Vishay Precision at 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference: Strategic Growth Plans

On Thursday, 20 November 2025, Vishay Precision Group (NYSE:VPG) presented at the 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference. Steve Cantor, Senior Director of Investor Relations, outlined the company's strategic growth plans in the $250 billion global sensor market. VPG is targeting low teens growth through organic and inorganic strategies, with a focus on improving margins. Despite some soft spots in the steel and industrial sectors, VPG remains optimistic about future growth.

Key Takeaways

• VPG is aiming for low teens revenue growth, split between organic and inorganic initiatives.
• The company has invested $53 million in manufacturing upgrades from 2021 to 2023.
• VPG achieved $26 million in new business orders through Q3 2025, nearing its $30 million target.
• Record gross margins were reported in 2024, with continued improvements expected.
• Emerging markets like humanoid robotics and advanced ceramics testing are key growth drivers.

Financial Results

• Revenue Growth Target: Low teens growth, equally split between organic and inorganic strategies.
• Margin Goals: 45% gross margin, 18% operating margin, and 22% EBITDA margin.
• Capital Investment: $53 million invested in manufacturing upgrades, enhancing operational efficiency.
• Q3 2025 Performance: Year-over-year growth with a fourth consecutive quarter of a book-to-bill ratio over 1.

Operational Updates

• Manufacturing Enhancements: Significant upgrades, including a new strain gauge production facility, and relocation to lower-cost centers.
• Efficiency Programs: Ongoing efforts to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.
• Business Development: Enhanced programs with increased resources and visibility to drive growth.

Future Outlook

• Growth Drivers: Electrification, digital transformation, and industrial automation are key trends.
• Emerging Applications: Humanoid robots and advanced ceramics testing are anticipated to boost growth.
• Market Recovery: Improvement expected in cyclical markets like steel and industrial sectors.

Q&A Highlights

• Military Business: Concentration in the US, with benefits anticipated from increased defense spending.
• Hypersonic Missile Program: Provides testing services and resistor components, seen as incremental business.
• R&D Strategy: Focus on adaptive engineering, customizing existing technologies for customer needs.

For a more detailed insight, readers are invited to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference:

William Shawn Meyer, Account Manager, Three Part Advisors: Good morning, and thank you all for joining us. My name is William Shawn Meyer, and I'm an account manager here at Three Part Advisors. I want to thank you all for joining us for our 17th Annual Southwest Ideas Conference, Day 2. Presenting first is Vishay Precision Group, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol VPG. Representing the company today is their Senior Director of Investor Relations, Steve Cantor. Steve?

Steve Cantor, Senior Director of Investor Relations, Vishay Precision Group: Great, thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's nice to be here in Dallas on a rainy morning. I want to thank the Three Part Advisors Group for putting this on. This happens to be a really good series of conferences for us, so I appreciate that. First, to begin with about VPG, I will be making some forward-looking statements today, so you should read our filings carefully. At our core, if you're not familiar with VPG, we are a sensor company. And as we all know, sensors are proliferating, and they continue to proliferate. It's a large global market, some estimate it to be about $250 billion annually, growing in the high single digits. We play in a corner of that market, really, where measuring weight and force and torque and pressure are really critical. We've been doing this for quite a bit.

What we do for our customers in doing that is really focus on the highest performance, the most premium solutions for those needs. Even though we address, as I'll show in a minute, a broad array of markets, it's really focused on providing that kind of high value to really make our customers' products and processes safer, smarter, and more productive. We really are ubiquitous. You may not see VPG in your daily life, but you're probably exposed to it almost in ways you can't even imagine. For example, last night at the reception, I had the opportunity to meet a couple of other management teams from companies presenting here at the conference. Two actually were either one was a customer, and one was a company that we actually our products work in close tandem with.

One was a producer of these large rollers, which are rolling steel into sheets. Our products actually control the pressure that those rollers are applying on that steel ingot. Another was a manufacturer of cranes. Our products are used to ensure the safety of that kind of equipment. As I mentioned, we address a broad array of applications and markets, again, niche markets. This slide is showing our revenue by end market. You can see here it is quite diverse. We think perhaps the most diverse for a sensor company our size. You will see we address traditional industrial markets. We also address such as manufacturing and industrial weighing and steel. We also address tech-driven markets, such as test and measurement, which includes semiconductor equipment, which is a key market for us.

In the other category are things like precision ag equipment, construction equipment, medical equipment, and even consumer electronics. It is really a broad array. In each of these, again, we focus on the premium niche within that category. In general, we have number one or number two share within that segment. We operate in three segments: sensors, weighing solutions, and measurement systems. I think of these as sensors being components which go into either modules or systems, things like precision resistors that we provide, or strain gauge sensors, which is a form of sensor that is measuring weight. It is perhaps the most highest performance, precise technology to do that. Weighing solutions are modules. In many cases, they actually incorporate a sensor such as ours or others. Those modules go into OEM equipment for medical, construction, and precision ag. Then measurement systems.

These are really standalone systems. They're doing one thing, but really for a very specific purpose or application. This gives you our financial highlights. I think what's probably more interesting for you is really what's on the right-hand side of the slide, which are our long-term financial targets. As you can see, we are looking to grow the business in the low teens. That's a combination of organic and inorganic growth. You can think of that as about half and half. If we do that, we think we can achieve these kinds of operating results: 45% gross margin, operating margins of 18%, and EBITDA margins of 22%. We've had these targets now for the last couple of years. As you can see, we still have some work to get there, although I think we feel confident that we will.

We actually have come close on a quarterly basis over the past couple of years. What is important here is that we now believe we can achieve these targets at lower quarterly revenue levels than we did when we first put these numbers together. That is a function of a lot of the investment and work we have done on the operating side to really improve our operating capability and efficiency. I will talk a little bit more about that in a moment. How do we grow organically? I think we have been seeing over the past few years some interesting trends that I think are changing our opportunity set.

These are really larger volume opportunities that are now coming to us that are requiring the level of precision that we can provide where they did not need to in the past, or totally new applications. There are a few ones that we will talk about in a minute, such as humanoid robots. This is a totally new technology, which is really requiring the kinds of levels of precision and reliability that we provide. I think that is the exciting part. A lot of these opportunities are being driven by some macro trends. These are not new to you. These have been actually around for a few years. We see the continued opportunities emerge from them. Things like electrification, digital transformation, industrial automation, and of course, defense and space technology, which is not really a trend. It seems to be a need that continues to grow.

First, let me talk a little bit about what we've done here is we've kind of taken a lot of our applications, and we've kind of put them in the context of some of these trends just to give you a flavor. For example, in electrification, we're not really involved on the EV, but we're involved in the testing of new EV models for safety. We're also involved in the testing of EV batteries. Beyond that, we've seen opportunities related to helping to test new electric aircraft, what are called EVTOLs, Electric Vertical and Takeoff Aircraft. It sounds a little bit kind of science fiction, but they are coming. I think the industry is expecting to see commercial deployment of these things in the next year or two.

We're also on things like e-bikes, where our force sensors in our weighing solution segment actually work on an e-bike to measure how hard the human is pedaling and taking that information and using it to modulate the battery so that you actually can extend the range of your e-bike. In terms of industrial automation, clearly, robotics is an important application for us. It's not just industrial robots, but it includes medical and surgical robots. As I mentioned, one of the more exciting opportunities that we're addressing today involves humanoid robots. We've been supplying technology for manufacturing automation for many years. That continues to be an area where we see continued demand, particularly as more and more manufacturing becomes automated. In precision agriculture, this is an interesting area, though.

Even though today that whole market is probably sickly soft for a number of reasons, the innovation of that equipment continues to move forward at a fairly aggressive pace. Today's combines are very, very sophisticated technology pieces of equipment. In terms of defense, about 9% of our revenue last year was what we call avionics, military, and space. About half of that is in space. One of the applications, as an example, is we were involved in testing these parachute reentry systems for a leading rocket company. We are also involved with satellite communications, both in terms of the command and control systems for precision resistors and even on the satellite itself. We have participated and continue to participate in missile systems, including new hypersonic missile systems that are being developed and will be deployed fairly soon. Unmanned drones, both land, sea, and air.

We've been involved with the testing of those platforms. Digital transformation, it's kind of a broad category. Even things like consumer electronics, we have product on a consumer electronics platform. Semiconductor equipment, both test and front end, is a key market for us. What we're doing there is actually providing precision resistors, which are a critical part of making sure that that equipment performs the test from one test to another consistently, which is a critical specification for that piece of equipment. Data center fiber optics, this one is interesting because I think it does exemplify what I was describing before as emerging needs that are requiring the level of performance and precision that we provide that did not exist before. We have historically served that market, data center equipment, particularly fiber optics equipment.

Now we're seeing that actually pick up, we think in part because of demands that are being driven by AI computing. What we do with that is our precision resistors control the bias, which is the current flow of current into that laser source and making sure that that current is stable over time. This is really important because there are other components of competitors that can do the same thing. Our product, again, remember, is built to be reliable and stable across all kinds of environmental conditions and time. The value proposition now has become more attractive to these laser source companies or tunable laser source companies because we believe they can have less calibration requirements. Also, the equipment does not need to be replaced as often and, of course, is more reliable.

That hopefully gives you a flavor of some of the high-level, top-end trends that are driving our opportunities. On the other side of kind of what we've been doing internally, it's really focusing on increasing our operational capability. We're building off of some of these what we think are core competencies of the company, such as our ability to innovate, our technical expertise in the areas that we serve, the fact that we do have an acquisition track record, which we're proud of, and then our focus on operational excellence. The operational excellence piece is not trivial for VPG. I always say with actually quite seriousness, this is a company that is operationally focused and financially driven.

We have invested a significant amount of capital in terms of upgrading our manufacturing, building a state-of-the-art facility, perhaps, as I mentioned, perhaps the most sophisticated facility of its kind that produces strain gauges of the type that we provide. We have invested $53 million of capital in 2021 through 2023. That also involves moving manufacturing from higher-cost centers to lower-cost centers. The result is, of course, it all comes down to the result, that we now have a more efficient operating platform, and we are able to achieve gross margins at lower revenue levels than we did before. We actually achieved a record gross margin in 2024 on a quarterly basis. One of our segments just this past quarter achieved a record gross margin. We are already seeing the results of these investments. We are not finished.

We continue to implement additional cost reductions and operating efficiency programs this year. A second business development, this is an area really of increased focus for the company. It's really going after new customers and new applications with existing customers in ways we did not before. I'll talk a little bit more about that. Of course, acquisition strategy. We think we have a really excellent platform. We are in a net cash position on our balance sheet. We certainly have capacity to borrow. We continue to look for high-quality businesses to add to our platform that are growing, that are profitable, and that can provide synergies. Just in terms of our business development, I'm showing here on this slide a partial list of some of the opportunities that we consider to be business development initiatives.

Again, these are new customers we did not have before or new applications with existing ones. There are really three takeaways I want to leave you with about this. First, it is really a broad list. Each of our business units has their own set of business development initiatives. There are a handful that are quite large, but most of them are actually small, around $100,000 or so opportunities. In aggregate, they represent a significant potential business for us. The second is that we are now approaching this in a different way than we did before. Not only are these programs more formalized, we are putting more resources to them, but there is also greater accountability and visibility all the way up to the board level on these activities. Third, we had a target this year of generating $30 million of orders from these new business initiatives.

Through the third quarter of 2025, we were able to book $26 million of orders. We are well on the way to achieving our annual target. I expect that you'll see more and more, we will have a lot more to say about this in the coming year. I just want to highlight a couple of these new opportunities. The first relates to humanoid robots. I heard Elon Musk this week talking about how why wouldn't anybody want an R2D2, a 3PO running around their house. He also said that we won't need a currency anymore and no one will have to work, but that is a different vision. It is real. It is real in the sense that there is a huge amount of capital that is being put to work to develop these.

They're really hard to develop, to make an inanimate piece of steel move and act and even think like a human has enormous technical challenges. We have been able to work thus far with two humanoid developers. We have been working with one. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose their names, but we have been working with one for more than two years. To give you a sense of how aggressive this development is, just this year in 2025, through the third quarter, we generated $3.6 million of orders just for prototypes. I have to tell you, in the history of the company and all our engagements with customers, that is unusual. That gives you hopefully a sense of how aggressive the development is and the depth of the technology challenges.

On the first customer, we are working with them on what are called torque sensors, which go into the joints of the robot, essentially giving it stability, its ability to move and sense its environment. With the second customer, we've been working on the tactile sensors, essentially giving the robot its sense of feel and touch. We have just started some initial technical conversations with a couple of other developers. We think this could be quite substantial for VPG. Obviously, today, as we look at this market, we have yet to see a real-world deployment of these robots. We think that's coming in 2026. When that happens, I think we feel that the value of these robots to a number of use cases is going to be significant and could drive substantial growth. The second business opportunity relates to testing of new kinds of ceramics.

Just to give you a little background, we make a leading testing tool that tests a new metal alloy. If you're an engineer or you're a researcher and you're working on developing a new alloy for either a vehicle or for 3D metal printing, you either have used our tool or know of our tool or want to use our tool. It is considered to be the best of class of that kind of equipment. We've now taken that and we've now adapted that to test non-conductive materials such as ceramics. Ceramics is an interesting material because it has a lot of emerging use cases, including in defense, such as hypersonic missile or energy or space. If you think about a hypersonic missile, the heat that's generated as that missile travels at Mach 5 speeds is really intense.

If the material at the cone of that missile is not constructed correctly to withstand that heat, that missile is not going to end up where it needs to go. Ceramics clearly is an important emerging technology. We've developed a platform that can increase the test throughput, we think, by a factor of 10. That is really significant. Think about the kinds of ceramics that are being tested. They have to be tested at really high temperatures. Your testing tool has to be able to heat up to 2,000 degrees Celsius and then cool down quickly so that you can put another sample in and test. Our technology can actually do that a lot quicker. It uses technology. If any of you have an inductive stovetop at home, you put the pot on the stove and it immediately boils within seconds.

Essentially, that's kind of what we've developed. That allows that testing chamber to be heated and cooled very quickly, which allows the researcher to perform more tests. This is an exciting area. We now have two betas going on with universities, one with the University of Alabama, and then we just announced a second beta with Stony Brook University. There is clearly more interest behind that. We hope as 2026 comes along and those betas get implemented that we'll see some additional interest in this product and be able to commercialize that by the end of 2026. Just a few comments before, if we have time for Q&A, just on our last quarter, we thought it was a solid quarter. We had year-over-year and sequential growth. We had our fourth consecutive quarter of book to bills over one.

That came after nine quarters of book to bills below one. It shows you that our core business has improved and is improving. We achieved a record gross margin for the Weighing Solutions segment on revenue, which was certainly not top revenue. All in all, a good quarter. We hope that we'll see some additional improvement in some of our core businesses as we go into 2026. Hopefully, I gave you a sense of what we're doing, our prospects for growth, both organic and inorganic, and also our focus on our operational excellence and execution, which is really helping us to address some of these larger volume opportunities that we did not have before. I will be happy to take any questions. Steve Cantor, Steve Cantor, relative to your military business, what's the proportion in Europe versus the U.S.?

It is probably, and this is a ballpark, probably a little bit more in the U.S., of course, than Europe. The defense budget is up significantly. Is there any reason that you will not be a beneficiary of that? No, we expect to benefit. I think what we have been seeing, at least in the near-term trends, though, is some disruption on the part of key programs that may have been a result of some of the cost-cutting on the federal government level. The shutdown also probably contributed to some temporary delays of those projects. We expect to fully participate. For us, again, these are platforms that take years to be developed. Once they are developed, there is a very long tail. I think right now we are seeing some of the older platforms kind of phase out.

We have yet to see some of the new platforms begin to become fully deployed. I am going to take one more and I will turn it over. You mentioned that you are on hypersonic missile program. Would you hold me to that role a little bit more, Shelterson? Given that we do not have hypersonic missiles today, to build up a stockpile, is the implication that this is going to be very important for you or it is a nice incremental business? I would say it is a nice incremental business. What we are doing with hypersonic is really two things. One, we are involved in the physical testing of that missile through our DTS business unit. We are also providing resistor components, which go on the missile and also in the command and control part of that platform.

If you think about, again, the dollar value content of what we're providing, it is a very, very small piece of those platforms. Is it a small dollar piece that will give you the ability to raise prices because it's a long important part of the overall product? If you raise prices 10% a year, it's insignificant to the overall cost of the very product. I wish I would like that. These contracts are definitely scrutinized. The ability to raise prices once those platforms are established is more difficult. Again, back to what I was saying earlier, we are a premium product supplier. We're already going in with a fairly healthy margin. Also, the criticality of what we do, in our view, the more important piece is that once it's designed in, it's designed in and has a long life.

It's not something that can be easily replaced. I just wanted to ask on the intellectual property portfolio, which I'm assuming is vast, but it's a competitive space, just in particular on the sensor market. I wanted to just ask about the differentiation or the application of your sensors that's helping with these wins that you talked about, maybe in the humanoids or other these areas of innovation. Yeah, I appreciate that question. I think that's really an important question. First, in a lot of cases, there isn't patent protection on what we do. We have, over time, built a technique for making these sensors differently, which provides that level of performance, which is hard to replicate, certainly at volume. That's one of the competitive modes.

The other thing too is, even though there may be alternative technologies that can kind of do the same thing, first, they do not have that technical robustness and reliability and precision generally. The customer is taking a risk if he goes with that technology, and many do, right? It is a cost-benefit analysis. Also, I think the thing that we can provide that customer that we are doing, for example, in the humanoid world, is that technical back and forth, that engineer-to-engineer engagement, where we are helping them solve technical issues which they do not have the expertise to. That is why we think those customers are coming to us. It boils down to if you need that technology level, that performance, there are not a lot of companies other than VPG that can provide it. You mentioned a workload too of these robotic humanoid things.

Are there significantly others out there that are working on the same thing? These are maybe the two more advanced companies that are doing it. Does that market have a very excited about it, but the new end users that could use your product? Yeah. Based on the analysis that we've done and that we've seen, there probably are somewhere between 8-10 leading developers in the world. At least a third, if not a half of those, are in Asia. Our strategy has been to focus on the North American and European developers first because, again, we have to use our resources effectively. By focusing on that, we think that's going to provide the greatest return. Right now, again, because there isn't a real-world example of how these robots are working and also the value they're providing, there's a lot of unknowns.

We think that even though there may be 8 to 10 developers and a growing supply chain that's feeding them, over time, there probably will be some reduction in those number of developers. You'll have probably fewer, but maybe they're focusing on different use cases. The leading use cases would be, of course, in manufacturing or in warehousing, but there are others in terms of deploying robots in applications which are inherently not safe for humans, but humans are actually doing it. Going down into manholes or into dangerous or dirty or dangerous environments. I was going to ask about R&D. I think many, and I know I'm in that camp, we always want R&D together. How do you separate your research and your organization's development and request coming in from the customer? Yeah, another good question.

I think one of the things we do probably better than a lot of companies is if you think about our technologies, that's fairly narrow. There's a fairly narrow set of technologies. Most of what we're doing, though, is customized work. We take that core strain gauge technology and we change the specifications and the size and the form factor and the inputs, outputs to meet a very specific need for the customer. It's really, I would say, more kind of adaptive engineering rather than fundamental engineering that we focus on. I just wanted to ask, you talked about the advancement of the first margin and the overall need to move that margin. It sounds like, though, that that's a big stage on revenue growth. Maybe even business is growth from a revenue growth perspective. You didn't put that addition to it.

What do you see as kind of the next three to five years on revenue growth potential? Is that going to reaccelerate in whatever kind of condition the market around? If I can fit in one more little one here, it's just competitors that you face, maybe larger incumbents are around that. Yeah. First, in terms of the investments in our operating capability, the goal is really twofold. One is, of course, we want to be more efficient to maximize our margins. Secondly, now we're starting to address larger volume opportunities. Historically, most of the opportunities were kind of smaller in terms of quantity. Our manufacturing was sort of geared to that.

If you're talking about things like in consumer electronics, which is a market that we've now been addressing for the last four or five years, or humanoid, we're talking about large volumes. The ability to now have a more efficient operating platform allows us to make products at higher volumes, but also to lower the price point to become more competitive for these larger opportunities. That's, I think, the key unlocking factor in why we're doing that. Your question about organic growth, I think as I showed those end markets, you undoubtedly saw that several of them are cyclical markets, such as steel, which are certainly not anywhere near even their mid-cycle. We expect, though, over time that will improve. I think also in the industrial-driven markets, those also are a bit softer. We think that's, again, those recover.

On top of that, you have the new business development, the incremental opportunity. We think all in all, that is where the organic growth is going to come from. Great. Thank you again for your time and have a good productive day.

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