CTS Corp at Sidoti Conference: Diversification and Growth Strategy

On Thursday, March 20, 2025, CTS Corp (NYSE: CTS) presented its strategic plans at the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference. CEO Kieran O’Sullivan outlined the company’s focus on diversification and electrification, while addressing both growth targets and market challenges. CTS Corp aims for a 10% revenue growth, balancing organic expansion and acquisitions, despite facing softness in some sectors.

Key Takeaways

• CTS Corp targets a 10% revenue growth, with 5% from organic growth and 5% from acquisitions.
• The company is reducing its reliance on transportation, now 49% of revenue, to grow in medical, industrial, aerospace, and defense.
• Revenue for 2025 is projected between $520 million and $550 million.
• Tariffs, especially in Mexico, pose a challenge, but CTS plans to pass costs to customers.
• The recent acquisition of SideQuest enhances defense capabilities, particularly with the U.S. Navy.

Financial Results

• Revenue Composition: Approximately 60% from North America, 15% from Europe, and 26% from Asia.
• Gross Margin: Improved by 760 basis points over time, with a long-term target of 38%.
• Operating Cash Flow: 85% conversion of operating cash flow as a percentage of adjusted EBITDA.
• Free Cash Flow: 20-40% allocated to shareholder returns.
• Research & Development: 5-6% of total revenues.
• Capital Expenditure: Around 4% of sales.
• 2025 Guidance: Revenue expected between $520 million and $550 million, with a tax rate of 19% to 21%.

Operational Updates

• Diversification Strategy: Reduced transportation exposure from over 65% to 49%, focusing on medical, industrial, aerospace, and defense.
• Industrial Market: After challenges, saw growth in Q4 2024, with low single-digit growth expected in 2025.
• Medical Market: 3% growth year-over-year; however, Q1 softness is anticipated due to inventory adjustments.
• Aerospace and Defense: Revenue increased by 37% to $70 million, with mid-single-digit growth expected.
• SideQuest Acquisition: Completed in August, performing as expected, with seasonal business patterns.

Future Outlook

• Growth Target: Aiming for 10% growth through organic and acquisition strategies.
• Capital Allocation: 60-80% of free cash flow dedicated to strategic acquisitions, especially in aerospace and defense.
• Medical Market: Some short-term softness expected, but confidence remains for the full year.
• Vehicle Market: Facing potential delays in new products due to slower EV and hybrid adoption.

Q&A Highlights

• Tariffs: Impact from China tariffs noted; main concern lies with Mexican factories.
• Vehicle Market: Products are powertrain agnostic; concerns over OEM delays due to EV adoption slowdown.
• Gross Margin Expansion: Driven by business diversification.
• Competitive Landscape: Challenges from large OEMs in transportation; fragmented industrial markets; strong defense history with the U.S. Navy.
• R&D and Plant Synergies: Different focuses for transportation and diversified markets.
• M&A: High expectations for quality assets; some market uncertainty may temper multiples.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back. My name is John Franzreb. I’m an analyst here at Sidoti and Company. Our next presentation of the day is CTS Corp, ticker CTS.

For those who are not familiar with the company, CTS is a manufacturer of electronic components and sensors across an ever widening range of end markets. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO, Kieran O’Sullivan. Following his presentation, there will be time for q and a. Should you have a question, please utilize the q and a icon to submit the question, and I’ll present it to management. With that said, Kieran, thank you for being with us.

The floor is yours.

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: Okay. Thank you, John, and good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are in The US. Welcome to our presentation. At the outset, I just want to remind everybody that our strategy is focused on diversification and electrification, Diversification in our medical, industrial, aerospace and defense markets and with the evolution in transportation markets moving more towards electrification solutions across our product portfolio And our portfolio is powertrain agnostic. So it’s been a good path for us.

The other thing I wanna emphasize is our strong balance sheet to support organic growth and acquisitions. Our leverage is less than one and we’re very much focused on accelerating our growth and improving the quality of our earnings. You can see here the safe harbor statement. And as you look at that, I’m going to move forward into the presentation here. Our strategy is focused on products that sense, connect, and move.

That’s where we deploy our talent. That’s where we deploy our capital as we move forward. You can see our revenue here, the EBITDA margin over the last twelve months and the EPS. And you can see the revenue breakdown is primarily almost 60% in North America, 15 Percent in Europe, and in Asia by 26% with the largest concentration in China. What I really wanna point out here is our diversification.

We love our transportation business. But as you’ll see later on in the presentation, that transportation business, while it’s moved a little bit, it’s now 49% and we’re accelerating the growth in our industrial, medical, aerospace and defense business. To give you another perspective on that, these diversified non transportation markets made up 56% of our revenue in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. We’re we’re focused on organic growth overall. Growth to deliver 10%, five % organic and 5% through acquisitions.

Our products primarily are highly engineered products for applications in those different end markets. And we’re propelled forward by the megatrends of automation, healthcare innovation around minimally invasive applications, and electrification, as I mentioned already. We’ve got a good new product pipeline for all the different markets. A clear focus on diversification. We like our transportation market.

But the quality of our earnings is further enhanced as we diversify into medical, industrial, aerospace and defense. And as I highlighted, we’ve got a strong balance sheet and strong cash flow both operating and free cash flow as you’ve seen in our filings and our metrics as well. Finally, on this slide, we’ve got a strong footprint globally across all regions of the world to support our customers. And one thing I’d like to point out is our facilities. We have two facilities in China.

And more than 80% plus of that manufacturing is locally for the Chinese market. A strong leadership team, we’ve been improving our operational capability as we improve the quality of earnings in the business over the last several years and organizational capabilities focused on the front end of the business to grow and enhance our performance as we electrify and diversify the overall revenue of the company as a whole. And you can see here the secular themes that drive our business, automation, healthcare innovation, and sustainability. When it comes to automation, we’re focused on factory automation and industry four point o capabilities, passive sensors and passenger safety, and then autonomous applications and countermeasures when it comes to autonomous underwater vehicle applications as well. On the healthcare side, it’s primarily focused on minimally invasive applications.

So that’s really helped our growth as a company as minimally invasive applications become more popular with with the consumer as well. You can see here improved diagnostics, that’s medical ultrasound, minimally invasive procedures, whether that can be therapeutics, temperature sensing for patient experience, or the delivery of drugs to the area of infection within the body as well. And then finally, on sustainability, we’re focused on reducing harmful emissions. Also focused on measuring scarce resources like water and fluid metering and applications across different end markets, primarily in industrial applications as well. Moving to our company, our product profiling and key technologies and applications, what I’d like to point out here is it’s a busy chart.

We’re a company that’s been around for more than one hundred and twenty seven years. But I like to simplify this by talking about two areas, magnetics and advanced ceramics. If I start at the bottom here with magnetics, the value we bring for our customers is we package position sensing in safety critical and harsh environment. So you may see 10 or 15 different products here, but they all have that in common as a competence and a deep engineering capability that we have around the globe. And then on the upper part, we talk about advanced ceramics.

So ceramics goes into many of our products here. We have three technologies, a foundry that supports bulk processing, foundries that support tape casting, and then a foundry that supports single crystal. Three different types of ceramic technologies, but what our customers value is the quality of the material formulations for specific applications, be that in defense, be that in medical or industrial printing applications as well. So while it looks rather complex and a diversified portfolio, we really have two big themes here in the quality of the material formulation and magnetics that drives the competence and the capability to support our customers and solve their problems. And if you look at the evolution of the company, not just from a revenue perspective, but from a diversification, you can see here over time moving from 65% plus exposure to transportation to now where in the last year, transportation was reduced to 49%.

We still like our transportation business. We’re still focused on the future with several new products in this area and electrification. But we’re growing in our medical, industrial, aerospace and defense business at a faster rate. And as I mentioned, while it was 51% of our total revenues for 2024, in the fourth quarter that had been up as high as 56% of the company’s revenues and further enhancing our financial and quality of earnings where you see our margins expanded substantially last year. Moving to each of these end markets starting with industrial, a $3,600,000,000 market size where we have applications in HVAC for temperature sensing, micro positioning and actuators for our piezo technologies and industrial printing, and smart metering with, the products where we have technology with ultrasound fly by wire versus traditional mechanical systems which are being replaced with our much more, longer life products as we go forward as well.

This has been a challenging market for CTS, not just for us, but for our peer companies for the last two years where there was a burn off with inventories at OEMs and distribution and EMS contractors. You’ll see in the last quarter, the fourth quarter, we had the first sequential growth in the last several quarters. And we expect that to continue at a low single digit rate throughout 2025 as we move forward here with the business. Very excited by some of the applications we have and some of the new customers we’re bringing on in this area as we go forward as well. And then if you move into medical where we’ve had sustained growth over the last several years, approximately 3% growth year over year, from ’23 to ’24.

And in the fourth quarter, we talked about softness in the first quarter of this year for medical ultrasound, some softness in in the medical market in general as some of our customers adjust their inventory. And what I would tell you also, we said in the fourth quarter is we’re seeing strengthening in certain applications like orders for therapeutics. And that’s continued to gain momentum as we come into the year. You can see the applications here. Minimally invasive applications with our technology here, high resolution ultrasound, wireless pacemaking, and then medical therapeutics as well where we’re actually seeing a big increase in demand as we move forward.

Even though we’re seeing some softness as we said in the first quarter of this year, as we spoke about in our fourth quarter earnings call, we’re very confident in this end market. We’re adding many new customers in different applications in line with our strategy and feel very good about the growth rate longer term in this business as well. Moving to Aerospace and Defense, a $1,500,000,000 market opportunity for us. You can see here revenue up 37% to $70,000,000 We expect good mid single digit growth going forward. And with the geopolitical backdrop, even with DOGE and everything else, we still feel this is gonna be a good market for us as we go forward.

Our applications are in forward looking arrays, total arrays, ordinance and countermeasures, RF anti jamming, temperature applications in space, and vibration monitoring as well. And I’ll touch in a few minutes in the one of the next slides where we added SideQuest to the business in the, August time frame of last year. And I’ll come back to how that’s not only enhancing our growth but enhancing our strategy and crystallizing our strategy in the defense market, especially with the US Navy. And moving to the transportation market, our focus is on sensors and actuators in this area, sensors and and accelerator modules in the light vehicle side, actuators in the commercial vehicle market. Our revenue was down year over year.

The two headwinds were the competition for our OEMs in the Chinese market where the transplant OEMs from Japan were losing share and then we had competition in the commercial vehicle market. You can see here, our go forward focuses on e brake products, drive pad, current sensing. All of the products on the left hand side that we have are powertrain agnostic as well. So it’s not just the new products. The products that we have on ICE engines apply to, hybrids and full EVs as well.

So, we’re looking to grow our content here. One of the things that we’re very focused on is not only the accelerator module market, but the advances in e brake, we see it as a chance to own the footwell in the vehicle as a company as we go forward on a global basis. Moving to our execution capabilities, improved operational performance, our adjusted gross margin here, you can see up over a time period of 760 basis points improvements in SG and A. And our balance sheet is strong. You can see here 85% of operating cash flow converted as a percentage of adjusted EBITDA, and you can see that for free cash flow as well.

And the return of two thirty eight million dollars to shareholders. We still, with the number of acquisitions we’ve done over the last few years, nine acquisitions have a strong capability to add acquisitions as we go forward. The primary focus from a capital deployment on acquisitions will be on the aerospace and defense, industrial and medical applications and very selectively in transportation. So we’ve got a strong global footprint. Strong investment in R and D in the 5% to 6% range of our total revenues.

And we are actively working our pipeline of opportunities in acquisitions as well. Moving to the capital allocation framework here. You can see here, we’ve always maintained a healthy balance sheet. Slightly conservative, I would say. Operating cash flow in the 15% to 18% of sales.

Leverage target is in the one to 2.5 x. So currently, we sit below one on a leverage basis. So again, I want to emphasize that capability to do acquisitions that fit the strategy and do acquisitions in a disciplined manner as well. CapEx running about 4% of sales that goes slightly above or slightly below. So you can see here, we’re allocating 60 to 80% of our free cash flow towards those strategic acquisitions that enhance the diversification and electrification of our portfolio of products.

And then, cash return to shareholders through dividends and repurchases in the 20% to 40% of free cash flow. Moving to acquisitions, you can see several pieces of information here that we evaluate as we do acquisitions. But the big things I want to point out is the return on invested capital exceeding our cost of capital and being accretive to earnings typically within twelve months, synergistic opportunities on cost, but also a primary focus for us is on growth. And then maintaining the strength of our balance sheet going forward and to make sure we’re in a solid position to operate the business, effectively, not just short term, but over a longer term period as well. And again, I wanna emphasize 5% of our sales coming from organic growth and investments and 5% coming from acquisitions.

When you look here on the Cyquist acquisition, which we completed, last August, you’ll see the several bullet points here. But what I really wanna emphasize here is it’s moving our defense capability and strategy from a supplier of components to a supplier of sensors, transducers and subsystems. So working directly with the US Navy, working with big primes in partnership on certain products. And the SightQuest team has strong capability to act and turn products in a meaningful time period and a good track record of execution as well. And so again, products like forward looking arrays, towed arrays, counter measures, autonomous applications within this space.

Primarily, again, with the US Navy but also some exposure to friendly navies as we go forward. That’s a smaller part of the portfolio. The acquisition is moving well. One thing we emphasized very clearly in our last earnings call is it’s more of a seasonal business. Lighter on revenue in the first half of the year and heavier in the second half of the year as we move forward.

So expect that profile to play out in our revenues in 2025. As we begin to wrap up here, just looking at our guidance for the year, we provided revenue guidance in the $520 to $550,000,000 range. And EPS, as you can see here on the right hand side, improving year over year. We expect to make continued progress in our diversified end markets in terms of growth. We do see some softness as we said in the fourth quarter in the medical market.

Even though they’re strengthening in some of the product portfolios as customers adjust their inventories. We’ve softness in the vehicle related markets that we’re watching very carefully. And, you can see the tax rate here in the 19 to 21% range for the business as we move forward as well. And then finally, if you look at, the the longer term profile of the company, you’re moving, from 300,000,000 to 500,000,000 targeting 10% growth, through a combination of organic and through acquisitions. Obviously, we didn’t achieve that last year, but we’re clearly focused on trying to move back in that direction as a company.

The gross margin of the profile of the company really improved in the last several years. Last twelve months in the 37% range and showing a long term target of moving towards 38%. And as we enhance the end market profile through the diversification and growth of those markets, we see further enhancements as we go forward as well. SG and A expenses, you can see here in the 13% to 15% up slightly this year because incentive compensation was low last year. So as we look at equity and other things that will return to the cost profile this year.

And then R and D expenses pretty consistently in that 5% to 6% range, sometimes slightly above that. And CapEx closer to the 4% range as well. And with that, let me pause there and hand it back to John. John, over to you. Thank you, Kieran.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Again, anybody, if you have questions, please put it in the q and a section, and I’ll address it to management. With that said, let’s start with the most common question of the past two days. Kieran, I recall when we you had the supply chain issues. I think you used the term whack a mole back then. Can you talk a little bit about the potential impact tariffs will have on your business?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: Yeah, John. Obviously, already, we’re seeing the impact of the China tariffs. That’s something we’ve already been working on. We’ve been very clear in our fourth quarter earnings call that we will pass on the tariff exposure with our customers. We have to do that to maintain a healthy business.

And our biggest concern would be mostly in the Mexico where the administration has talked about 25% tariffs. That happened for a day or two in March and then was deferred. We have three factories in China sorry, three factories in Mexico, I beg your pardon. So and that’s a combination of transportation and our diversified end markets. That’s something we’re prepared to act on and have already been in dialogue with our customers and not sure where this is gonna end up as the administration goes forward, but that’s pretty significant for us to manage and it’s not not factored into our guidance because again, we expect to pass it on mostly to our customers.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Makes sense. You talked about, call it, muted expectations in the vehicle market. There’s also the, call it, slower adoption of the, in EVs and and hybrids. How does that impact your business if at all?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: On a near 10 basis, John, you know, fortunately for us, our product portfolio is agnostic to the powertrain in light vehicles. And, so we’ve seen some, as you’ve indicated, some changes back in electrification slowdown, especially in the North American market. It’s still progressing in Europe and certainly progressing at a faster rate in China and Asia. And we expect that trend to longer term continue. It’s it’s it’s something that’s not gonna go away.

The biggest concern for us would be on new products that are in development that OEMs might delay products, and that’s something we’re hearing some noise around. So it’s just the timing of new products as they come on board in that twenty five to thirty year time period, but we still see it as a growth opportunity for us as well.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Good. Good. Questions from the audience. What has been the main drivers for the gross margin expansion?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: The diversification of our business, our gross margin was improved in the fourth quarter. And in the fourth quarter, you also saw, 56% of our revenue coming from diversified markets. And if you look at it on an annual basis for ’24, we were marginally above 50% for diversified markets and as, we’ll still continue to grow our transportation business but grow our diversified markets at a faster rate which will enhance the margin profile as we go forward as a company as well.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Makes sense. Audience member wants you to maybe discuss the competitive landscape in each segment, not only the transportation, but also the medical, industrial, and aerospace, who are the peers, and, which segments have the highest barriers entry? Lot lot data breakdown.

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: Yeah. Just at a high level, I’ll start with transportation. You know, we’re dealing with large OEMs. So there’s always two sources in those areas. So, nothing dramatically new to point out there.

Obviously, we’re careful of the competition coming from China into some of the end markets. If you moved into medical, we’ve got some key technologies like our single crystal capability with some proprietary processes that give us advantages there. So we feel good about our position. And from a competitive perspective, we would have competition coming out of Japan, companies like Tachia. And on the other hand, we’re more concerned about what are the longer term new technologies which could disrupt.

And as we sit here today, we’re not seeing something that’s causing us any disturbance, but we remain paranoid about what could happen there. In the industrial markets, I would say we have we have, it’s they’re very fragmented markets that we’re in. We wanna have competitors known to people in the temperature space, some in the ceramic space like, ceramic suppliers in Europe or in North America. And then when you move into the defense market, we’ve had a long history of working with the U. S.

Navy, a long history of working with the Advanced Naval Research Labs. We would have some competition from smaller ceramic suppliers either in Canada or maybe in Europe to a lesser extent. But we’re partnering with the big prime companies either supplying them or partnering with them on products. So we feel pretty good about our position there as well, John, from a competitive landscape.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Another question from the audience about R and D and plant synergies. Are there any amongst the segments, transportation versus non transportation? Or does each segment have its own infrastructure?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: So we we we we have one segment overall the way we operate the business. I I from an end market perspective and for end markets, what I would say is from an R and D perspective, they’re they’re very different. Transportation, tends to be more, designed around semiconductor applications and harsh environments. Whereas on the diversified markets, it’s much more the R and D is much more focused on three different technologies, single crystal capability, tape casting foundries and bolt processing foundries. So very much, different types of R and D.

We get more scale across the diversified markets because those three technologies do interplay across those three end markets, so we get greater efficiencies there on the R and D side.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Can you update us on your integration of Sidecrest or maybe relative to your expectations when you close on the deal?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: Yeah, John. The integration is running well. Sometimes we completely integrate an acquisition. This one we’ve been obviously fully integrating the financials and the public company nature of what we’re doing here. Strong team and on the side side, strong leadership capabilities and relationships with the customers.

So, some part of the businesses were leaving standalone to to give it the capability to execute on the the pipeline of opportunities that’s there, but everything’s moving in a good direction. And again, I wanna emphasize the the seasonality of this business because it’s something we haven’t had as much of before. So, again, lighter in revenue in the first half of the year, stronger in the second half of the year.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: You know, since you brought it up about seasonality, in your prepared remarks, you talked about the medical market demand being a little lighter than expected in the first quarter, certainly in some product lines. Should we maybe think about the medical market being lumpier than you previously anticipated?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: John, obviously, we haven’t reported on the first quarter. We’ll do that here within a month or so. But we we and, you know, what we said in the fourth quarter still pertains. We we’re seeing softness and some lumpinesses to your point. And could that be a little bit longer, potentially?

But, you know, for the full year, we still feel good about what’s happening there.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Okay. Despite the Cyclist acquisition, you have plenty of dry powder to work with. When you think about additional M and A and certainly, you’re going to do it outside of the transportation market primarily, what are both of us looking like today versus, say, six months ago?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: John, what I would say is expectations are still high on multiples, especially for good quality assets, which we’re looking for. On on the flip side, there’s there’s more uncertainty out there now than there has been for some time. And so I would expect, some tempering, but, they they certainly haven’t dropped to to to to to single digit level or anything like that. Okay.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Well, I don’t see any remaining questions on the q and a. I’ll give a second in case someone wants to chime in. But with that said, Kieran, do you have any closing remarks?

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: No, John. Just wanna emphasize again, thank you and everybody for your time today and for your support of our company. We’re very strong on the diversification of our company and electrification, and this diversification will lead to enhanced quality of earnings as we grow the company. And that’s the biggest focus for us as we move through these difficult times here with the geopolitical situation is focusing on the right long term growth to make us a more robust company for our investors and all stakeholders.

John Franzreb, Analyst, Sidoti and Company: Alright. Thank you very much, Kieran. Thank you for presenting today, and have a great balance of your day.

Kieran O’Sullivan, CEO, CTS Corp: Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody.

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