem and solve that problem with a solution with a composite solution.

So you need a good core technology function that can come into the customer, know what the opportunities are, what’s the next best alternative and how we’re better. And then acquisition. The number one priority for acquisition is sales channel access and then footprint expansion. So if we can get sales channels that has a if we can buy a company that does large parts, say a thousand ton or more high pressure injection molding, does large parts, is somewhere in the West Of Texas, closer further away from our other plants. That’s technical in nature.

But the big thing when you start looking at some of our parts, we’re structural. Right, we’re the we’re the composite. So if I look at a unibody for something that we’re looking at, this is early in the design phase, right, so we know what’s being done early. Everything that covers this is aesthetics, injection molding or carbon fiber, right? We already have the structural part.

We know what goes on next. So we’re earlier in the design phase and there’s come back to competition. So and then complementary technology and resources. We still want to be in molding. We still want to be able to build out our portfolio.

So steps to driving more organic growth. So we restructured our sales department when we talk about the next month’s win battle, it’s sales. What do we have to do to grow sales? We’ve changed our order structure. We’ve invested in our sales force.

We’re looking at new opportunities to best utilize our resources, really ROI, priority rank, everything that we’re going through now. It used to be very it used to be very opportunistic. Yeah. We could do that. We do it.

Right? Now that one is in the market we wanna be. It has a higher margin and higher future potential. That’s a dream. That one’s the ultimate work on that one and not that one.

Train and embed the value selling methodologies. I I I don’t think we were as purposeful as we had to be. We did what we did because it worked. Build out the value proposition, how do we and I think what’s important today, as of today, now we put this out last night so that we could talk about it here, we’ve won $30,000,000 of incremental new business just this year. Now I would bet everyone in here at Coke that will win the Volatile program, which is another 20,000,000.

That’s just this year. So I believe it’s working, or at least we have one data point that says this. When does the revenue on that 31 start to flow through? What’s the revenue? When does it start to flow through?

You’ll start seeing this, our cash to quote our quote to cash cycle is fairly long, on most of the products, so you’re probably looking at anywhere from twelve to eighteen months. What launching this year, we won last year. So we won $45,000,000 worth of business last year and we’ll start seeing that coming online by Q2, Q3 of this And then we’ll ramp up. So now we get into some fun stuff. So automotive, the new EV truck coming out.

When you look at what we’re able to do with the cargo beds, the bottom of the bed, the sides and that, you know, they’re predicting a 150,000 units of that a year. When we say 30,000,000, we said we’ll probably we we we toned it down a bit. We say it’s probably about 30% of that at I don’t know if they’ll get a 150. They think they will. And an exciting part, I think Eric will kinda talk about this here.

When we start talking, part of the challenge that we have with our sales is that it is long term. When you’re designing a product that has to be validated and then the final product has to be validated, that’s where you get twelve to eighteen months. But we make SMC, so that’s a sheet molding compound, and we make the raw material for this. We can do about a 100,000,000 pounds a year, And that’s used in construction for doors. So doors that you see, the outside of the door would be SMC, the inside would be a cardboard honeycomb structure with another layer of SMC on the inside of that door.

So any Home Depot or Lowe’s. Maybe Eric wanna walk through and show what we’re talking about?

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: Yeah. It’s hard to upload the video so I got a video just to take you a little tour of one of our plants and I’ll walk through. This is how we make sheet molding compounds. So we make the compound ourselves,

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: The beauty of that is it’s short term, meaning that we can win the program and start a production with that in May of this because you’re making a product that then gets molded. Now molding a door is pretty straightforward. It’s a rectangle. It’s really not a lot of value in molding a door. But making the SMC and if you take this around, we formulate the SMC which is similar to baking a cake.

We put all the components in there and you can make SMC and they’re the same strength. Now if you want high performance, you’ll pay for the layer. Eventually, five years from now, eight years from now, everybody will be in a lighter one, and there’ll be a new lighter. Alright? So what we do, we have one that’s in between those two for those who don’t wanna pay for the high end, and they wanna be something in the middle.

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: How much of a secret sauce is in the formulation of this?

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: It’s all about the secret sauce. That white one is something that’s proprietary for us. We’re actually using a certain formulation of what we call microspheres. It’s like fiberglass bubbles at a micro level to get that medicine. Really hard for

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: So is it It’s not. The the formulas are not patented.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: Patent it, everyone will know your formula.

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: Kinda like Coke. Oh, okay. Consider it more like a trade secret, like a Coke formula or something. Right? We know how to make it, and we don’t wanna know everybody how to make Sure.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: Yep. Even the people running the lines, it’s material a, different than that. Everybody wants to know your formula.

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: And how many other people make SMC like you do?

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: I’d say probably and sell it probably four or five. The biggest manufacturer of SMC is Kohler, but that’s for their own. It’s captive. So they see SMC as part of their value proposition. When you look at tower, tub or shower, you know, they want to get that nice white clear finish so they make their own SMC.

Companies like IDI, they sell, make and sell SMC and that’s all they do. A lot of it’s low volume and smaller batch is what you’ll see new people getting into SMC. It’s usually small batch with low volume. Even for us, if it’s 5,000 or 10,000 pounds, sometimes we’ll have somebody else do it if we already know the 400. We have two large automated SMC machines.

We can do a little over a 100,000,000 pounds of SMC a year. Until until we did all the turnaround, SMC was only for internal use. Right? We made just enough SMC for all of our truck business and personal watercraft business. Now we’re able to produce much more SMC, many more variants, and at a much more efficient cost, and that’s why we’re selling it out externally now.

See a lot of demand for it. Also, when EV battery enclosures, especially on municipal buses, so what we make this battery enclosure goes on top of the bus, comes in, robot picks it up, puts it in the charger, robot grabs another battery, puts it in, and it’s done. I think EVs do well in markets like this where you know how far you’re gonna drive, you know how long you’re gonna drive, and you got a standard way to put or change the battery in and out of charge. So I’m sorry. Other areas that we’re getting into are medical, hospital beds.

It’s taken us a year and a half to get in here, but the structure underneath that bed is structural foam. And then if you look at why we would do injection molding, this part here is injection molding because you don’t need the shrimp. But you need to know the structure of the bed and how it’s gonna be shaped Vehicles, we still do truck. We do a lot with what we’re seeing at ATVs, UTVs, truck the recreational side is down, but the commercial side is actually doing pretty well. So landscaping companies, other construction companies, you look at things like John Deere and Gator where we do the the bed, and this bed is the same thing as you’re doing here.

It’s a direct area. How high your gross margin get? How high can your gross margin get? Well, definitely higher than what it is. I would say, well, for sure, truck is by far our lowest gross margin business.

Everything that we’re going after is higher margin. And it makes sense because truck has been doing composites for thirty years, they have very sophisticated purchasing department set, their sole job is to put you out of business, and you’re really designed for manufacturability. They have the design. So there’s no the next best alternative is another supplier. When you do things like this, like this carbon fiber, that bed, you know, being able to to make SMC that actually looks like wood, that’s where you’re at.

There’s definitely a lot of time above the 20% gross margin. Everything other than truck. Yeah. Truck before we did the price increases, truck was was it was business you shouldn’t get out, you shouldn’t do it. And we’re selective about what we take in truck today.

So I think a really good story, maybe Eric kind of go through what we did with the carbon fiber.

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: I’ll show you this picture of a tool that we made too. They want a lower cost solution and something that could keep up with the demand for all of those units. So we took an actual part, made a tool off of it. So the blue the green and red part you see there are actually made fiberglass tools. So we have a very competent fiberglass organization that make a lot of parts.

So

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: of a kind.

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: I I think it’s the one. I we we might tell you there’s probably nobody doing this because we really took our experience in making low cost lower cost truck parts and crossed it with carbon fiber, so it’s unique to to the industry or to the world. But everybody that makes a power sports vehicle or even in automotive, if you pay extra to get the the platinum or the premium or the, you know, whatever model, in this case, they call them the x model, the spring order with 300 horsepower, They wanna have something unique on it. So so if you pay the $20,000 for your jet ski, I got a carbon fiber hood. It’s in the literature.

Right? I can tell my buddy I can make it. So they’re gonna leak faster than he can. Right? And so all of them wanna do special things like that.

I got to go to Valcour where their engineering center is. They put 20 people in that room with a few of us. I learned about this. They had their big TV guys that are doing their off road vehicles. They had their snowmobile guys.

They were doing snow. They had their personal aircraft. They all wanted to know how we were doing it and whether they could apply it to their vehicles. Even just inside that OEM, there’s already opportunity.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: Yeah. But to be honest, three years ago, Ford would have never done that because we wouldn’t have been there with the customer, with our engineers, with our engineers, with voice to customer. What is it that what is your problems that you’re facing today? We want to invest either by doing an acquisition like we had talked about or we’re investing in we have a couple of large projects. If we win the Volvo, we would put a plant in Monterey, consolidate our current small plant in Monterey, and then grow that plant with the investment in Volvo with that business.

What multiples do you pay typically for businesses? I’m sorry. What multiples do you pay for businesses when you acquire? Yeah. Everything that we’re looking at right now is somewhere between six and seven.

Our multiple right now, if you look at the report. So the the challenge we have to overcome is if we buy a business, how can we scale that business either going in and do an operational improvement and get the savings from a material side, an operational side, or are we able to grow the sales channels faster? Why not buy yourself back and We are buying stock back today. Yeah. We we have the problem with buying stock back is the SEC puts regulations on how much you can actually buy.

You’re only allowed to buy a certain percent of your last ten days trading volume. Whatever. I think you can buy back as much as you’d like. Right. Yeah.

We buy back as much as we can every day.

Unidentified speaker: On that carbon fiber example, is is it functionally the same as carbon fiber? Like, is it as strong?

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: 90% of the carbon fiber you see is only aesthetics. Don’t need it. So those are areas, and we’re doing the same thing with Bohrox. Right? You see Bohrox out there, we did.

Our team put together the same process to be able to start making Clove Rocks. I never thought there was a 10,000,000 market in big rocks, but there is. So these are just some of the products and the value proposition we have. So we do all the hauls for the Yamaha high performance. This product is a VRV switch.

This is a DLFT, a fiber reinforced composite, and a structural foam. So only we can do this because we take two different processes and make this together. We can then do an entire boat haul in one shot. We have processes up to 5,500 tons. Light weighting you see a lot with the storm drains, we talked about those, the ball for bioeroptic and data transmission.

And then really when you start looking at what we can do, this was a runner board that had 43 components. If we mold it and activate the mold, you can get all that in there in one part. The value proposition is to reduce the customer’s labor. Again, we mold in all the engine mounts, fasteners, holes, everything in that hole. When it gets to the customer, all they’re doing is bolting everything in.

No faster, it’s already done. Why core molding? I think a big part of it, culture is a competitive advantage. When I talked about our must win battle as far as people, our turnover is actually less than. HR got upset because 8.6 is about six months old, it’s less than eight now.

That’s huge cost savings, significant. So again, large difficult parts. I’m gonna hand it over to Alex to go through our financials before I take up all the time. Sorry, John. Know.

Start talking, but shut up.

Unidentified speaker: Alright. So we really have a four pronged

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: approach when it comes to

Unidentified speaker: our capital allocation structure. one being organic growth. one second one being inorganic return capital to shareholders and then also maintaining a strong balance sheet. So like Dave said, our Muslim battle in the current year is to invest for growth. We’re gonna do that with a very disciplined approach.

We target a return on capital employed of 14% to 16%, and that’s a pretax measure. Return on shareholder return capital to shareholders, like the gentleman in the back said or asked about, we’re currently doing a stock buyback. So through 2024 and 2025, we purchased over $5,000,000 of stock. We have about 2,500,000.0 left. We can buy that over the next eighteen months.

Maintaining a strong balance sheet. At the March, our cash balance was $45,000,000 and our debt balance was $21,000,000 We really believe that any opportunity that comes our way, we can take advantage of. So moving on to the P and L, we’ve really focused on improving profitability over the last three years. Our adjusted EBITDA has been about 10% the last two, and we’ve kicked off a return on capital employed within that target range of 14 to 16% over the last two years. We’ve been able to do this with operational efficiencies and really looking at our customer portfolio in doing a full go kind of approach.

So the profitability has kicked off a ton of cash flows. You can see over the last three years, we’ve averaged $17,000,000 of free cash flows while spending $5,000,000 on average of growth CapEx. We’ve kicked off over $89,000,000 of operating cash flows over the three years. We believe right now we have the capacity to do somewhere between $425,000,000 to $475,000,000 of sales. And any growth CapEx from here on out would really be because we don’t have the right size press or the right process in

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: the right location for the opportunity.

Unidentified speaker: So long term financial goals. In the next five years, we’re really looking to achieve $500,000,000 of sales

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: at an operating income of eight

Unidentified speaker: to 10% and still while still achieving our return on capital employed between 1416%. So for q one, we were up year over year. We achieved 19% loss leverage obviously with sales going down.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: That’s always been quite a discussion with our board. Yep. And when I talk with investors, I mean, would would would an investor prefer a stock buyback or a dividend? I’ve had some investors say, they don’t want a dividend because you just create a tax event for me, I want your stock price to go up or buy a share back. I mean for us, if you’re going to do a dividend and you’re not going to be 3% or 4% on dividends, I’m not so sure it really gives you a lot of benefit.

Yep. I I mean, if

Unidentified speaker: you pay them, I just can’t do them.

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: They will buy your stock. Yeah. Yeah. That’s we we’re gonna finish up the share buyback and make a decision whether we do dividend or finish up the share buyback right now. You mentioned

Eric Palamaki, COO, Core Molding Technologies: the customer base with tooling. Yes. After the job is done, what happens to the tooling? It seems to me there’s some IT involved with that tool. Can you read

Dave DeVault, CEO, Core Molding Technologies: Usually, depends on the product and the service life of that product. So a lot of times, it’ll be kept for service at low volume, and usually, you’re decommissioning most of it unless the part that you need for service. If you don’t have service requirements, we are actually required to cut it up and just just large numbers just so somebody else doesn’t take it. Alright? Alright.

Questions? Alright. Thank you for your time. Okay. Bye, everyone.

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