Miller Industries at East Coast IDEAS: Strategic Growth Amidst Challenges

On Thursday, 12 June 2025, Miller Industries (NYSE:MLR) presented at The 15th Annual East Coast IDEAS Conference, revealing a strategic focus on innovation and expansion despite facing challenges such as tariffs and emission regulations. The company, a leader in towing and recovery equipment, reported solid financial performance for 2024, while outlining its vision for future growth.

Key Takeaways

• Miller Industries reported a 9% revenue increase in 2024, reaching $1.26 billion.
• The company faces challenges from a 50% import tariff on Strenex steel and emission regulations.
• Expansion plans include a facility in France and potential growth in Ottawa, TN.
• Key markets for growth include global military contracts and the rental industry.
• Capital allocation focuses on dividends, debt reduction, and innovation.

Financial Results

In 2024, Miller Industries achieved a 9% revenue increase, totaling $1.26 billion, with a gross profit margin of 13.6%. Net income stood at $63.5 million, translating to $5.47 per diluted share. The return on equity was 16.9%, and $11.6 million was returned to shareholders through dividends and stock repurchases.

For the first quarter of 2025, revenue was $225.7 million, with a gross profit margin of 15%. Net income reached $8.1 million, or $0.69 per diluted share, with a return on equity of 14.2%. Shareholders received $4.4 million through dividends and stock repurchases.

Operational Updates

Miller Industries operates four manufacturing locations in the U.S., with additional facilities in England and France. The company is investing in a facility expansion in France and considering a similar project in Ottawa, TN. Its distribution network spans 53 distributors in North America and reaches approximately 60 countries globally.

The strategic focus includes commercial towing, transport fleets, government contracts, and aftermarket parts, with an emphasis on employee health and safety.

Future Outlook

Growth opportunities for Miller Industries include increased requests for quotes from global militaries, expansion in the rental industry, and consolidation in the European market through potential mergers and acquisitions. Capital allocation will prioritize dividends, debt reduction, and investments in innovation, automation, and capacity expansion.

The company is also preparing for upcoming emission changes set for 2027.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A, Miller Industries identified its major competitors in North America as Jerdan (Oshkosh Corporation) and NRC (Quebec, Canada), with approximately 13 smaller regional manufacturers. In Europe, about 49 different companies compete in the market.

Capital expenditure includes an ongoing French expansion costing approximately €8 million and a potential $70 million project in Ottawa, TN, expected to commence between late 2026 and early 2027.

Most global towing fleets are privatized, with New York City hosting the largest government fleet, equipped with Miller Industries’ tow trucks.

For a detailed account of the conference call, please refer to the full transcript below.

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

Jeff Elliott, Three Part Advisers, Three Part Advisers: Alright. Good morning, everyone. Jeff Elliott with three part advisers. Next presenting company is Miller Industries, MLR. With us here today from the company, Will Miller, the CEO.

Debbie Whitmer, sorry, Debbie Whitmer, the CFO, and Nick Tiano. What’s your title? Investor Relations. Investor Relations. And with that, I’ll just turn it over to Will.

Will Miller, CEO, Miller Industries: Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. We have a small group today, so certainly we’ll pivot and answer any questions that you guys have towards the end, but we’ll run through the presentation as planned. We’re gonna start with a quick little four minute video that we’ve put together for IR purposes.

It is also available on our website as well if you want to go back and watch it later.

Unidentified speaker: Miller Industries was founded in 1990. Since its inception, the company has provided innovative, high quality towing and recovery equipment worldwide. Listed on the New York Stock As the industry leader, Miller Industries provides a complete line of quality equipment, including carriers up to 30 feet in length of deck capabilities up to 40,000 pounds and towing recovery units with boom capabilities up to 100 tons. Like all great products, engineering and attention to detail are at the forefront. Our on-site fabrication facilities are key to our innovation and essential for rapid prototyping or part supplementation.

Innovation is key to our product line. Innovation in weight capacity, tow capacity, and most importantly, in the safety of our trucks. So just what is a tow truck? For the purposes of this demonstration, a tow truck is a vehicle married to a record body, and Miller Industries makes a whole range of various record bodies. How do we build one?

We start with a blank slate of a vehicle, otherwise known as a commercial chassis. The chassis has a cap on the front and nothing on the rear just yet, at least not until we put a wrecker body there. Prior to the wrecker being installed onto the chassis, the subframe is assembled in our weld shop. Subframe assembly can take up to fifty to sixty hours using both robotic and human welders. Once the unit leaves well, it is taken to our blasting and painting facilities.

We blast the welded components prior to painting them with a primer before we top them off with a finished paint. Once all the components are painted inside and out, we move them over to our assembly area where our wiring, wiring harnesses, valves, electric, and control stations for the record are built and hand assembled. At this point, the record body is ready to move to distribution or over to our factory install area where we will mount the PTO on the pump and attach After this, the toolbox will widen with their lights, power door locks, and wiring harnesses that were assembled earlier. At this point, the vehicle is starting to look a bit more like a tow truck. The wrecker body is attached to the vehicle, but it’s still missing the toolboxes.

With the toolboxes still uninstalled, we take the unit back to paint, where the unit is stretched out and washed with a deionizing wash, where we eliminate any particulates or dust before taking the unit to final paint. Once the unit has its final paint, it’s time to take the truck over to dress out and see it come to life. This is the final stop for becoming a finished trucker. In the dress up bays, we take all of the components we were working with before and we bring them all together. The toolboxes are installed, the final wiring for the light, the electronics checks all the boxes on quality and specifications before moving on to our worldwide distribution network.

Miller Industries products are sold and serviced through the largest distribution network in the industry. And as the world leader in towing and recovery, we look forward to continued growth and success.

Will Miller, CEO, Miller Industries: Thank you. So, it’s a quick little video. Like I said, it’s available on our website. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of the process of actually taking raw materials and bringing them all the way through to finished manufactured product. Quick safe harbor statement, as you guys are all aware, more than welcome to read that in any of our filings.

As the world’s largest manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment, founded in 1990 based in Oodwa, Tennessee, suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee with operations in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, England, and France, with approximately 1,700 worldwide employees. We have a variety of products that we manufacture in different product categories, light duty recovery units, car carriers, specialty transport vehicles, medium and heavy duty recovery units, rotators and military recovery vehicles. We function on very simple philosophy, which is that we have the best people and the best products and the best distribution network in the towing and recovery industry. That’s been our core philosophy since 1990, since our inception. And we continue to focus on what brings the success to our organization over the past thirty years.

Investment highlights. We are the world leader in the towing and recovery manufacturing segment, as we said. Consistent organic growth, we do have paid consistently 57 quarters, I believe, of a dividend to our shareholders. We are the industry leader in innovation, best in class products and distribution, strong customer relationships. The towing and recovery industry is very family oriented.

Average fleet size here in The US is about five to 15 vehicles. So a lot of small entrepreneurs that enjoy doing business, generational business with their supplier. Attractive financial metrics and an experienced management team. Our compounded annual growth rate, as you can see here, since 1990 is approximately 13 and a half percent. As I mentioned, experienced management team, we have a little over two hundred years at Miller Industries, a little more than that in industry experience in our senior management team.

Our strategy is simple. Develop a world class team. Innovate, design, and produce the highest quality products in the industry. Locate, develop and maintain a five star distribution network globally, invest continue to invest in our business and grow both commercial market share, explore new market potentials and develop innovative products to create new opportunities for our consumers. The towing and recovery industry is a multibillion dollar global market.

Primary market segments that we focus on are commercial towing, transport fleets, which will be rental and salvage related for a little bit more depth. We do provide products to the major rental companies here in The United States, Sunbelt, United, Herc Rentals, as well as Copart, which is the largest salvage company here in The US. Primary product types we went through earlier. Industry drivers, what we focus on and what we pay attention to, miles driven both commercially and from non commercial individuals, accidents per miles driven, last mile driven deliveries, so the increase of commercial operations delivering Amazon packages and things of that to consumers. General infrastructure and construction, natural disasters do play a role in increased demand for our products.

And some accelerators that have been created over the last four to five years, we’ve seen a reduction in the trade cycle, which runs currently on our lighter duty product around forty two months, so right about four years. And five years to six years on our class eight, our larger product. Future emission changes. We’ve seen emission changes on diesel engines starting in 02/2007, again in 2010, 2014, and the next major mission change happens next year for 2027. Global conflict, we are a military vehicle manufacturer, so global conflict does increase demand for our product.

And then military recovery vehicle upgrades. As militaries have started to use more and more armored vehicle carriers, and they’ve upfitted a lot of their products with armor to protect the soldiers, the current vehicle fleets that they have are incapable of actually recovering the heavier products. So, they’re looking to upgrade their fleets so they have ability to recover the vehicles if and when the time comes. As we mentioned in the video, we have four locations here in The United States manufacturing locations, one in England, one in France. We continue to invest in our manufacturing facilities.

So, when people look at priority for our capital allocation, returning money to our shareholders, but then investing in what creates the product itself, which is our manufacturing facilities globally. We also invest in our people. We believe highly that people really what bring our company together, both employee health and safety, employee engagement and development. So, we have a lot of potential internal career paths for all of our employees at all of our facilities. When you look at sales channels, revenue streams, North American distribution is our largest revenue stream, exporting product outside of The United States globally, our European operations, national accounts as I mentioned with the rental companies and Copart, government contracts, military contracts, aftermarket parts and chassis sales.

North American distribution is approximately 53 distributors, principals with 75 distributor locations. What’s interesting to our distribution network from our competitors and also a lot of other industries is a 100% of our distributors are exclusive to Miller Industries. About 95% of them only sell towing and recovery equipment. So they’re very focused on moving our product on a daily basis. There are approximately 300 retail salespeople that work for the 75 distributor locations here in The United States.

Average fleet size is approximately 10 to 15 trucks with trade cycles varying between that four to six years. A lot of that’s driven on the warranty offerings that we provide them. So we provide, through our chassis program, a proprietary warranty with the Cummins engine of five years, 300,000 miles, which is really driving that trade cycle to fit within the warranty offering of the OEM on the chassis, which ultimately reduces the cost of ownership for the consumer. International manufacturing facilities. As we mentioned, we have facilities, our Ziger brand is built in France.

The headquarters there is in Revenie. And our Boniface brand is built in Thedford, England. They have strong backlogs at both facilities. We currently have announced an expansion project in France and look to continue to take advantage of our opportunity of growth in the European market. There’s approximately 30 plus distributors globally outside of The United States.

Once you get into the European market and a little bit outside of The United States, there’s a lot more direct to consumer sale than through the distribution network. We export to approximately 60 countries globally. When you look at growth opportunities, global military contracts over the last few quarters or year or so, we’ve seen an increase in RFQs or request for quotes from global militaries, our allies around the world. Rental industry market share, we believe we’re scratching the surface with, you know, getting our products into the major fleets of United, Sunbelt, and HERC, but they only equate for approximately 25 to 30% of the total rental market. So, as we continue to push our distribution to get in front of the smaller rental houses, It’s a very fragmented industry similar to the towing industry.

Now that those consumers can see our product being used by the large major fleets, it’s really allowed us to enter into the rest of the rental market as well. Expanding our global presence, consolidation of the European market. Our next biggest growth opportunity, we believe, is in Europe. Similar to what The US was in the extremely fragmented with approximately 49 manufacturing companies in the European market. We own two of those currently and are looking to continue to either greenfield or look at potential M and A opportunities in the European market.

When we invest in our business, we continue to look at capital allocation with robotics capacity, human capital. We’ve implemented a new ERP system in the last few years. It went live in January of twenty two? One. January 21.

Time flies. Continue to focus obviously on cybersecurity and risk assessment, research and development, vertical integration, and employee health and safety. Capital allocation priorities that we’ve discussed throughout this presentation, continuing with our quarterly dividend. Debt reduction, we are a debt averse company and certainly look to reduce our current debt load to maximize flexibility. We have approximately $20,000,000 remaining on our current $25,000,000 share repurchase program, focusing on innovation, automation, human capital, and capacity expansion.

The small picture at the bottom right is an image of our new facility in France that we’ve just broken ground on. Moving over to the financial review, I’ll pass it over to Debbie.

Debbie Whitmer, CFO, Miller Industries: Thank you. This is just a quick look at our year over year results, ’23, versus ’24. For ’24, we did increase revenues by 9% to 1,260,000,000.00, slight increase in our gross profit year over year with a margin of 13.6%. That resulted in 63 and a half million dollars in net income or $5.47 per diluted share. This was a return on equity of 16.9% and during the year we also returned $11,600,000 to our shareholders through our dividend as well as stock repurchases.

Will Miller, CEO, Miller Industries: So

Debbie Whitmer, CFO, Miller Industries: first quarter results, we did face some headwinds in the first quarter, we’ll talk about those on the next few slides, but our results were $225,700,000 in revenue with a gross profit of 15%. That resulted in 8,100,000.0 in net income or 69¢ per diluted share. We did return 4,400,000.0 to the shareholders through both the stock repurchases and dividend in the quarter as well. That resulted in 14.2% return on equity. So some of the key considerations we have for 2025 and kind of to go into those headwinds that we faced.

Obviously the ever changing tariff situation is something that we focus on every day. Trying to establish what the impact of those will be on the company and take mitigating efforts to reduce those as much as possible and what we can’t reduce, pass that along to our customers so it doesn’t erode our margins. The carb and ACT, the emissions headwinds that we’re facing in several states, we’ll touch on that a little bit more in a future slide, but that is impacting some of our distributors ability to purchase product and get it into the market. Inventory reduction, this is primarily at our field inventory for our distributors, but also a little bit for us internally through the supply chain efforts. We had over purchased, if you will, to make sure we didn’t face those same headwinds.

That’s turned out to be an advantage for us as the tariffs have come into play. So working through that inventory and getting that working capital level back down to historical levels. You know, that should free up some free cash flow, Helping our distribution get that inventory down, we’ve also extended some terms for them, so it’s slightly inflated our receivables, but we’ll be working through that throughout the course of the year. As that free cash flow is available to us, like Will said, we’re very debt averse, so we’ll be working to pay that debt level down for that flexibility that we’ll need should these military RFQs turn into an actual purchase order. Also, growth opportunities, looking at various opportunities to either gain market share, expand our product line, whatever opportunities are out.

So just to touch on the tariff a little bit more, you know, as we’ve monitored the tariff situation through the half of the year, we feel like we’ve put a price increase in place to cover the majority of what we’ve seen to date. However, with this last announcement of the 50 import tariff on steel, wanted to bring one thing to your attention. There is one item that we purchased from Sweden from SSAV, it’s called Strenex. It’s a product that is not available in The US and it is used in our record production. The high tensile strength steel that we import from them, has flexibility capabilities that no US steel has been able to duplicate.

So we’re monitoring this situation, we’re doing, we’re we’re leaving no stern stone unturned to try and alleviate this, because we do feel it would have a negative impact on us if we have to pass this along to our customer in addition to what we’ve already put in place. So it is a headwind that we’re facing, but we’re doing everything that we can to mitigate it. This is a slide that we put together just to kind of explain the fluctuations in our quarter to quarter gross margins. So the chassis that we purchase from the OEMs and pass along to our distribution network have a lower margin than the manufactured product that we build and sell to them. Through the supply chain issues, the flow of chassis and bodies was disrupted, so we don’t have as much control over what the OEMs deliver to our distributors.

So as those deliveries took place, you can see the spikes in the chassis revenue and how that impacts our gross margin. So the more chassis we invoice to a customer, the more of a pull it puts downward pressure it puts on our margin. If we have more manufactured deliveries, it gives us a benefit on the gross margin side. If you look year over year, it’s pretty consistent. We’ve had gradual improvement over the last three years.

I think we’ve gone from about 12% margin to 13.5, 13.6 for last year. So if you look at, if once the flow of chassis and units normalizes, we should get away from these big volatile swings quarter to quarter. So it’s just a little bit of an explanation of why you’re seeing those quarter to quarter, but year over year it seems to have leveled itself out. Talking about distributor inventory, as those chassis deliveries were inconsistent, What happened at our distributor inventory level, as you could see in ’23, that inventory started to climb as you were coming out of supply chain issues. So your chassis inventory exceeded your body inventory.

So what you’re seeing now is a slight, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a correction, just a normalization of that body to chassis inventory level. So if you can see in ’23 where it was kind of at an optimal level, it kind of peaked last year mid year and it’s working its way back down in the current state. So we feel like we’re on track to be where we need to be to get it normalized. It was just an adjustment period that we think we needed to do to keep our distribution network healthy. You know, they don’t need the carrying cost of all this equipment that they can’t integrate and get out to the end user customer.

And I’ll turn it back over to Will to talk more about the emissions.

Will Miller, CEO, Miller Industries: Talk about California. Thank you, Debbie. So touch briefly on this if you’re not aware. There’s a group called the CARB or California Air Resource Board. They work closely historically with the EPA to set regulations under the last administration.

They went above and beyond, were granted waivers by the US government to actually exceed the EPA’s regulations on chassis or commercial diesel engines. They put in place a requirement that you had to sell one ZEV truck or zero emission vehicle, electric vehicle, to sell nine diesels in the state of California. That took effect last year in 2024. And then in 2025, another five states joined with them. Since the beginning of the year, Massachusetts has already decided to delay till 2027.

The House of Representatives passed a bill to revoke the waiver. The US Senate had a a bill drafted, bill six six ninety nine, I believe it was, to revoke the waiver as well. The US Senate, a few weeks ago, did pass a congressional review act, a CRA, to actually revoke the waiver. Since then, the state of California has sued the federal government, and it’ll work its way through the court system. There’s also conversations that currently New York and New Jersey are looking to push out like Massachusetts till 2027.

So it’s still a little bit of a work in progress. It is affecting our ability to sell diesel powered commercial vehicles into these six states at the rate that they normally purchase vehicles. We hope that by the end of the year, most of the legal battles get taken care of and, you know, sales can continue in 2026 and beyond. Our investor relations scheduled for 2025, we’ll be attending the Midwest Conference, Ideas Conference with three part, D. A.

Davidson Conference in Nashville, the Southwest Ideas Conference, and we’ll continue to actively work on some roadshows with three part advisers throughout the country in the calendar year. With that, that’s all I have, and I’ll open it up for questions. Yes, sir. Question was who are our major competitors? Here in The United States, two largest or North America, our two largest competitors are Jerdan, which is owned by Oshkosh Corporation, it’s a subsidiary of Access Equipment, and a privately owned generation company out of Quebec, Canada called NRC.

They do they are probably the largest manufacturer globally out of Canada. There are approximately 13 different smaller regional manufacturers that don’t necessarily focus on the full product breadth that we do. They’ll either focus specifically on small light duty recovery units or the flatbed car carriers. They’ve always been there. They will continue a totally different sale process.

No real distribution network, more selling on price direct to consumers. Then when we look at the tier ones ourselves, NRC, and Jerdan, that group is selling through a distribution network with after sale parts, service, accessories, things of that nature. Globally, in Europe, there’s about 49 different manufacturing companies. Globally, you can find manufacturers of sort of the light duty product, small wreckers and car carriers all across the globe. Where you see us excel from an export perspective is gonna be on the large heavy duty equipment that has a little bit more IP and technology to create trucks that can have capacities between 25 tons and a 100 tons.

Any others? We try to keep around depreciation running right around 13,000,000 plus or minus. We do have the French expansions about €8,000,000. And we’re estimating if we decide to pull the trigger on the CapEx project in Ottawa, Tennessee that we’ve been discussing for the last probably year and a half. It’s approximately $70,000,000.

And that would be spent between now and 2020 late twenty six, early twenty seven, about a two year build project. Question is do municipalities have or do or do not have capital to spend. We’re not heavily structured toward municipalities. So most of the towing fleet globally is privatized. So it’s owner it’s owner operators.

The largest fleet is actually the largest government fleet of tow trucks is right here in New York City. They have the largest fleet of government owned tow trucks in the country. All the tow trucks you see here in New York City were manufactured by Miller Industries. So it’s a wonderful partnership, but most most municipalities, they may own a few tow trucks. But, you know, when you really look at the the total market from a military’s perspective, the potential for spend is up.

But we don’t do a lot of municipal work. It not that we don’t do it. It doesn’t exist. Yeah. Oh, thanks, Jeff.

I appreciate the question from Jeff. No. You know, we’ve seen, you know, during COVID and shortly after supply chain, we saw a lot of the the RFQs or request for quotes starting to dry up. There wasn’t a lot of capital out there to be spent at the government level. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war in The Middle East, you’ve seen that totally revert back to where it was prior to 2020 and probably actually exceed the activity globally.

We did announce in November that we were awarded the Canadian Canadian contract to be manufactured throughout ’27 and ’28 for their recovery vehicles and there is a significant amount of activity globally with some large countries, most of it’s outside of The United States with our allies. Yes, sir? Will ever expand You know, we focus on what we know best. I believe there are some potential opportunities out there that fit inside our sales channel with, you know, our understanding of the the distribution network that we have today and how we go to market.

None of those opportunities have most of them, actually, all of them are privately owned in the that market. So none of them have come available at this point in time, but there is probably one market that we’ve looked at potentially expanding into. We’ll never say never to anything, just wanna make sure that we’re not going out and doing mergers and acquisitions just to create revenue growth, but make sure that we can succeed and be number one in whatever market that we’re in. Yeah. There’s there’s leasing.

Yeah. I mean, there’s both there’s both leasing fleets out there. We actually I mean, when you look at it, they can finance. They’ll either finance through you know, some some of the major Santander Bank and some others that are in the industry. Obviously, through their local banks.

We have distribution network, our distribution, some of them actually have their own leasing and finance companies as well. So that’s where you’ll see the lease start coming into play. Some of the national accounts lease their product and some actually acquire it. And they use generally Ryder and Penske. Our distribution handles the the repurchase of the used and moving the used equipment.

We find it, you know, obviously, it’s large equipment. So, you know, having it housed at the point of location, not shipping things back and across The United States driving trucks. And quite frankly, using their ability and their sales staff to move that product. You know, on an annual basis, if you think about it for almost every new truck, they’re selling a used truck. So they’re they’re selling just as much used equipment throughout the year as revenue for the distribution as they do new product.

You know, once it gets to that life cycle of probably you know, the owner to the owner, once it gets to that life cycle, generally, it’s being exported outside The United States with less emission controls. So the trucks then, you know, they export them, remove the mission control system, and they run for a million miles like they used to. It’s an amazing thing. I have about a minute left. I’ll give you guys an extra minute to get to your next Well, thank you so much.

Oh, go ahead, sir. Yes. Idea to show a video work completion to it. Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it.

It that is

Debbie Whitmer, CFO, Miller Industries: the time I watch.

Will Miller, CEO, Miller Industries: It’s yeah. Just a little bit of who we are. So I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Jeff at, 3 part. He can get you in touch with us. And, hope you have a great trip here in New York, and enjoy your afternoon.

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