Curtiss-Wright at Baird Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 12 November 2025, Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE:CW) participated in the Baird 55th Annual Global Industrial Conference, offering a strategic overview of its growth prospects. The company reported strong performance in its defense electronics and nuclear segments, while also highlighting increased capital expenditures to support future growth. Despite these investments, Curtiss-Wright remains committed to maintaining strong free cash flow and returning capital to shareholders.

Key Takeaways

• Curtiss-Wright is capitalizing on increased NATO defense spending, particularly in ground vehicles.
• The nuclear sector is expected to significantly boost revenues with AP-1000 reactor builds.
• The company plans to increase capital expenditure by 40% this year to support growth.
• Curtiss-Wright is maintaining a strong free cash flow conversion rate of 108%.
• Acquisitions remain a top priority for capital allocation, along with share buybacks.

Financial Results

Curtiss-Wright is guiding a free cash flow of $520-$535 million for the year, maintaining a conversion rate of 108%. The company has consistently produced cash ahead of earnings, exceeding a 105% conversion rate. Capital expenditure is set to increase by 40% this year, following a 30% rise in 2024, underscoring the company's commitment to growth and efficiency in capital equipment.

Operational Updates

Commercial Aerospace: The company is experiencing growth rates of 13%-15% within aerospace and defense markets, benefiting from the FAA mandate for 25-hour flight data recorders.

Defense Electronics: This $1 billion business boasts the highest margin performance, with operating margins reaching 29% in the third quarter. Over 20 new products are being introduced this year, aligned with industry mandates.

Nuclear: The nuclear segment accounts for approximately 12% of revenues, with 90% in the aftermarket sector. AP-1000 reactor builds present significant incremental revenue opportunities.

International Direct Sales: Representing 10% of Curtiss-Wright's business, international sales have grown over 20% this year, amounting to $335 million.

Future Outlook

Nuclear: Potential AP-1000 orders from Bulgaria and Poland are anticipated next year. The company plans to move into prototyping for small modular reactors (SMRs) next year, potentially through 2028, and aims to greenfield a site by the middle of the 2030s to support capacity needs.

Defense: Curtiss-Wright is positioned to benefit from increased NATO defense spending, particularly in ground vehicles, and expects to grow its relationship with Rheinmetall.

Overall Financial Goals: The company previously targeted achieving a $1.5 billion annualized revenue rate by the middle of the next decade, a goal now seen as conservative given the growth in the nuclear sector.

Q&A Highlights

Nuclear Growth: New AP-1000 builds in the United States were not included in prior growth targets and represent incremental revenue. Curtiss-Wright aims to double or triple the content per reactor, potentially reaching $150 million per reactor.

Capacity Expansion: The company currently has the capacity to produce 12-16 reactor coolant pumps per year and is preparing to expand this capacity.

Capital Allocation: Acquisitions are the top priority, followed by share buybacks as an effective way to return capital to shareholders. The board has increased share repurchase authorization by $400 million to $535 million.

Curtiss-Wright's comprehensive strategy and financial discipline were evident throughout the conference. For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Baird 55th Annual Global Industrial Conference:

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: All good? Okay. Thanks, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst here at Baird. We are delighted to have Curtiss-Wright with us. Thank you back for joining us. With us from Curtiss-Wright, we have Lynn Bamford, who's Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Farkas, who's Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Lynn, Chris, welcome. Thank you very much for coming back and supporting the conference. Appreciate it. Let's jump right into Q&A, right? No opening statement, right? Good?

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: No opening statement.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Okay. We'll jump right in. Maybe we'll get to the nuclear, relax, everyone. We're going to start in aerospace defense briefly, which supports—when we think about aerospace defense, it supports about two-thirds of your portfolio today. You've recently raised your 2025 outlook, and several of your defense markets are now projected to grow 10%-11% revenue growth in aerospace defense. What are some of the key drivers you think about growth this year? Then you can give us some early indications when you're thinking about 2026.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Okay. Thank you for that. I really sincerely want to say thank you for having us back. This is a fantastic conference, and we're pleased to be here. I am obligated to say that today's statements will include some forward-looking projections with risks and uncertainties that are outlined on our website. With that, I just—you know, I see a lot of familiar faces here, so I know a lot of you do know who Curtiss-Wright is. In a snippet, you know who we are as a company is, you know, we are a complex engineering, design, and manufacturing company that builds a lot of critical components that are highly engineered and often are part of must-not-fail systems that have safety-critical applications. In many of our end markets, we've been in those markets since the inception of the markets.

Obviously, the name Wright comes from the Wright brothers. Aviation and aerospace, a lot of people do not realize that. I just got a couple of looks that indicated that. From that to Navy nuclear, to commercial nuclear, to the birth of the COTS electronics industry. We are proud of that because we really are seeped in these industries and know the market dynamics and know our customers. There are a lot of things going on, a lot of different market growth vectors going on across our various end markets that are really providing solid projections of growth going forward. Peter has asked about one of those, and we will come to that in just a second. We launched our pivot-to-growth strategy five years ago. It is focused on driving organic growth while driving ongoing operational excellence and delivering strong free cash flow.

It has really provided great value to our shareholders as we have moved to the point where we are compounding earnings at a mid-teens rate over time and generating strong free cash flow. That is sort of a quick snippet of the company. If you want to learn more, you can go to our website and see our last earnings call and look at our investor day from May of 2024. Turning to defense, aerospace and defense is about two-thirds of our portfolio. I will just start out in commercial aerospace because it is a smaller portion of the segment, but it has the highest growth rate at 13%-15% within our A&D markets.

We have really solid positions across all the major Airbus and Boeing platforms that, as they look to see a ramp going into the future, we think we are well-positioned and do not really see ourselves in a, from what we can tell, in a destocking position across those. We believe we are going to be afforded a ramp in revenues as those platforms ramp. It is not just the content we have. We are always bringing new capabilities to market, whether it is sensor technologies or surface techs to meet the future demands as the platforms evolve and temperatures in the engines go up. We are right there winning new content. Another thing we have talked about recently is we have done this for a while, but it has really started to ramp and drive some revenues in the commercial aerospace is our 25-hour flight data recorder.

I won't go into too much detail here, but it's been mandated by the FAA for all new builds and a retrofit of the Boeing planes that are out in the field and a lot of regional jets. We have our partnership through Honeywell, where we're delivering that. EASA has also mandated that across the European markets, and we're working with Airbus to achieve certification on the Airbus platform. That's really just started ramping this year and has got a great growth trajectory through the back half of this decade and beyond, quite frankly. Commercial aerospace doesn't get quite as much the talk time, so I thought maybe I'd lead with that.

Across our defense businesses, we have very solid positions really across ground, naval, and aerospace, predominantly here in the U.S., but we've got great positions in Europe, which, as NATO considers ramping its spending, and we're beginning to see early signs of it, we're well-positioned to be aligned with that. If I look inside of the 2026 budget, naval shipbuilding is a priority. We're on all the major platforms. Again, the content is in our investor day presentation from 2024. You can go through those numbers in there. So well-aligned there. All things about increasing the superiority, air superiority, Golden Dome, various defense systems fit very nicely into our defense electronics capability and the really interesting new capabilities we're bringing to market continuously in that space, as well as our footprint across Europe, where we've always sold directly into the European defense industry.

That positioning and those relationships position us well as they ramp spending. We're there. One example that's particularly exciting for us is our partnership with Rheinmetall to do turret drive stabilization equipment and other things that, as a lot of the NATO spending really will be geared at building ground vehicles. We're very well-positioned there.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Perfect. That's great. A lot of growth drivers as we enter next year. A lot of good tailwinds. You mentioned last week on last week's earnings call, spoke about kind of the bullish pipeline in defense electronics. Maybe give us a few examples on what's driving that optimism. I think that's, and obviously there's some really strong margin performance as well that comes with it.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Thank you. If you're not familiar, our defense electronics business is about a $1 billion business that is the highest margin performing business across the portfolio. There are a lot of things that have allowed us to operate in that manner for many years at this point in time. One, the business goes to market from a commercial standpoint. If you've listened to stuff in the Defense Department, the push for commerciality only continues. There was stuff in the Forge and the Speed Act. There was stuff that Secretary Hegseth talked about just last week, and it very much fits our go-to-market strategy. I talked a little bit before about some of the programs where we're well-aligned.

I think it's really important to know kind of what we're doing to assure our leading position and bringing value through the products we offer that, even though we're going to market commercially, we need to bring the value to drive the types of margins we have. Just a couple of examples, forces that are very strong in that market is compliance with the MOSA/SOSA CMOS mandate. This year, we'll bring over 20 products to market aligned with those open standards. That's just very important. I know it's probably a hard number to completely digest if you're not familiar with the industry, but that's a significant amount of new product introduction, broadening our capability and broadening where we can take and different applications we can play in. We've talked a little bit about our NVIDIA partnership. We are now shipping our embedded Blackwell products to customers.

The demand is great. We were the only company to demonstrate a running embedded Blackwell processor at the GTC conference just shortly ago. Our Fabric 100 product offering is out in the marketplace. It provides the highest speed interconnect between the computing elements that is available in industry and a very specific, unique differentiator for Curtiss-Wright. Just to name one that is a little more off the beaten path, we have recently had some of our small form factor products achieve what is considered Microsoft Azure validated. With that, they are put in Microsoft's Azure catalog, which has a customer reach that I do not even know if we fully appreciate what kind of doors that is going to open up to a company like Curtiss-Wright. It is early days, but we are really pleased with that.

I really list those things out to just try and put some specificity on the things we're doing with that IRAD we spend in this group to make sure we're always looking for new applications, new places that we can push our available market and go win new content.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Yeah, that's terrific. If you did not see, 29% operating margins in the third quarter of defense electronics. Tremendous performance. Really, really a great growth story and a great margin story. Let's shift a little bit. Let's think about how do you view Curtiss-Wright's exposure to Golden Dome?

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yes, I didn't maybe barely mention it before, but this is very well aligned with how we have product offerings. If you think of what Golden Dome is to do for the United States, it's a combination of three major buckets of technologies. There's the sensor technologies that's looking to find anything that's coming towards the United States. There's the effector technology, which is to defend against anything that's coming at the United States. Most importantly, what's new is the networking capability that ties all these different systems together into a unified defense system across the country. We have, being in this industry for a long time, not just our electronics, but our electromechanical actuation products on many of the products that are the sensors and effectors. We're well-positioned there.

Our tactical communications capabilities is really embedded in the three main approaches that are being decided how they're going to work together to form this command and control capability that ties these networks together. We are well-entrenched in the three different approaches that will be intertwined to build this networking capability. It is going to be a fantastic opportunity for Curtiss-Wright. A lot of the networking configuration is classified, so it is not something to be talked about. It is early days. We do not have content yet. It would be too premature to talk about that. A lot of very senior-level conversations, and it is going to be very positive for Curtiss-Wright.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: That's great to hear. Another area, I think, where you're seeing continuous benefits is related to outside of domestic spending, NATO and kind of sort of allied spending. Obviously, we know that funding is accelerating. How do you think you're positioned there to benefit?

Chris Farkas, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah, so maybe just I'll talk a little bit about our direct foreign military exposure, Peter, not where we're selling to the F-35 or F-16 or Stryker, which is then sold internationally, but where we're selling direct to international customers. I think first, it's important to note that we have a very broad defense portfolio across Curtiss-Wright. We're selling both domestically and we're selling internationally. When we're selling internationally, it's to NATO and allied countries. We're selling products into the aerospace defense markets, the naval defense markets, and the ground defense markets. Just some examples to build upon what Lynn was saying. In the aerospace defense markets, we're selling embedded computing to European fighter jets. We're on all the major platforms here in the U.S., and we've got great content on the major platforms that are over in Europe.

We're also selling arresting systems, ground-based arresting systems, so that you can land those aircraft in locations. You look at the naval market, and while we're selling embedded computing equipment, we're also selling rotorcraft arresting systems or towed sensor arrays that go in the back of frigates, and that's to NATO and allied countries. Within ground defense, we've got a great tactical communications business. In addition to that, we sell things like turret drive stabilization systems that go into ground vehicles. If I dig a little bit deeper into ground defense, that turret drive stabilization systems business that we have has a great relationship, a long-standing relationship with Rheinmetall. We've been working with them for a number of years.

You've probably all heard in the news earlier this year, there were some announcements regarding Germany's intent to procure $30 billion worth of ground vehicles going forward, 3,000-3,500 Boxers. We released some press releases earlier this year where we're actually selling product turret drive stabilization systems, not only to the Boxer, but to the Hungarian Lynx, to the Panther, and other vehicles. These are some of the things that are actually influencing our results. The order book has shown tremendous growth. Over the past two years, revenues in this area have grown at a mid-teens pace. This year, they're growing at greater than 20%. It's 10% of our total business, so it's $335 million.

Now, it's a great momentum, but then as you look forward, and we've all heard the statements that have come on out of the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte's statements recently, where he said, "Hey, we need to move this NATO spending from 2% of average GDP to 5% of GDP going forward." And that's a very favorable thing for Curtiss-Wright in the way that we're positioned. Rheinmetall is particularly well-positioned to benefit from that and will certainly leverage our customer relationships to be the best supplier that we can to help make them successful in that going forward. But as we look out, we think this is a strong area of growth for us, and it'll help to accelerate that already strong base that we have in defense spending going forward.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Terrific. We have got strong tailwinds across the board in aerospace defense, both domestically and abroad. Let's shift to the topic du jour. Let's talk about a little nuclear. Last year when you were here, we were discussing kind of the expected increasing news flow out of Eastern Europe and the potential for AP-1000 reactor orders. Clearly, I think a lot has changed also domestically. We have seen the administration's executive orders and most recently $80 billion in funding that is going to be earmarked for nuclear. How do we think about this U.S. and Europe opportunity for Curtiss-Wright?

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah, we've reflected a little bit with a couple of people today on how exciting this was a year ago and how much new things have come even in the past year. It's pretty amazing. To frame our nuclear business, really just for, again, for people less familiar with in the room, it's about 12% of our revenues. It's dominated 90% in the aftermarket business, which is mostly here in the U.S., but it has a global footprint. That's really the keeping the existing reactors online and being able to extend those life cycles from 60 to 80 and most likely to 100 years over time. That's a good, healthy portion of our business that's growing very nicely. We're also very active with the SMRs, but to touch specifically about the AP-1000s, this is fantastic news. The executive orders were really great.

There is one thing to target building a nuclear power plant, but you need the whole infrastructure around it, whether that is fuel, a willing NRC, a workforce. The executive orders really covered all that. It really set the stage for the revitalization of a successful nuclear industry in the United States. This announcement, we put out investor day targets that had strong growth targets in this area. You can see them in our investor day presentation from May of last year. We really did not have any predictions of new AP-1000 builds in the United States. That is all incremental on top of that. This is really meaningful business for Curtiss-Wright. We are in the middle of a lot of capacity planning with Westinghouse and figuring out how we are going to ramp for this.

This is a fantastic growth driver that is going forward. We did not include it in any of our three-year investor day targets that we gave last year. This is incremental revenue to those targets. At that time, we talked about getting to a $1.5 billion annualized revenue rate by the middle of the next decade. That was before these announcements. That surely layers a lot of additional revenue into our projections going forward.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Yeah. And just to be clear, because this was talked about last week on the earnings call. So AP-1000, you are the only one in North America that can make a reactor coolant pump to support that. You have an exclusive relationship with Westinghouse for reactor coolant pumps per reactor. It's one of your higher price point products and also a very attractive margin. I know we haven't discussed the margin opportunity for that, but we know it's previously from what past history was. So this clearly, and there's some incremental content as well that you have with AP-1000s. Maybe you could just highlight that it's not just reactor coolant pumps.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah, very, very good point. Thank you for bringing it back to that. We laid out, again, there's $110 million-plus of content for the reactor coolant pumps. In prior contracts, we had, say, $10-$20 million of other equipment that we supplied into each plant build and reactor build, I should say. We're looking to double, ideally triple that content per reactor, putting our content up more in the nature of $150 million per reactor. We're still working opportunities that we're trying to be the best supplier we can to Westinghouse and where they have supply chain needs that we're there to meet them. We're working hard to be a rock solid. You can take that content, the number of plants. Eastern Europe is still going.

It's still today, we still think that the Eastern European opportunity, whether it's Bulgaria or Poland, will drive the first orders. Believe me, in the U.S., whether it's the funding from these 10 plants or the Fermi opportunity, there's a lot of horses in the race that are heading down with a pretty close alignment, so.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Yeah. Bulgaria, Poland, potential order for next year, right? I think that's kind of the timing. Obviously, this whole Fermi America is happening at a pretty fast clip. It seems like you've got huge support from not only the administration, but both sides of the aisle, and for nuclear is very, very, very supportive.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: It's been great to see that the ARDP program started in the prior Trump administration. It was very well supported through the prior administration and continues to be. Thank you for mentioning that. We've been very steadfast in saying the timelines of when we believe this would turn into an order starting back in 2022. We have held that exact cadence. We do feel confident we're going to get an order next year. That was not in our three-year investor day targets. We feel very positive about the possibility of it coming.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Great, great. Let's just quickly move over to kind of thinking about SMRs. Curtiss-Wright's also discussed alignment with several of the major designers and advanced SMRs. Maybe if you could remind us of content on some of those designs and when you would start to think those would have to ramp for revenues.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yes. When we talked about the size of our nuclear business, the 90% is the aftermarket. The 10% today is paid for design work we're doing across the various SMRs. When we think of the SMRs that are of the size that they're relative to our capacity, it's X Energy and TerraPower, who are the ARDP funders. Westinghouse has a small modular reactor. NuScale, Rolls-Royce are the predominant ones where we have the most significant content. We've sized that content as $20 million-$120 million based on the different designs. We feel really good about working towards not just achieving the low end of that, but working through that range and getting to the midpoint or the upper point across those various platforms.

One of the things I think is so great, if investing in nuclear is part of your thesis, the thing I think that's really exciting about Curtiss-Wright is you get the here and now in the aftermarket. You get the very near future of the AP-1000s that is coming really faster than we even anticipated, or I think Westinghouse might have anticipated, but that's around the corner. This SMR thing, we've been doing design work for quite some time. I think we'll be moving into prototyping of those various complex components next year, 2027, maybe through 2028. That's meaningful business to Curtiss-Wright when you're prototyping $50 million, $60 million, $80 million, $100 million of content on these plants and then moving to production in the early 2030s.

Now, there are a lot of things that need to be accomplished to make that happen, but there are a lot of forcing functions driving this. As that portion of the market grows, we are well-positioned to grow with that portion of the market.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: There's obviously a lot of demand signals. Let's talk a little bit about your capacity to be able to support that. When we think about the ability to kind of help support all the RCPs in production, how do you think about what the factory can support today and just capacity overall?

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Sure. I mean, it's something, and maybe I'll let Curtiss speak to this a little bit more, but we've been very much focused on capacity. We have a standing capacity planning meeting where we're going through various iterations of what we need to do. We've mentioned a couple of times we can imagine we may need to greenfield a site by out in the middle of the 2030s. That's prior to the $80 billion announcement. Believe me, these are real-time discussions. When I think of capacity planning, I think of cash flow. With that, I turn it over to Curtiss.

Chris Farkas, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah. So just to step back a little bit, I think it's important when you think about Curtiss-Wright and when we talk about increasing our CapEx investment to know that we produce a very strong free cash flow. This year, we're guiding $520-$535 million in free cash flow and 108% free cash flow conversion. We've got a strong track record of producing cash ahead of earnings and being in that range of above 105%. Over the past two years in 2024, we increased our capital spending by 30%. This year, we're going to increase our capital spending by 40%. We're maintaining those strong free cash flow conversions and the strong free cash flow despite the fact that we're increasing our capital expenditures. When we think about CapEx, we view this as a great sign for our stakeholders.

This is Curtiss-Wright committing to growth and committing to efficiency in our capital equipment going forward. We're convinced that when we spend capital money on CapEx, that it's going to be a great return on investment for you going forward. Curtiss-Wright, with all these great growth factors that Lynn's been talking about, is extremely well-positioned to grow going forward. Maybe I'll just talk about a couple of different areas where we're seeing CapEx spend as we look forward in 2026, where we expect things to kind of accelerate. The first I'll talk about is funded outside of Curtiss-Wright, but it's still very relevant. Back in the February timeframe, Lynn had mentioned that we had secured $20 million in marine industrial-based funding at that point in time. Since then, we've secured another $20 million worth of marine industrial-based funding.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, you look at that and you say that's not a tremendous amount of capital. The signal that we really want you to take from that is that Curtiss-Wright is seen as a very solid supplier to the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy is convinced that they need to provide us with more capacity to be able to grow going forward. While the naval defense market is growing at very strong rates this year, the strong support that you see for naval shipbuilding going forward, this injection of marine industrial-based funding that's coming to Curtiss-Wright, and we believe that there's more even on the way, this is a strong signal that growth lies ahead for us in this business. The second example that I'll talk about is we spent a lot of time talking about commercial nuclear.

While we are pen to paper right now and design on SMRs, starting this next year and into the following year, we're going to be working on prototypes. This design work, which is 10% of our commercial nuclear portfolio today, is going to be accelerating. We need to have the capital in place to be able to build those prototypes and then eventually have that shift into production. Regarding the AP-1000, yeah, that's exceeding our expectations, right? I mean, the conversations that we're having with our customers about capacity are very exciting. We're having those discussions. We're not only thinking about the people, but the capital equipment, and we're preparing ourselves for the future volumes that lie ahead. We've talked to Peter before that we have the capacity today to do 12-16 RCPs a year within Curtiss-Wright. That's three to four plants.

We are looking beyond that and preparing ourselves to make sure that we can handle more going forward. More CapEx to come, but we will continue to maintain a highly efficient working capital structure to balance that out.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Yeah, growth CapEx for sure. The RCP, just to double-click on the kind of 12-16 RCPs, it still is kind of a four- to five-year build process when we think about delivering an RCP. You're talking about sustained kind of capacity of that 16-18 because there's that many RCPs that would be needed, what you're talking about.

Chris Farkas, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah, I think that's what's different about now. For those of you that maybe followed us during the China period, I mean, when we entered into our investor day in May of 2024, we were just talking about a European opportunity to hit that art of the possible $1.5 billion in annual commercial nuclear revenue by the middle of this next decade. A lot has changed. Now you've got the U.S. opportunity. I mean, we're pretty excited about the art of the possible becoming more probable.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Sure. So we only have two minutes left here. Lots coming to the left, which is a good sign for nuclear. So very excited about that. Maybe just talk briefly on capital allocation. You've been on track for record share repurchase activity in 2025. Maybe help us understand that, and maybe we'll wrap there.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Okay. First, I do, when people or the topic comes up, I think it's important to note we do still prioritize acquisitions as our top priority for our capital use. We are very diligent and have a pretty high bar for bringing acquisitions into the company. We've looked at a few that we thought there was a chance we might close on this year and have chosen to walk away from them for various strategic or financial reasons. The pipeline is still strong. We have a couple of companies we're in dialogue with right now that are more on a proprietary basis, which is always good in my opinion. We'll see. I know we walk away from probably 10 potential acquisitions or more for every one that we close on. We've just got to be willing to do the work and keep working through that.

The decision to buy back our stock is a very purposeful one. It reflects our opinion and the board's opinion that the value in our stock is still there at the prices that we repurchased. Maybe, Curtiss, just throw to you the end of.

Chris Farkas, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Yeah. I agree with Lynn. I mean, acquisitions are absolutely our top priority. We're looking for critical adjacent technologies to help supplement our customer offering. Beyond that, share buyback, we believe, is the most effective way to return capital to shareholders. To kind of further Lynn's point, this isn't just kind of a cash dump for us. I mean, we are having a lot of discussions with our board regarding the growth and earnings that lies ahead for Curtiss-Wright. We look at the relative valuations from a number of different angles, and we're making a conscious decision to buy back stock. I mean, earlier this year, they increased our authorization by $400 million to $535 million. We've had two successful $200 million buyback programs here in the third quarter. We're going to have a record share repurchase year here for Curtiss-Wright. The future's bright.

Beyond that, our ninth consecutive year of increasing the dividend, 14% this last year. We expect that to continue going forward.

Peter Armand, Senior Aerospace Defense Analyst, Baird: Terrific. We are out of time. Thank you very much, Lynn. Thank you, Curtiss. Thank you for getting to support the conference.

Lynn Bamford, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright: Thanks everyone.

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