Participants

Stephen Poe; Investor Relations; NN Inc.

Harold Bevis; President, Chief Executive Officer; NN Inc.

Timothy French; Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer; NN Inc.

Christopher Bohnert; Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; NN Inc.

Joe Gomes; Analyst; Noble Capital Markets Inc.

Robert Brown; Analyst; Lake Street Capital Markets

Mike Crawford; Analyst; B. Riley Securities

John Franzreb; Analyst; Sidoti & Co. LLC

Presentation

Operator

Hello and welcome to the NN Inc. fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants are on listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephen Poe, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Stephen Poe

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm Stephen Poe with NN Inc.'s Investor Relations team, and I'd like to thank you for attending today's earnings call and business update. Last evening, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the fourth-quarter and full-year ended December 31, 2024, as well as a supplemental presentation which has been posted on the Investor Lelations section of our website. If anyone needs a copy of the press release and the supplemental presentation, you may contact Alpha IR Group at NNBR@alpha-ir.com.
Our presenters on the call this morning will be Harold Bevis, President and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Bohnert, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Tim French, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.
Please turn to slide 2 where you'll find our forward-looking statements and disclosure information. Before we begin, I'd ask that you take note of the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements contained in today's press release, supplemental presentation, and the one filed in the Risk Factor section in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024. The same language applies to comments made on today's conference call, including the Q&A session as well as the live webcast.
Our presentation today will contain forward-looking statements regarding sales, margins, inflation, supply chain constraints, foreign exchange rates, cash flow, tax rates, acquisitions and divestitures, synergies, cash and cost savings, future operating results, performance of our worldwide markets, general economic conditions and economic conditions in the industrial sector, the impacts of pandemics and other public health crises and military conflicts in the company's financial condition, and other topics. These statements should be used with caution and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of the company's control.
The presentation also includes non-GAAP measures as defined by SEC rules. A reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures is contained in the tables in the final section of the press release and the supplemental presentation.
Please turn to slide 3, and I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Harold Bevis.

Harold Bevis

Thank you, Stephen. And good morning, everyone. As mentioned, myself, Tim French, and Chris will be giving an update and have a Q&A session at the end. Let's go ahead and get started. If you could turn to page 4 on business update, I'd like to give you a few highlights.
NN's first year of transformation produced significant and immediate results including a new five-year business plan, new top leadership team which is 80% in place, a new business development program which has now produced as of last night approximately $150 million in new business awards. We enacted a fix-it or close-it program at seven plants that were underperforming. And we began a refresh of our capital structure with a new ABL in December of '24 and a term loan refinancing process which is underway now. And Chris will give a fullsome update on that later.
As we look to the full year of 2025, we expect advancement on all fronts, including growth, cost-outs, and cash generation, barring any significant tariff impacts and we're going to talk about tariffs as they're a timely thing. We have 70 new business win programs launching this year. Our cash CapEx is expected to be at our normal levels. And we will continue to selectively add a few new people to further help drive our new business development areas, particularly in stamped products, medical products, and electrical products. And we will continue to optimize our operational footprint and headcount.
Lastly, a word about tariffs. It's the goal of the Trump administration to encourage reshoring of volumes, profits, and jobs for companies like NN. But as it's playing out in the papers and all of us know just from common sense, the U.S. manufacturing supply chains are global, complicated, capital intensive, and slow moving for important reasons like consumer safety and project paybacks. For instance, it takes several years and several billion dollars to build a car factory; and then another year for vehicle testing. So these changes take some time. And the timelines are generally outside the duration of a presidential administration. And already, the big three are getting exemptions. Most parts suppliers like us believe that this will be short-lived with minimal long-term impacts. But I am going to give you an update that we've had positive impact so far.
Turning to the next page on page 5, I'd like to just give you a little bit more details on our five-year plan and reiterate them. We haven't changed them. First, sales growth. Sales growth is very important. And in the industries we serve, sales don't fall naturally in your lap. You have to target properly, offer innovative solutions, hustle, and win. And the components of our top line program are based on winning $65 million a year of new business and ending $25 million a year.
It's an assumption. We don't have a firm outlook. People do not give indications that far out of when they intend to end programs. But it backtests to be a number that's conservative for us. And we have a matrix of targets underneath that and individual accountability. A big goal is to minimize CapExand to leverage the installed base of equipment, buildings, and land that we have, and we've been doing that. And this program is working. We've been on track now for six quarters in a row and headed into our seventh quarter. We've already won $150 million of business, as I mentioned, which is definitely a big number for us. We've had to get some operational guidelines in place to launch that many programs at once. Anyone who's been a plant manager or have been in plants, that's a lot of work to do. And we're launching 50 programs right now in the first quarter.
The second major component of our five-year plan is aggressive cost reduction. Overall, we want to reduce our cost 3% a year, condense our plant footprint, combine our operating teams into a shared team, implement continuous improvement programs at every plant, continue our Kaizen and Six Sigma programs which are working very well, and this component of our plan is working well also.
Third component is to refresh and correct our balance sheet. We expect to generate free cash flow and invest $12 million to $15 million in CapEx per year ex-China. We've kind of sliced China off and have China funding itself and sending money back to us each quarter, and it's working fine and I'll give a China update in a bit. Again, we want to leverage our installed base of equipment, lands, and building that we have, and it's very sufficient to achieve our goals.
Our end goal is to have all our plants be free cash flow generative, self-sustaining, and bear their fair share of our overhead burden. And where we are today in progress we've made, we're happy with it. We have a new ABL in place and a term loan process underway that Chris will give an update on. And a big deal is to correct our dilutive plants which are being fixed or closed, and Tim will give an update on that. All of it is geared to getting our EBITDA margins up and we're tracking to that. And we're going to give you an update on the fourth quarter of last year and on the full year and our outlook for this year.
We've closed two plants. We're in the process of closing two plants and we have one underway at this point in time. So overall, we're happy with our first full year and our five-year plan, and we're recommitting to it.
If you turn to page 6, this is a format we've been using to track our transformation plan. And this year will be another formatative year for us. Through the first six quarters of us being here, we think we're around 60% complete. This is judgment of where we think we are. And our new leadership team is about 80% complete, as I mentioned. We still need a couple people in a couple of the new areas that we're trying to grow more quickly in, primarily non-automotive. And the fixing of our own profitable parts of our business is around 60% complete. You can see it on the graphic here on page 6, what our EBITDA has been doing at those plants that were underperforming and all of them are planning on making money this year in '25 which is a remarkable turnaround in a short amount of time from mid-'23 until this year's outlook. So we're pleased with it. We had to shed a little bit of business which Chris will bridge for you.
So the goal is to drive up our gross margins and we have been doing that. We have a long term goal of 20% so we have more work to do. On our balance sheet, we started working on that last year. We previously reported that we had to part ways with our banker. And Chris and I pretty much took this on our own and we did the ABL and now, we're underway with the term loan. And we're also underway with putting China on their own. And that's all tracking very well.
And the last piece is growing sales year-over-year to win enough business so that we have a natural growing company. And we're starting to get tailwinds now. Some of the business that we've won is now launching and going into our run rate. So overall, we believe that our transformation is on track.
On the next page, we got a request to go into a little bit more detail about the plants that we're underperforming and what have we done and what's in front of us. Tim French, our Chief Operating Officer, who's led that initiative, start to finish, I'd like Tim to give an update to the group, please, Tim?

Timothy French

Thank you, Harold. Good morning, everyone. As Harold said, I'll talk to slide 7. For those of you that have followed our progress, you'll be familiar with the term, Group of 7. These facilities are responsible for $113 million of revenue and negative $11.5 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2023. Their locations are listed on the slide being shown. In addition to the poor financial performance, they were negatively impacting our customer relationships because each of them had significant past-due backlogs, and it was giving us unfavorable customer ratings and scorecards which is impacting our ability to grow commercially.
Over the last six quarters, we've intensely focused our efforts on improving the performance in these facilities. After an in-depth analysis, we decided to shed portions of the business that we decided were or determined were unprofitable; as well as close two facilities, Dowagiac, Michigan and Juarez, Mexico. Both of these facilities are in the mobile division. Portion of the business in these facilities and the related equipment has been transferred to other locations. This required us to gain approval from the customer. We had to build and manage inventory banks to service the businesses while we removed, reinstall, and PPAP the equipment in the alternative facility. Production has concluded in Juarez and we're on track to have Dowagiac closed in Q2.
The remaining five facilities, we focused on organizational and operational improvements that included top grades to leadership and staff, improvements in engineering processes. We implemented functional KPI trackers as well as increased focus on customer pricing, service, and interaction. As a result, we now have green scorecards with all our customers, and that's a big help when it comes to securing new business wins. It's really benefiting our commercial team.
These actions over the last six quarters have been extremely successful. In 2024, the facilities went from losing about $12 million of adjusted EBITDA to losing just $900,000. That's inclusive of the closures. Our operational transformation plan is working. It's worth noting that looking forward to 2025, as Harold previously stated, every remaining facility is expected to be adjusted EBITDA positive with the group having approximately $75 million in revenue and generating over $5 million of adjusted EBITDA. We're pretty happy with this result, but we still need to focus on improving free cash flow, specifically in two facilities. Our Marnaz, France facility has been awarded new business that once the SOP is completed, the facility will be operating at very close to capacity. This will stabilize the standalone profitability and free cash flow.
While e're pleased with our early success in transforming the underperforming facilities, we're not stopping or slowing our efforts. We're not done. Each of these facilities is part of a larger continuous improvement program that Harold mentioned earlier that will deliver consistent enhancements to our economic competitiveness. Additionally, we have identified one more facility for closure which we plan to execute when the lease expires in 2026.
All in all, we're very happy with the improvements we've seen with the Group of 7 and we're excited about what we can do going forward with them.
With that, I'll turn it over to Chris to walk through our financial performance in more detail. Chris?

Christopher Bohnert

Thank you, Tim. Good morning, everyone. Today, I'll be presenting information on both a GAAP and a pro forma basis. As a reminder, we began presenting pro forma business performance in the third quarter of 2024 to give a better representation and depiction of our financial and operating results after the sale of our Lubbock facility this past July. We also have other adjustments that we arrived in what we consider to be our ongoing business. We detailed the adjustments made that translate our GAAP and non-GAAP reporting to our pro forma results in the Appendix for the presentation.
Today, I'll start on slide 8 where I'll detail our consolidated results for the fourth quarter. Starting with our as-reported numbers, fourth quarter net sales came in at $106.5 million, reflecting about a 5% decline compared to Q4 of last year. While the top line was impacted by the sale of our Lubbock facility and strategically rationalized sales volumes, we continued to drive strong margin expansion and improve profitability, as noted on the slide. Adjusted operating income was $2.4 million, a $3.8 million improvement over the prior-year quarter where we reported a net operating loss of $1.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew to $12.1 million, a 21% increase from the $10 million delivered in Q4 of 2023. This performance underscores our commitment to operational efficiencies and disciplined cost management, allowing us to improve profitability in a dynamic macro environment despite the lower sales.
Now shifting to our pro forma results on the right-hand side which adjusts for key items including the sale of the Lubbock facility, rationalized volume, and foreign exchange impacts which we outlined in the table at the center of the page. On a pro forma basis, net sales of $106.5 million reflected a 2% increase compared to Q4 of '23. On a pro forma basis, fourth-quarter adjusted operating income was $2.4 million, an improvement of $3.9 million compared to the fourth quarter last year. On a pro forma basis, adjusted EBITDA grew to $12.1 million, up 25% year-over-year. These results highlight the strengthening of our underlying operations and our ability to drive margin expansion through diligent cost and operating efficiency initiatives.
Now turning to slide 9, we detail our consolidated results for the full year. For the full year, we reported net sales of $464.3 million, declining 5% compared to 2023. This year-over-year decline was driven by the sale of our Lubbock facility, the impact of our strategic volume rationalization, a one-time customer settlement in the prior year, and foreign exchange impacts. Despite this top line compression, our focus on operational improvements allowed us to expand profitability and deliver solid adjusted returns. Adjusted operating income for the full year was $5.1 million, up 65% versus $3.1 million in fiscal 2023. Adjusted EBITDA results grew to $48.3 million, marking a 12% increase year-over-year. And adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 160 basis points to 10.4%, up from 8.8% last year.
Moving on to our pro forma numbers, controlling largely for the same one-time items we detailed earlier, net sales of $464.3 million were largely flat to the full-year 2023, declining less than $1 million or 0.2%. Pro forma adjusted operating income was $5.1 million, a 28% increase compared to the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA on a pro forma basis was $48.3 million, up 13% versus 2023. And adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 120 basis points to 10.4% from 9.2% last year. The pro forma results provide a view of our ongoing business and operational momentum which has had a strong positive effect on our profitability, as evidenced by solid adjusted operating income and adjusted EBITDA results on what was essentially flat revenues.
Looking ahead, we expect the elimination of profit-dilutive sales volumes. And the inclusion of new business wins will further enhance our operating income and adjusted EBITDA, grow margins, and provide incremental fixed cost leverage.
I'll now turn to our segment results starting with our Power Solutions segment on slide 10. Fourth quarter as-reported net sales were $39.2 million compared to $43.4 million in the prior year. The decline was primarily driven by the sale of our Lubbock facility. On a pro forma basis, quarterly revenue increased slightly by $900,000 or 2%. Power Solutions adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter was $5.6 million, down slightly compared to $6.6 million in last year's fourth quarter, again primarily to the sale of the Lubbock facility. On a pro forma basis, prior-year adjusted EBITDA was $5.9 million compared to $5.6 million.
On a full-year basis, Power Solutions net sales totaled $180.5 million, down slightly from $185.9 million in the prior year, again due to the sale of Lubbock. On a pro forma basis, full-year revenue increased by $8.7 million or 5%. For the full year, Power Solutions adjusted EBITDA increased to $29.2 million, up from $28.3 million in the prior year, with margins expanding to 16.2%. On a pro forma basis, Power Solutions adjusted EBITDA grew from $26 million to $29 million, an 11.5% increase year-over-year.
Now turning to slide 11, I'll highlight some of our financial metrics in the Mobile Solutions segment. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $67.4 million compared to $69.2 million in Q4 of the prior year, a decline of just over 2%. The slight decline was primarily driven by foreign exchange headwinds of $1.6 million which nearly offset the volume increases of $1.7 million. Pricing impacts also contributed to the slight reduction in revenue. Further, the decline in fourth quarter net sales was impacted by $1.5 million of unprofitable business that we exited.
Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $10 million, marking a strong increase from the $7.1 million delivered in the prior-year period. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded to 14.8%, up 350 basis points from the 10.3% in the fourth quarter of 2023. The increase in adjusted EBITDA and margin growth reflects the benefits of our sales volume rationalization and our actions to improve our cost structure and productivity.
For the full-year 2024, Mobile Solutions revenue was $283.9 million, down from $303.3 million in fiscal 2023. The decrease was primarily due to the strategic exit of unprofitable business which impacted sales by $8.6 million as well as a one-time customer settlement in 2023 and unfavorable foreign exchange impacts of $3.3 million. However, this was partially offset by $9.6 million of growth from our China operations which continued to see increasing demand throughout the year.
On a pro forma basis, full-year revenue decreased by $6.4 million or 2.2%. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year grew to $35.6 million, up more than 19% from $29.8 million in full-year 2023 with margins improving by 270 basis points to 12.5%. Similar to the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA results reflect the benefit of our cost-out actions and the impact of our strategic exit from unprofitable business. As a reminder, our goal was to achieve a minimum 10% adjusted EBITDA margin in the North American Mobile Solutionss business, and we're tracking towards that and beating that in several quarters with sights on expanding further beyond our initial goals as we execute our transformation.
Please turn to slide 12 where I'll provide an update on our ongoing balance sheet improvements which Harold mentioned earlier. As previously mentioned, we made progress on improving our balance sheet, having executed our refinancing of our ABL at year end 2024. Our focus is now on refinancing our term loan which is well underway.
First, as we navigate through the process with our lenders, our refinancing goals are centered on enhancing operational flexibility by securing improved loan terms and a more favorable structure achieving a cost of capital that helps us execute the transformation and deliver our full potential. By lowering our overall cost of capital, we aim to create additional financial capacity that will allow us to potentially pursue strategic M&A opportunities alongside our organic growth opportunities once the timing is appropriate.
Second, we rebooted the term loan process in late 2024 after completing the ABL and after parting ways with our investment banking partners, relaunching the term loan refinancing effort to take advantage of a solid pool of interested lenders and potential financing options. Since then, we've made significant progress. We expect to conclude this process sometime in the first half of this year.
Finally, we view these efforts as part of a broader holistic strategy to position our balance sheet for transformation and optimization. An improved capital structure will allow us to continue deleveraging while also creating value for our equity holders. We remain committed to paying down debt, and we will continue to evaluate potential modifications to our preferred equity structure as we move forward over time.
Now please turn to slide 13 where I'll talk briefly about our outlook for 2025. As a reminder, for the full year of '25, we're projecting net sales in the range of $450 million to $480 million, adjusted EBITDA in the range of $53 million to $63 million, and new business wins of approximately $65 million at the midpoint. These ranges assume our key markets and currencies remain stable and aligned nearly with 2024 levels. We note that the global markets are experiencing significant volatility as a downstream impact of a fluid and shifting international trade policy. Current marketing conditions, if they hold similarly to where they are today, would likely drive our results to the lower half of our ranges, though we note that it is very early in the year and these factors remain very unpredictable and subject to change. We face the same variable conditions as the rest of the market, and the external environment will not cause us to deviate from the central elements of our transformation plan. Thank you.
And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions)
Joe Gomes, Noble Capital.

Joe Gomes

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. So I wanted to start out with the turnaround of the Group of 7 plants and you guys have done a tremendous job in my view there. Just looking at the '25 outlook, so you're talking about EBITDA of $5.1 million, sales of roughly $75 million which translates into roughly a 7% adjusted EBITDA margin, almost 16% of your revenue. The question is one, do you think you can get that EBITDA margin at those plants up to the 10% level where you currently are overall? And if you were able to do that, how high does that take the adjusted EBITDA margin in the entire company?

Harold Bevis

Yeah. It's two-part. Tim, I'll start, okay? For us, those plants, Joe, have a decent amount of open capacity. And so there's cost and revenue fixes here. We have good machinery. In the process of these plant closures, we've upgraded some of the equipment in the other plants by relocating equipment. And we've discarded some of the older equipment so we're able to compete better with better equipment out of those locations. And we've built up the business development profiles, the size of the opportunities that we're tracking for those plants. So a part of the go-forward optimization has to do with revenue, and getting our revenue up. Our looks are increasing slightly with the reshoring that's been happening with the tariffs and and all the activities. And one of the facts, Joe, is in the first quarter here where we are launching, is it 11 programs, Tim, that's reshoring from China to the U.S.? In Kentwood, yes. So we have 11 discrete programs that that we've secured that have moved from China to US soil and those are going to all help. So part of its revenue. And Tim, I'll hand it over to you to give your two cents

Timothy French

Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is the financial performance of the group of 7 was really what showed through, but if you look at one of the underlying causes of it was the significant past due backlog, and that put us in a very bad position with a lot of our existing customers, and it basically rendered those facilities almost unsellable with our existing customer base because we didn't have the favorable scorecard.
So now that we've been able to eliminate the significant backlogs and have green scorecards with customers. Our commercial teams are now able to effectively sell for that group. So what Harold was saying is is exactly where I was going with that is, although there's still room for some more operational improvements, the next space shift for those facilities is additional volume, which now we've we've opened the door to by by getting us in a favorable position with the customers.

Joe Gomes

Okay great. Thanks for that. I wanted to touch base also, Harold, maybe give us a little kind of update on the medical components and the electrical components and how those businesses are unfolding here.

Harold Bevis

Yes, so we have. We have some goals for medical, to win 50 to grow that $50 million organically. We're at about 20 right now. We have about a $25 million dollar pipeline. It's high quality. We've been able to get become an approved supplier. The first step is to become an approved supplier for the products that you're selling. And we wanted to really get into machine products and stamp products, and we still have a couple big customers that we're going through approval processes with, but we're on track. And so the approval, then looking at the opportunities and then getting securing the wins, it's gradual. We have a goal this year in radical to get another $8 million of wins. And $8 million a year and then we'll get to 50 so The medical is on track. We need another person. We just have some small things to do, but, we're on track and we're now shipping medical products out of 10 of at 11 plants that we're making medical products in, yeah, so we're shipping medical products at 11 of our plants. We've got our first medical one in Europe now. And we're increasing our certifications on stamped products. And electrical products, it's a similar story except for we're largely already an approved supplier. And and so it's a matter of getting in on the action and we have pipelines for that as well.
Stamps products are good for us also in automotive. Some people say gee, many Christmas, your auto your automotive business is so capital intensive. It's really not true. The part of the part of our company that's capital intensive is the machine part of auto. The stamped part of auto is just as good as the stamped part of electrical or medical. So the stamped business has a good business model in that the machines are ubiquitous and the customization is in the dyes and we make our own dies, and a lot of times the customers take part in financing those dies by letting us amortize the die back into the piece price. So.
We're after all things stamped and we have a dedicated effort there. We've we've added some high tonnage equipment both in China and the United States and it's expanding our aperture. Couple of big products we're going after. One is bus bar. Bus bar is a big thing for the electrical grid. And we just needed some longer beds on our presses, so. It's a gradual build up, Joe, that we're going through and we're just trying to chop it down by the same amount of wins per year and so far we're tracking to our goals.

Joe Gomes

Great. And one more for me if I may, Harold, again I just want to get your view, your insight here. So you know recent report came out, class A truck orders, down, 30 some odd% month over month, almost 40% year over year supposedly people extremely concerned. About tariffs, you see the press reports, tariffs go through or they stay through, passenger vehicle prices could go up thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Just trying to get your view of your thinking around this whole thing. How any of this could potentially, impact the company here. I know it's very fluid, the terrors seem to go on one day off the next day, but just trying to get, kind of the way you guys are looking at things and your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Harold Bevis

Yeah. You're welcome. Yeah, that we're not tethered very much to Class 8 trucks, but I'll answer your question. Our commercial vehicle business is tethered to work trucks, so our biggest engine that we're on is a 7.3 L diesel engine at Cummins. We were tethered to the 7.2, the Ford Godzilla engine, GM's Gen V. So we're primarily a participant in engine parts for work truck. Engines, but on Class A trucks, the big truck, the big engines. Pack car, Volvo, Cummins also. As the industry learned during COVID, you have to be clear to build the vehicle, and there's something like 100,000 parts that go into a Class 8 truck, and you have to have all of them. You can't just say, okay, I'm all right, except for I don't have a steering wheel or something. So you have to be clear to build and the big trucks have a lot of parts.
And so they're very sensitive to supply chain disruptions that like are happening right now. So, and the people that buy the trucks, the Class 8 trucks are primarily businesses, and they have to have a payback on the investment into the asset. And if the asset goes up in price, the fleets for the majority buyers of Class 8 trucks back off because it's a bad time to buy, so. I think you have some supply and demand irregularity in the Class 8 world. We're not really participating in it. We're into the work truck. We're in delivery trucks, delivery vans, garbage trucks, Class 6 and 7, not Class 8. So our business isn't going to be impacted, Joe, but the Class 8 truck crowd, they have a, they have a different set of of issues to deal with.

Joe Gomes

Okay, great. I'll get back to you. Thank you very much.

Harold Bevis

Welcome.

Operator

Rob Brown, Lake Street Capital Markets.

Robert Brown

Good morning. Congratulations on all the progress.

Christopher Bohnert

Thank you.

Harold Bevis

Good morning.

Robert Brown

On your 20%, long term gross margin goal, what sort of has to happen to get there, from from this point.

Harold Bevis

Good question. Part of it is Tim's group of 7s, group of 5, soon to be group of 4. So we have, Tim's getting rid of his problem by consolidation if you're putting the math together, but no, I'm kidding. The part of it is what's next. What Joe asked the question on kind of what's next to make that group of seven not dilutive.
And it's getting our revenue up and and Tim's also sharing the overhead structures amongst the plants versus every plant has a dedicated staff to do procurement scheduling and all this. So he's implementing a shared overhead structure amongst common plants common either because they're close to each other or common because of the type of manufacturing they do. So it's either or or both. And in the case of France, which Tim alluded to on his page, the France plant isn't where we need it to be, but they've secured a very game changing win. And it is already in development and ramping up. It will effectively sell out the plant.
And that plant will actually go above average when they're fully on boarding that. Now then you're down to one plant that's one large plant that's dilutive, and it's Wellington, Ohio. And that plant we're hoping to benefit from reshoring. We have a big pipeline going into that plant. We're pretty close to having nubbed out the cost structure to run the plant. It does make positive even at DA, but it is dilutive to your point. And so, fixing the diluters is part of it. The other part is to onboard a creative business, and that's the whole intent of our new business award program is to onboard a creative business and leverage the installed cost structure which Chris was referring to, which we did in Q4 and we did in the year of 24. So we have a five year plan.
The first year of it is kind of in the books, if you will. We tracked to what we wanted to do and we're on track and it requires a little bit of patience because we have to win this business and on board it and then we have and that that's France and other plants and then in the case of Wellington, it's a special case. Where we're a little bit more impatient with that plant. So, how long, how many years will we, wait for that to play out? Not many. So that one's kind of the one that's on Tim's radar screen right now to fix.
Tim, would you like to add anything to that question?

Timothy French

No, I think you covered it all, Harold. You had all the the key points.

Harold Bevis

Thank you.

Robert Brown

Okay, great, yeah, very comprehensive, thank you, and then on the kind of on some of the mitigation things you can do with tariffs and as reassuring comes, how much flexibility do you have to move business sort of between your, from your international locations to the U.S. and maybe vice versa on kind of adjusting these tariffs or this business around to deal with the tariffs or or is that a longer process?

Harold Bevis

Well, the biggest part of our company that's impacted by the tariffs is it's a concern to understand is our automotive parts. It doesn't impact our power. It doesn't impact our medical. We don't have any of the issues, any cross border issues. The automotive part is very slow because you have to go through a PA and product safety process. We're tied into steering. And breaking, and those require the OE to go through. Any substitutions require the OE to go through crash tests. It's pretty significant cost for the vehicle makers to do it. They avoid it like a plague.
So once you're kind of locked into a system, there's there's a high resistance to change. So in the short term it's mainly people that are taking the initiative to move and reshore of the awards that we're, we are ramping up right now that I referred to earlier, we won those in the fall. By a proactive, tier one maker of fuel systems, for medium duty, sports cars, excuse me, medium volume sports cars. And they're going through the long term cost of doing it, and they just decided to simplify their supply chain because their customers were on US soil.
So we really don't see a lot and you know you have direct and indirect impacts of the tariffs. So the direct impact, our direct impacts are minimal on our cost structure and minimal in terms of our pipeline. The indirect costs are what happens to the volumes, at the OE if they're clear to build on vehicles or not, that can impact kind of everybody's volume. We won't be a problem for anyone. But if anyone's a problem that causes the OE to be have a problem with being clear to build on their building materials, so.
We haven't heard anything yet. No one's really doing anything quickly right now. It's not a quick thing and there's a lot of flip flopping in the papers, including last night with the big 3, where President Trump gave him another reprieve.
And that's the majority of our exposure, so, nothing major happening right now. Our direct hits are are minimal and it can only be minimal because of our supply chains and then the indirect exposure we have is just industry based and that's also minimal right now as well.
It'll probably change today so I should probably date and time stamp my comment, but you know it's a really fluid topic, Bob.

Robert Brown

Okay great thanks thanks for that answer. The last question I guess is on the Power Solutions business you know you've you've eliminated some capacity there how do you see the revenue trends and I guess the market demand in that in that segment?

Harold Bevis

Yeah, so we expect to have an up year in power, the electrical grid business, the reporters there, the people that speak clearly are eating and H1ywell and Iron Groupschne Air, the electrical grid demand is still strong with data centers. Infrastructure investment, the whole AI data center thing is putting a lot of strain on the grid. And the and the need to control the grid and also the EVs, even though EVs are kind of plateauing any EV if if if a person on the street buys an EV, the transformer for that street has to be upgraded.
And so there's the grid wasn't installed with these type of demands, so our business is still very strong on we're primarily grid edge, so we're into distribution, we're into circuit breaker panels, we're into meters, we're on the grid edge.
And that business is strong and we've increased our capacity to make those products and we have a decent amount of new winds in that business as well. So, the outlook for Power Solutions is in 25 is pretty strong.

Operator

Mike Crawford, B. Riley.

Mike Crawford

Thank you. Can you talk about your, deliveries, like any metrics regarding on time deliveries now versus in the past and maybe how much that's been attributable to some of the, additional ones you've been secured?

Harold Bevis

Yeah, good morning, Mike. Tim, will you take that one?

Timothy French

Sure, we don't track on time and in full in the in the standard process like quoting it as a percentage, but what I can tell you is we track past due backlogs and we have, dropped our past due backlogs significantly, not just in the group of 7 but across the board. So that's what has allowed us to get the green scorecards from the favorable ratings from all of our customers now is we've been able to move that forward and past due backlogs would would be an indication of an on time and in full or a delivery metric. We are in the process of implementing an on time and in full metric, but at this point we don't track it in that format.

Mike Crawford

And have you seen the correlation between where you've reduced those past due backlogs and seeing an increase in new order wins, or is that more?

Timothy French

Yes, oh definitely seen a correlation even in facilities that aren't part of the group of 7, we've seen new business wins because when you're not when you don't have a green scorecard or a favorable rating from a customer, you're basically on what's called new business hold.
And one of the contributing factors to our new business wins that we've we've been able to generate over over the last little while has been the fact that we're off new business hold across the board, that we're able to generate new business wins with our existing customers as well as.

Harold Bevis

I can help a little on the stats there Mike the 77% of our new wins have been with existing customers. And when Tim and I came in the door, we were on new business hold with almost all of our TOP30 customers. And the majority of our wins have been with them, so I could go right down the list, Cummins and Iron and Sensata, Denzel, all the top tier one people we serve where we're on new business hold. And came off new business hold and now secured wins with so I think Tim at the at the highest level, the majority of our wins have come from customers where we were on the business hold.

Timothy French

Oh, exactly, and that's the point I was attempting to make is that by getting off new business hold it opened the door for us to start winning again.

Mike Crawford

Okay, great, thank you. And then just to shift direction, and you're trying to JV. I think the vast majority of of what is made there goes to customers where their end products stay in China, but I think we're also seeing some of those products now being shipped to other markets that But like the the the China customers are targeting, be it in Africa or Brazil, or Europe, but is there a breakdown between what stays in China and what might be exported out of China, but not to the US?

Harold Bevis

Yeah, so there's movement on that topic, Mike. The JV that we have with Weifu, which is about $130 million dollar revenue profitable JV, which makes components that go into hybrid and ICE vehicles. Largest, the largest in customer for the output of that JV is BYD for instance, and to your point. BYD shifts their systems and then does final assembly in many countries around the world. They're the big one doing that. Geely does a little bit of it in Europe and Great Wall, but if you look at the TOP10 China OEs. A few of them are the guys that are driving the export market and I would say your comment is true that our parts are ending up getting exported out of the country now. And as there's rebalancing between Europe and China, leaving the US out of it, the European tier ones are seeing that their China operations are much more competitive.
Than the European plants, so we see them shifting load. To China to make braking systems, steering systems, these kind of things in China versus making them, for instance, in Germany. And so the loads on automotive part making in China are just going through the roof. We are at capacity in the JV. We are at capacity in our wholly owned foreign entity, and we're adding capacity in both areas. The costs are globally competitive. They're they're the lowest cost at what they do. So we see demand coming to both operations. They're very profitable for us as well.

Mike Crawford

Great, thank you very much.

Operator

John Franzreb, Sidoti & Company.

John Franzreb

Good morning everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. I'd like to start with the new business wins. Are they being written at that 20% target? Or are they approaching that 20% threshold?

Christopher Bohnert

You're talking the gross margins, John?

Harold Bevis

Yes sir, they're being written above that we have. Some floors and caps and we also look at ROI at CapExis required. We look at the actual cost, so if we have an open machine. And we're quoting open capacity. And the machine's already been expensed into other business and so has the overhead and all that. We just look at the variable costs that are associated with it. If we have to add a shift or add supervision, it it varies that cost, and if we have to add equipment, it has to carry that cost. So we have three tiered pricing, 3 tiered pricing, and in all cases the bottom is 25%. And then on ROIs it's also the bottom of 25% of spending is needed. Most of it is above that, and we price as much as we can get.
We don't do cost based pricing. We look at what we think we can the market will bear and then we look at our cost structure and see what the return would be. The new wins that we got 73 million or new wins last year, but we also walked away from about $340 million of quotes that we made, and we primarily walked away from them because of their economics and probably the biggest opportunity we had.
It might be the biggest opportunity we had in the fourth quarter. We walked away from it because the ROI wasn't there, so we are cherry picking. And a big part, that question was asked earlier too, a big part of getting our gross margins up is the contribution of the new business, and we'll report more clearly on it in the future, John. I can't give you exact ratios because we haven't calculated it. Part of it's cost him getting the cost down, and part of it is that is the new business that we're bringing in. Well, Chris, what would you get half and half?

Christopher Bohnert

Yeah, roughly about half and half, yeah.

John Franzreb

Okay, that's a good color, Harold. And just I might have missed this, regarding the timeline of the plant closings, have you kind of disclosed that and have those facilities owned the lease, would they be asset sales in the future?

Harold Bevis

Yeah, tell you want to take that?

Timothy French

Yes, we've got a leased facility in Juarez. We've stopped production. Production has ended in that facility, but we still have people prepping the building and packaging machinery for relocation. Duagia is an owned facility. That currently is listed for sale, it should be, it should cease operation in in early Q2. Is is the current estimate.

Harold Bevis

And the third plant, the other plant John that we mentioned we're going to close, we haven't said the name of the plant because the people in the plant don't know it. It's as we reported earlier, that one's leased.

John Franzreb

Okay, got it. I guess one last question regarding the balance sheet, any update on the timing of the refinancing of the term loan and any updated thoughts on the preferred.

Christopher Bohnert

Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah, we're in the middle of the refinance, as I mentioned, we're we're expecting to get it done in this first half of the year. We had quite a bit of interest once we once Harold and I rebooted everything and so we we we got a lot of different options on the refinance, John, so we took a look at those options and narrowed it down and we're very pleased with where we're heading right now. Not a lot to report on the prep yet, but it's on our radar screen and, we'll take a look at that as part of the kind of the third step in our total cap cap structure refinance.

Harold Bevis

I would say that we we pivoted John to China because the the China receivables and China assets are pretty much disallowed in the to get full value for them with the US domiciled work that we were doing on the debt and so we turned our attention to extracting cash out of the balance sheet in China and having them get set up to to do their own local banking and local financing.
First, before we got after the preferred, so the two big things we're working on right now are the term loan. Overall for the company and then getting China on their own to do their own funding, and just send money back to Chris. We're trying to turn it into an ATM machine.

John Franzreb

Thanks for the color. Good luck.

Christopher Bohnert

Thank you.

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Harold Bevis

Thank you, everyone, for the good questions. Appreciate it and you gave us some insight on how to report even better in the next time. And we look forward to reporting our progress after Q1. With that, thank you. Operator?

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.