inTEST at 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 19 November 2025, inTEST Corporation (NYSE:INTT) presented at the 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference, outlining its strategic vision amidst both opportunities and challenges. The company is diversifying beyond its traditional semi-test market, focusing on innovation and global expansion. Despite a dip in Q3 revenue due to shipment delays, inTEST remains optimistic about future growth, backed by strong order growth in the automotive/EV and defense sectors.

Key Takeaways

• inTEST reported Q3 orders of $37.6 million, with a backlog close to $50 million.
• Q3 revenue was below expectations at $26 million due to shipment delays, but Q4 revenue is projected to rise to $30-$32 million.
• The company is actively pursuing acquisitions in the $20 million-$40 million range to bolster its technology divisions.
• New product revenue has grown to 17% of total revenue, with a goal of reaching 25%+.
• inTEST is restructuring into three technology divisions and focusing on six key markets for growth.

Financial Results

• Orders and Backlog:

- Q3 orders were $37.6 million, with significant strength in automotive/EV and defense/aerospace sectors.

- The backlog increased to nearly $50 million by the end of Q3.

• Revenue:

- Q3 revenue was $26 million, impacted by $2 million in delayed shipments.

- Semi market now accounts for just over a third of the business, down from half.

- Q4 revenue is forecasted to be $30-$32 million.

• Profitability:

- Q3 gross profit was $11 million, with a gross margin of 41.9%.

- Q3 GAAP EPS was a loss of $0.08, but adjusted EPS was $0.02.

- Adjusted EBITDA remained positive, indicating strong cash generation.

• Cash Flow and Capital Structure:

- Q3 operating cash flow was $3.1 million, totaling $7 million for the first nine months of 2025.

- Debt reduced by over $6 million this year, with plans to be nearly debt-free by 2026.

- Net cash stands at approximately $12 million, with a $40 million borrowing facility for acquisitions.

Operational Updates

• Restructuring:

- The company is now organized into electronic tests, environmental technologies, and process technologies divisions.

• Target Markets:

- Focus on semi, automotive/EV, defense/aero, industrial, life sciences, and safety/security.

• Innovation:

- New product revenue has increased to 17%, with a target of 25%+.

• Global Expansion:

- Expanding manufacturing in North America, Europe, and Asia, including a facility in Malaysia.

• M&A Strategy:

- Targeting acquisitions in the $20 million-$40 million range, aiming to add $50-$60 million in revenue.

Future Outlook

• Vision 2030:

- Aims for $235 million-$285 million in revenue with a 10% operating income margin.

• Growth Initiatives:

- Expanding channel partner network and deepening market penetration.

• Near-Term Outlook:

- Anticipates increased customer spending to drive growth.

Q&A Highlights

• New Product Revenue:

- Increased from mid-single digits to 17%, targeting 25%+.

• Revenue Delays:

- Delays in Q3 due to challenges at AlphaMation and AstroLogics.

• Auto/EV Market:

- Recovery expected as orders for 2027 models begin, including new displays and infotainment systems.

InTEST's strategic focus on innovation and expansion positions it well for future growth, despite current challenges. For more details, readers can refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference:

Erk Gay Gurgan, Partner, Three Part Advisors: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the 17th Annual Ideas Conference. My name is Erk Gay Gurgan. I'm partnered with Three Part Advisors. Today we have inTEST Corporation, ticker symbol INTT. We have CEO Nick Grant and CFO Duncan Gilmour.

Nick Grant, President and CEO, inTEST Corporation: Thank you and good morning, everyone. Appreciate your interest in inTEST Corporation. As noted, I'm Nick Grant, President and CEO, and with me today is Duncan Gilmour, our CFO and Treasurer. Excited to share with you the journey that inTEST is on. We will reference some forward-looking statements and key performance metrics, which I advise you to review our forward-looking statement comments here, as well as we will include some non-GAAP financial measures in our materials. Please, you can visit this information as well as our website to learn more about that. Like I said, I'm happy to tell you a little bit about the journey we're on here. I was brought in five years ago into inTEST, a sub-$55 million business, predominantly serving the back-end semi-test market.

It's where it originated back in the early 1980s and was brought in to really unlock the potential of this company. How do we grow this business? How do we diversify the business and really capture what we believe the business should be as a partner of choice for innovative test and process technology solutions to our customers? We've made tremendous strides over the last few years, growing the business to about $130 million last year, right around $130 million. Despite some headwinds in some of our end markets in that, really pleased with the diversification that we've driven, as you can see here on this chart. Semi, which is now diversified not only back-end semi-test, we've got some front-end silicon carbide, gallium nitride power device semi-test or semi-process solutions there in that number, but it's just over a third of our business.

We have grown our automotive, our aerospace defense, and our industrial markets out there, which are really attractive spaces and where we have good applications for. Why inTEST? Why invest in inTEST? We just announced our Q3 numbers. Duncan will give you more details on that. We did see some really nice order strength. This has been building up. Our funnel of activities had reached record levels for the Q1, Q2, and then we finally saw a number of orders start to break through in Q3 here, which is great, positions us well. We have been really driving innovation, strengthening our position in the markets, going after competitive accounts. We have not been sitting idle while our headwinds and some of our end markets were occurring there. We have a strong balance sheet, good financial position throughout this time. We continue to have positive cash flow.

We are well positioned for growth and seeing nice leverage on that growth when it comes back here. We restructured the business around three technology divisions. This first one is electronic tests, is where the origin of the company resides, serving the back-end semi space. Through acquisitions of AstroLogics and AlphaMation, we have expanded our test capabilities, providing automotive tests, infotainment, CCU testing, displays, as well as flying probe testers for integrated circuit boards and battery test solutions, batteries for EVs, as well as batteries for a wide variety of applications, drones, boats, industrial applications as well. We are well positioned with our test technologies, good synergies across some of our businesses there, and well positioned in that space. Environmental technologies division is centered today around thermal control and testing, and we do some of the best and most stringent test solutions on the market.

We're serving Defense Aero as one of our core markets, as well as semi and industrial applications out there. I'll show you a little bit more about market presence for these divisions here in a minute, but really differentiated thermal solutions, high-end solutions, solving some of the toughest challenges out there. Last but not least is our process technologies division. This is centered around two technologies today, first being induction heating. This is where we've seen some nice growth in the 2022-2023 timeframe, where our induction heating solutions were used in silicon crystal, silicon carbide crystal growth applications, as well as gallium nitride crystal growth, and then epitaxy on these higher power, higher current devices. That market drove a nice wave for a couple of years. A lot of capacity went in place.

The automotive industry kind of slowed down, and it was a key driver of that use, but it's been predominantly finding more and more applications in the market space, and capacity needs will be expanded here in the future. We're confident about that. We are well positioned when it comes back. The other technology is image capture vision systems. These are embedded cameras that we work with the end users to build board-level cameras, as well as some unique cameras for their applications, cameras going into defense, industrial, medical applications out there. We focus on these six markets on the top. These are our target markets. Semi, of course, is where we've got a strong customer base as well as know-how and expertise. The automotive, EV, defense aero, industrial, life sciences, and safety and security. We believe these markets will drive good growth opportunities for us.

These are attractive customers. You can see some of the through-the-cycle growth rates we've estimated down there. Some of our key customers are listed at the bottom. We are well positioned from some of the mega trends that are happening in the world today. The electronification of everything, cars continue to get more and more features inside the cars, becoming autonomous, driving. All that requires sensing, testing of electronics, and we are well positioned there. Power management, silicon carbide, gallium nitride I touched on there, but really these higher power, higher current needs out there, battery advancements, battery testing that we can provide. We believe this trend will continue to create opportunities for us to sell our solutions into. Last but not least, this whole complexity. Everything is getting more and more challenging. The size of chips are getting smaller. Advanced packaging.

It requires a higher-end test solution rather than a standard off-the-shelf. We are well positioned to provide those unique test solutions out there. We laid out our Vision 2030, a growth strategy out here over the next five years to drive this business in the $235 million-$285 million range, both as a combination of organic and inorganic growth. We believe this is very achievable, giving more kind of bouncing off the bottom here. We will see a nice pickup of organic, and we have identified targets to expand and add capabilities to our solutions for our customers out there. At these levels, we will be able to drive our businesses, operating businesses to drive 20% division op income and should see 10% operating income margin at the midpoint there at the bottom line. Innovation is something we have really been pushing, and I have put the product funnels in place.

When I started, it didn't exist. It was very much focused on this customer need, this customer need, rather than market-driven solutions. These product funnels have been developing. We've been launching new products, and we're driving our new product revenue up to around 25%. Pleased to see we're in the high teens the last couple of quarters. We are making good progress there. Global expansion, again, getting closer to our customers, better serving the customers with the acquisition of AlphaMation in 2024. We've got a strong footprint in Europe now. We have started up our Malaysia facility in Penang to better serve our Asia customers out there. Really pleased with the progress we're making there and driving operational excellence, something across our businesses.

As we've standardized more of our products, we can now drive more operational improvements and improve lead times, drive costs down, and continue to improve the bottom lines there. Just a snapshot of our global manufacturing footprint today. We've got quite a strong presence in North America. As I mentioned, with AlphaMation and Malaysia coming on, we're well positioned from a manufacturing geographic presence there. Just a few comments on some key products here or new products that we've been launching. The first one, our electronic test division there. I've highlighted a couple that we touched on in our Q3 earnings call, our oscilloscope probe, as well as our RF measurement probe. These are new technologies we've added to the flying probe test solutions that customers are very excited about and actually drove a number of tool orders in the quarter there.

This is the first, really first fully automated oscilloscope measurement, being able to test circuit boards out there rather than having manual intervention on the board. It seems some good excitement there. The environmental test, this is a benchtop thermal stream, a compact unit that sits on top of a table there, providing best-in-class temperature ranges for cycling of the products. I'm excited. It was a gap in our portfolio. We were able to fill this last year. On the right, our process technology solutions, Compact EcoHeat. This was launched a couple of years ago, probably three years ago now. This really reduced the footprint for our customers out there by almost two-thirds of space by condensing the power supplies and the footprint required out there.

Really pleased with some of the products we've launched, and we've got a healthy pipeline of new opportunities coming along. As I mentioned, as we drive our 2030 vision, M&A and acquisitions is a key part of our growth plan. We are targeting companies in the $20 million-$40 million size range, trying to stay under the radar of some of the larger strategics as well as PEs. We are focusing more on building up the divisions, adding to the existing technologies that we have to broaden our solutions rather than adding another platform or division, and continuing our geographic expansion, looking at how do we further strengthen our footprint in certain regions as well as in target markets. We believe achieving our $50 million-$60 million of acquired revenue over the next few years is very achievable.

This is some of our near-term growth initiatives. As I mentioned, our funnels had been at all-time highs across the company. We did have very strong bookings in Q3. Despite the strong bookings, the funnels did not move a whole lot. We were able to replenish the opportunities there. We have a very nice pipeline. Customers have been cautious about spending for various reasons, uncertainty, and pleased to see things starting to break through here. We have been working diligently to expand our channel partner network and expanding our sales footprint. I touched on new products, going after our target markets, and how do we further penetrate that. We believe we are well positioned here in the near term to drive growth, but long-term execute our vision 2030 strategy. Let me turn it over to Duncan.

He'll go through some of the financials. Thank you, Nick. Great to see so many of you here joining us this morning. Hopefully, there's a few people on the webcast as well. Let's go through some of the financials. Let's start with orders and backlog. Q3 was a strong quarter for us from an orders perspective. Things have been a little bit weaker the last few quarters. It's very encouraging to see Q3 coming in at $37.6 million as presented there on the chart. Where we really saw strength was in our automotive/EV business, which has been soft the last year, but we did see orders starting to really kind of come back in in Q3. We also saw some nice strength in defense/aerospace, driven by some test demand for some next-generation weapon systems.

Overall, I would say it was encouraging to see customers starting to move ahead with capital projects. One area that I would say is still a little softer is our semi business, but certainly auto EV, defense aero, industrial, nice to see that improvement. With that order increase, we started to see our backlog growing again. We ended Q3 just under $50 million of backlog. On the bottom chart there, you can see that our backlog had been depleting for the last number of quarters, but that has popped back up nicely with the strength that we saw in the order book in Q3. From a revenue perspective, those orders have not yet converted into revenue. Q3, $26 million was a little bit softer than we were hoping. We had a couple of million dollars tied to three or four large shipments that ended up going out in October.

We were hoping to be a couple of million dollars better, but certainly encouraged with what we saw. The delays really tied to some new technologies, some new capabilities that just took a little bit longer to get out of the factory than we anticipated. The pie charts there show some of the breakdowns by market sector that Nick has touched on. I would say that the semi piece, the biggest piece there, just over a third of the business, that was something like half of the business going back a couple of years ago. Some of that is driven by the fact that semi piece has shrunk a little bit, and some of it driven by our diversification efforts, a combination of the two.

I would say the semi side on the order side of the business is still where things have been a little bit soft for us. Plenty of room for upside there. How do those revenues then convert as we walk down the P&L? From a gross profit perspective, Q3, $11 million, 41.9% gross margin, relatively comparable to what we saw in Q2, which was slightly higher on the revenue side. Again, that softish revenue number as we walk down the P&L, slightly weaker numbers than we would like to see and have seen in the past when things were ticking over a little bit higher. On the operating expenses, we have been managing spending over the course of the last year. Q3 on the far right there, just over $12 million of total operating spend, down $700,000 from the prior quarter.

We have been working that down as we have seen slightly slower demand across our businesses. From a profitability standpoint, the left-hand charts there show EPS and adjusted EPS. Q3 in the gray, we were from a GAAP perspective at $0.08 loss, $0.02 on an adjusted basis, the only adjustment being adding back tax-affected amortization. You can see that is down a little bit from Q2. If you remember Q2, $28 million of revenue. Q3, we only came in at $26 million with a couple of million dollars of revenue missing the cutoff. We would have been relatively comparable in Q3 with Q2 had we seen those shipments recorded in Q3. On the right-hand side, showing adjusted EBITDA and net earnings. Q3, even with the $26 million of revenue number, we were still positive adjusted EBITDA.

We use that as a proxy for our perspective on the cash generation capability of the business. Now, if I move to the next slide on cash flow and capital structure, you can see that even though the P&L is a little bit softer than we would have liked, we're still generating cash and driving strong operating cash flow as the businesses work their working capital efficiently. In Q3, we generated $3.1 million of operating cash. Through the nine months 2025, $7 million of operating cash so far this year. We've been steadily reducing debt. We took on some debt to acquire a couple of businesses in 2021. We've reduced that by just over $6 million this year. By the end of 2026, we will effectively be close to debt-free and have paid off the bulk of the $9 million that's sitting there at the end of September 2025.

From a liquidity standpoint, we do have $20 million of cash offsetting the debt we have, about $12 million of net cash. We do have a borrowing facility available to us with our banking partner for approved acquisitions. As and when we want to look at that, we have additional up to $40 million for an approved acquisition in combination with our banking partner. Relatively strong balance sheet that we've been solidifying over the course of the last few years. In terms of guidance, we do expect revenue to pop back up to $30-$32 million in Q4. Strong orders in Q3, generally seeing across most of our markets, things looking a little bit more positive. Gross margins on that, we estimate around 43%, a little bit higher given the higher volumes.

Operating expenses popping up a little bit as we release some of the discretionary spending constraints that we've put in place. Things like amortization and interest expense expected to be similar. With that, I am going to hand it back over to Nick. I thought there was another slide here for you to wrap up, but. Sure. Great. Thanks, Duncan. You can stick around in case there's some questions. We'll open it up for Q&A here. Just to reiterate, we're a well-diversified business focused on really strategic target markets. We've been driving innovation and customer penetration, competitive accounts, and order books healthy. It's just a matter of time. Appreciate your all's interest, and we're happy to address questions. Yeah. Over the last five years, what % of your revenue is from new products and new technology? Yeah.

The question was, over the last five years, what % of your revenue is from new products and new technology? When I started, we were not really tracking that. When we did put this metric in place about three years ago, we were in mid-single digits. We are now up to like 17% the last two quarters. Our target is to get 25% plus, which we believe is very achievable here. Yes. Specifically, what were the technical challenges that you had in the last quarter from that revenue? There were two challenges there. One at our AlphaMation business, which was about two-thirds of the revenue miss tied to two tools. This was a new product or new project that they acquired for a new market. They are predominantly an automotive business test solutions company.

We've been pushing them to diversify as auto has been kind of weak. They won a large order in the med technology space. Their development of that solution for that medical company took a little bit longer than they anticipated. They thought the order came in in Q2. They thought they could get the units out by the end of Q3. It slipped into October. A couple of tools missed. The other was the AstroLogics, which was around the technologies that I mentioned, the new products, the RF probe and the oscilloscope probe. It took the engineers a little bit longer for that particular application for that customer, their unique programming around their devices and as we measure on that. Once again, the technology challenge just delayed that shipment a little bit out there. It went in October as well. Units solved.

I mean, the challenges were solved. Now that the repeat orders are anticipated, in fact, we've got an LOI from the customer at AlphaMation for the next few tools that will be coming. We should have a hard order this quarter on that. Yeah, even though it was disappointing we didn't get the shipments out, the new technology and getting the application solved positions us well going forward. Process much that you can keep those kind of discrete online by yourself rather than if you have other customers that are ordering similar products. Yeah, no. Yeah. They absolutely, we learn from these and we can apply those, but they are unique because it's their circuit boards, their devices that we're testing, and our test points and our measurements are unique to their customers.

What we've learned there will certainly carry over to the next applications and allow us to streamline that. With these newer technologies, it takes a little while to work through all the application challenges. Yep. Do you need to at all with Vishay Precision Group when it comes to the test on the semi front? Which group? Vishay Precision Group. Vishay? No, not really. Haven't heard of them as one of our key competitors out there. You're testing wafers as opposed to back end? We're testing chips, back end chips, whereas our induction heating solutions are used in the actual growing of the bullets that get sliced into wafers and then the epitaxy that gets applied on building up the wafers on that. We aren't testing wafers, though. Yep. Other questions? Yeah. Although, yes.

I want to ask about the auto EV and the more broader industrial in markets. What do you see here? Somebody says it's mixed range sheets for the broader industrial that we send around. Can you give us some more color on what you're seeing? You said it's not the capital projects. Give me more color there on what actually is happening. Where do you think we are heading-wise to a couple of years before the slump? Before the slump. Yeah, no, absolutely. The question is more about the auto EV, kind of where things are. You're exactly right. Auto EV really slumped down as customer preference shifted dramatically in 2024 as EVs fell out of favor and the OEMs really started prioritizing the hybrids, combustions, going back to combustions out there.

What it meant was for 2025, much of 2024 and a good portion of 2025, they had to reshuffle programs that they had planned for the next model years to these other technologies. We saw a lull in our auto EV orders there, which is now starting to flow through because they're releasing these projects for 2027 model years. They have to do that now in order to get these lines up and running. Now, of our orders in that space booked at AlphaMation in Q3, 50% of them were for new displays, new infotainment systems, new computing systems in the cars. The other 50% were for existing displays, tools, and that we have our solutions for. What they've done is they've basically said, "We were using these displays in this model. We're going to put it over here in this model.

We now need to ramp up." They're just spreading their technology across the vehicles. We're seeing that benefit us from these we can just rinse and repeat. These will work and solve the new testing solutions for these new applications. It's a nice mix. Really pleased with that. Auto itself, I would say, still hasn't bounced back in a big way. Timing-wise, they have to cut loose on a number of these projects. The pipeline is very healthy as they've got to continue to invest to build out these lines. Thank you all for your time today. We appreciate your interest and look to see some of you in one-on-one sessions, hopefully. Thank you.

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