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My name is Sheila Cayalu with the Jeffries Aerospace Defense and Airlines Equity Research Team, in case you're on the webcast. And we have John Plant, who's Chairman and CEO of Helmet. John, do you like what I have in my hand here for the first question? Is that something you stole? I did. I stole it from Whitehall, Michigan. It's a piece of a core at a very impressive facility. And I keep it in my bag, actually, all the time as like a little bit of a lucky charm. And I thought, what better way to start off than say, I stole a piece of the core, and it seems like lots of people are trying to steal a piece of your core, whether it's SpaceX or GE. I still think you should hand that back to us. No, no. I actually have a spare one in case you did try to take this away from me that I have secretly locked up in my jewelry box. So how do we think about your next move from here? um are you talking about me personally or the company or um or what i mean i don't know i don know you know you you know just like i'm gonna tantalize you with the all the you know the opportunity you you have to consider but notice i'm inviting you to get more specific so how do you think about my interest in war games from here and how the scenarios play out you know I was rather shocked at one of your suggestions. So I decided that you really had lost it in your positioning. But then that's me and the way I think about you, Sheila. um uh you know she who steals parts uh from us um so my assumption is you're referring to like some recent announcement spacex and that was a topic uh that you're uh like a week or so ago and then you had another and yeah and you know because i i never want to avoid anything you know think myself yeah let's let's talk about it because it's far better that I do because you'll just be relentless in following up questions if I don't and so my first thought about it is let me try to put the whole issue of power provision into and demand seen by turbine manufacturers for whether it's provision for oil and gas pipeline or whether it seemed to data centers and what is all that about and where are we in the in that journey and I think the most important and acute aspect of it is um the demand evolution uh in the in the data center market because that clearly is uh you know a data center without power is is useless and availability of turbines is you know it's never been less against a greater need and uh and and so where are we and and so i think i've got to start off with trying to make sure that we're all level set on the the nature of uh of today's data center demand so historically if you go back let's say the storage of your images on your iphone or your email and and a data center that was more let's call it plain vanilla demand And that was using, I'll say, standard merchant available chips, very different to the data center demand, which is really emanating today from the likes of the software being written by OpenAI or by Anthropic. And now I'd say data centers that are being built out with very advanced GPU chips, let's say, using NVIDIA or custom silicon. So you've got very much yesterday's, it's a more standard silicon, and tomorrow it's custom silicon. You've got air-cooled versus air and liquid-cooling. You've got stable power demands for yesterday's data center to highly variable power demands for the more exacting, and there's certainly a topic of the day of where data centers are. And that also influences the turbine selection and also the technologies that go into that. Because when you've got variable power requirements, it puts very different loads on the turbine compared to, let's say, the more stable plane vanilla demand. And so not only is more power required, but it's the type of power that's there. So you get very different answers to what's the preferred turbines that service this market beyond electricity from the grid. But what are you putting in there? So it's also driving the nature of, let's say, not just for the use of natural gas, but also the robustness of the set of turbine blades. So the evolution from equiaxed through direction solidified to single crystal, all of that is going on. And at the same time, allof the movements towards air-cooled turbine blades is also going on And the one thing about Hamet is that we provide that pathway of technological evolution, which is rather unique in what we do. And it's a world away from the plain old solid Equiax turbine blade of yesterday. and uh and and these things get exponentially more difficult to manufacture as you go through that technological journey towards the future and so you know what do we see first of all going back is that very much the offering that we have goes very much to the more advanced it's a custom silicon variable power requirements of these modern you know variable according to how many searches are going on at one particular time so it's important to talk about that the technology drift for the future and it's something i haven't really talked about much in the past and so uh you know i think that's an important thing to get out there and i wanted to say it in a more public forum so i'm not advantaging anybody else in that knowledge as we go through second point that probably should be made is that as you know from what i've said in the past our market share is significant and that market share has been growing and and indeed is growing we have according to the last earnings call i gave that we have now concluded agreements with all of the i use the word seven but you know one of the seven being let's say a generation of various aero derivatives but all of these are the big turbine manufacturers so think jiva nova I think Siemens, I think Mitsubishi Heavy. And then you've got the smaller and mid-sized turbine manufacturers. So you think about Caterpillar, Solar, Baker Hughes, Doosan, and so on. So you've Got all of those laid out. And these contracts, first of all, are multi-year. They go through the end of the decade and beyond, and in some of the cases to the middle of the next decade. that's that's an important aspect as well and also you know it defines you know price and also you know supply position and share with within it and in in one case we actually have an exclusive arrangement an exclusive means 100 so you know that that is a really a good position for us to be in and the biggest issue that we have today now is is really not only facilitating for the capital that we haven't been deploying but what we're going to continue to deploy over the next two or three years but also the our next decision is do we need to have more building footprint for the capacity expansion so this part of the market is um exciting for us and uh i'm gonna say i probably sometime in the next sometime in the next two or three earnings called maybe the one in february i'll probably update everybody about you know my my statement was that we would from the 2025 we would see a doubling of our revenues somewhere in the three to five year time period i think i'm going to update that not today but you know it will be coming at some point yeah i'm not 100 exclusive with you so i wouldn't get that right yeah i was going to get to the second point now because i mean you'll want to ask a second question at some time point during the meeting but let's get the the two big things out there and talk about it and um and of course you know the topic de jure yesterday was the announcement that uh g were uh buying and you know hopefully closing a year from now the acquisition of uh cpp uh which is a turbine uh oh sorry i didn't address spacex for you did i so you wanted me too let me just go back and just just cover that because you know the question i think has been is is the intention to become a a supplier of third party parts as a merchant supplier or just because today whether it's maybe it's colossus one or two they you know they're requiring a lot more power and you know i think a a smaller turbine company was purchase people who you know run turbines for a living not manufacture them um or even the provision of you know buying old engines from aero you know aero engines and repurposing them for that so there's a lot going on and you know and the question is how can they get replacement parts for some of those things so i think you need to look at more that part of the market than the more advanced part of market that we've been talking about in the last five minutes so i said i'd missed because you know that before i went to the um to the g announcement so i think i've covered that but if anybody else i mean if you if you want to follow up on spacex you know be my guest um and then you know the the more in one was the uh g and cpp which we we knew is coming up for for a sale uh we had reddish but essentially you know we we also knew that for us it was an impossibility in terms of antitrust etc and it does of course beg the question well what's the intent and you saw the intent yesterday was to look at developing it over the years and I think we should be fine with that the question is if there is additional investment and capacitisation of CPP in the future is that a detriment of everybody else or is it one of our competitors or is more aimed at the turbine side or structural casting side but I think we're pretty confident in our own abilities in fact the biggest issue we have now is actually provisioning for additional capacities in the aerospace market and without getting very specific because I don't think I should talk specifically about any you know one or two customers but it is multiple customers within in the aero engine market including the name i just talked about are asking us can we provision for increased capacities going through the end of decade and beyond and of course you know we're unlikely to do that if we're not clear on you know that capacitation and durability of of that provision so we're fairly confident in that and um and that's born of in fact being asked for a special doubling of uh demand for one of the engine customers because of our extraordinary quality and what's probably more important is a hundred percent on time delivery and so that's the biggest i'll say challenge that we're you know facing is that what you know it's like that's like an additional one and a half manufacturing plants worth of capacity build out on top of what we're already doing and as you know we're spending an extraordinary amount of capital today and building footprint and uh you know and i'm unlikely to do that without be sure that capacity is going to be fully utilized during the 2030s and beyond. So I feel as though we have extraordinary technology, extraordinary capabilities, and we'll be showcasing that increasingly in the future. That's great to hear. I think you've mentioned in the past you have 50% share of the turbine and blade market across both aerospace and IGT combined. And Merrick slept in March at the Analyst Day in Whitehall and said this year, 2026, would be the year of highest, the record number of new product introductions. I guess, how do you protect your IP from people like myself, SpaceX and GE, to dig into the moats of your business as new entrants try to come in? We protect ourselves in many ways, not only just in, let's say, the IT environment of their various vaults for information because we are attacked every day from certain jurisdictions in the world in trying to obtain information. We also pay extraordinary attention to CMMC compliance because of our defence industry, I would say, requirements, and I think try to make sure we're at the forefront of that level of cyber security. but we also have physical security of partitioning production into very different parts of the process so there's only a few people in the company that can ever see across the whole range of the processes that we do and you know we're always making sure that you can't just go and and hire someone from Hamet and let's say get an extreme jump from Hamer and go be enticed to go to Texas to somewhere because you only know like a fraction of the information so we try to protect it in all of that way as well and it's true we have a lot of new product introductions you know some of them because they're very public in terms of some of the upgrades of narrow body engines but there's a lot others going on as well both uh both in commercial but also in uh in in the defense aerospace markets and now i'll say collaborative combat aircraft and missiles when large cruise missiles where we're doing uh work for um and not just the institutional componentry of uh struggling with the structural parts but i'm talking about you know smaller turbines um and the one thing i hadn't mentioned is that on every single one of our major aerospace customers we have long-term contracts which again define share and also go beyond you know to the end of the decade and beyond and uh and also um you know we will be wanting to you know or we always consider duration of where we are in fact there's only one customer in the aerospace world which is mainly in the bizjet business jet turbine market where we haven't got a lockdown where that's that's due for renewal on 1-1-27 so they're already well past date of uh you know supply got it um so so what i've been trying to do is to give you a picture of uh your also sustained business both technologically and by way of of contract more and more importantly of the way we protect information as well to try to keep stuff inside helmet and knowledge and we also choose in most areas not to patent things so you're not even aware of what we're doing because if we patent it then you become aware ofwhat we're trying to protect. That makes sense. Maybe the third element could be perhaps capex and the ability to build out greenfield facilities which you're no stranger to. I guess is it feasible that in a few years we wake up and there's a fifth supplier of blades and veins out there whether whatever spectrum that that has well because in this life you never say never because uh you know that that's for a future event that we know nothing uh nothing about um i'm saying it's it's probably very unlikely but i'm not going to say never um somebody with unlimited funds and maybe unlimited time. It could, but highly unlikely, and it would not be an economic decision. Got it. On that front, if we could talk about the industrial gas market. It's moved at roughly a high single-digit growth rate, and you're clearly seeing the business double now to $2 billion in annual sales. You've talked about the business doubling. How do you think about the timeline for that and just milestones in achieving that along the way? I think I said earlier I'd probably be updating everybody. I'm trying to get a little bit of a glimpse into what that looks like. I know. And I recognize that. But I'm going to stay strong and not, you know, as enticing and as nice as you are, I'm not going to weaken at this point. And a little Bit of Crazy based on the piece. And with Sheila, you always get a bit of crazy. Yes. I think you all know that as well. But if I say to you, when I update the market, assuming that I carry through with what I just said, I'm probably not thinking I'm going to take it down. How's that? I mean, is that a lot for you? Isn't that a little bit too much? Isn't it a lot just for you. That's quite unhelpful, actually. When you think about the IGT market, you know, you started off the discussion with the evolution of how data and additional data centers have evolved, and that puts more pressure on blades. You've also talked about scaling your single crystal into IGT over the medium term. How do you think about the technology moving within IGT blades specifically? There's clearly this move that's been going on, as the aerospace market has done over the last 50 years, going from the Equiax type of blade construction to directionally solidified towards single crystal. It may surprise you that the single crystal aspect of the market is actually quite small today. It's only in the most exacting environments where you have that. It also can depend upon what position in the turbine you are, with more likely that it will be towards the front end of the turbine and the gas path. um and yet at the most extreme that at the most particularly in the mid-sized turbine at the most extreme the modern the modern blade is now every bit as sophisticated if not even more so than the latest aero engine blade i'm not talking about i'm talking about in compared to the commercial arena i'm not talking back into the military arena but um the what we've developed for one customer and now it's you know it's it's not just the first blade but also we're talking about air cool very you know microns of control in uh in multiple parts of that blade on the inside across at least the first stage or two or so i mean i again i'm I'm going to be careful, you know, I don't want to give too much information on behalf of our customers, but they are truly at the most, I will say, sophisticated level. And so, and we're doing that not only in those mid-sized turbines, but we're also provisioning and also now supplying at both a direction solidified and single crystal level in the very large turbine blades. And now you're talking things which are, you know, three feet plus long and getting bigger. And so hitherto we'd had the singular biggest casting furnace in the world. And we're just building, we're actually commissioning a building of several more. And we almost turning that into our industry at the moment. but going to be again at the forefront of that and building the next biggest one in the world that again can take the scale and size of these blades to another level anticipating there are further requirements coming towards us I don't blame you for not wanting to give out info every Grok tweet about a blade in a vein has a quote from you as a factual comment to follow up does it? oh shoot So I don't blame you to not focus on the tech, not provide as much technology color. You're in the middle of a significant CapEx cycle, and maybe most people don't realize your CapEx has actually doubled since 23 to support the revenue base that's set to exceed $10 billion in 26. As you look to major expansion plans you have in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., how do you think about how you balance that with the OEM discussions you're also having through the 2030s and what conversations look like to actually deliver on that demand? well i can tell you the the sheer scale of the capitalization is is certainly testing us so um and you actually do you know interesting reach physical limits on on certain things so when for example when we're building a new casting furnace what you see above the ground is uh is only half of the machine i mean the rest of it's sitting at an equivalent level below ground things that you've never seen because as you visited us you you obviously didn't go below into the into the tunnels underneath you know and why should you especially if you've got heels on um but we wouldn't have shown you anyway um but it's interesting so when you when you actually manufacture these things you actually have to have a plant with big open holes in the floor so you can build these things and you know we've already you know we've just actually would you believe it built another one just so we can have lots of holes in the flow so we could build additional machinery to capacitize the future so it is testing us in many ways because you know, we hadn't thought we were going to be there building this amount of equipment and so far either we're on track and we know that our customers want it in fact as recently as this weekend you know with an email because we just completed something with one of the large igt customers and saying yeah thank you very much and please understand that we would like you to produce even more in 27 and 28 and it is almost like doesn't really matter what just produce something just because the demand requirement is so great and it and just now the emphasis on build um you know it's just just build and so um that's you know It's quite exciting and you know we just up against capacity limits and that's why I've been emphasizing in the last couple of earnings calls what we've been able to try to achieve on yield because you know as while the capacity is beginning to come in it all what we so far this year in getting out this additional 30% plus has been a function of yield and also moving to more repeatable production using tap time because we are now having in certain areas of provision being able to go to serial production rather than batch production. And that matters to us. And to think all these investors thought last week's share price performance was the only thing testing you. It happened to be just physical capacity and being able to deliver to customers that you were worried about. That was interesting because, you know, on Friday it was all about how am I going to build another two and a half manufacturing plants on top of what we've already talked about? And, you Know, everybody else is worrying about something else come Monday morning. You know, it's like, yeah, but that's the way it is. I guess to quantify that, how do you think about your level of support to the commercial OEMs and IGT OEMS over the next several years as you've built out these facilities and done a ton of hiring? We try to be really good partners with all of our customers. We try To take the attitude, do what you say you'll do and meet the commitments that we have agreed on. And I mean, it isn't to say sometimes that people don't want more because that's also, but it's more which has come from, you know, for themselves getting surprised by just the sheer scale. And three years ago, I don't think any of us were really talking about this levels of demand and build either in the aerospace market or in the, I would say, the gas turbine market. it was not something like in aerospace it was you know we know we're going to build more aircraft but nobody had any concept of just the sheer amount of spares that are going to be required and in the gas turbine nobody anticipated i i don't think um what was going to be required and i mean none of us thought we're gonna have chips built by nvidia at this level or is it cerebras or any of the other custom silicon manufacturers and therefore turbine manufacturers as well. So on that point, I think SPARES is 22% of sales doubling from 2019 levels. How do we think about how much higher aerospace, IGT, and defense SPAREs could go from here? It's difficult to know who's going to win the race on volume increase given that I think we all are expecting additional aircraft build over the next few years. we're also expecting, because we've been provisioning and that's what the capacity is all about, producing more. I mean, obviously, let's say Mitsubishi is going to build a lot more turbines or is it G-Venova, and therefore we're going to built a lot more OE blades as well. But every one of these things is also producing its own revenue stream for the future by way of additional spares requirements and the fleet's working harder and i try to describe to you the it's not just the volume effect on the fleet but it's the variability of the power demand which is also driving some of the spares requirements and um and it's difficult to handicap it exactly right now i mean you if you look at the i mean if you say 2027 i mean i'm clear that we're going to be in you know during the changeover that's going on in uh on on more likely that not the leap one b and then i'm thinking of wearing the gtfa and therefore there's going to be some aspect which is going to be you know retrofit some of the fleet in some of those things as well um and the gas turbine fleets working harder you know the pipelines are working harder the liquefaction of natural gas for shipping uh to give more energy so provision to europe is uh is providing demand so everything's working harder and then everything that we're going to build will have built from 25 through 2030 that's going to produce a level of aftermarket demand in the 2030s so you know should the oe demand stop going up which i don't i don t it only happens i mean the moment it seems like build rates are going to increase into the 2030s and the equation is how far into you know what how far is your crystal ball is that the spares demand is is also going to uh you know increase by a significant factor for us as well so handicapping like which one is going to have the highest percentage growth you know you know i i don't think because i'm too worried about it because it one aspect for me thinks does it really matter because if they both go up life's going to be good. Sounds good. Defense portfolio has been growing double digits, 11% in Q2. It's anchored by the F-35. And I got to think all the usage in the Middle East is going to help some of that blade work. How do you think about your defense portfolio shorter term and also longer term as we think about missiles and drones? It seems like things are changing there as well. I mean, You have the base level of demand for F-35, and I think that just continues given both the build-up for the U.S. and the Air Force and Marine and Navy, but also for the export orders. Clearly, some of the legacy fighters are seeing some renewed interest, so you have now significant increases expected for the F-15 and the F15 Super Eagle. and basically it's weapons-carrying load that it can provide. And then the thing which everyone of us is grappling with at the moment is missile demand and what's being asked there. And that's the existing designs for missiles and not just talking any classified program. but then there's also what is the method delivery missiles in the future for the larger cruise missiles etc is it going to be bigger solid rocket motors or is it gonna be smaller turbines and I think the bet is on some of the smaller turbines and then the whole aspect of these collaborative combat aircraft and I mean there's things we just don't know and except that there's gonna be these unmanned aircraft flying alongside manned fighters or manned bombers and we provide into that part of the defense network as well into the into the satiric bomber area but is it going to be two collaborative combat aircraft per manned or is it gonna be 22 or is more you know what what's a swarm you know I don't know how big a swarm is and so these things are just unknown and said The only thing we know is we want to be engaged and participative with them and do it as an act of faith that directionally it's going to turn out to be good. Two more questions before I let you off the hook. Your balance sheet sits at 1.2 times leverage post-cam. I guess, how do you feel about M&A from here? Do you have a bigger appetite for M&As, just given the two recent deals you've done and the castings moves in the market? i'm gonna try you one more time yeah um i think that m&a should be part of what we think about by way of capital deployment um clearly you know we we still want to have investment in our own capacity for organic growth as the favored uh i'll say return that we get on that um you know we've been buying back shares we've been increasing the dividend and you've seen us do a couple of m&a moves and um and i and i think that you know roughly speaking that at the end of this year then we're going to be in a position where our leverage ratio is the same as we exited 2025 having bought back a very significant amount of stock having done, let's say, almost a couple of billion dollars of acquisitions and increases. So, you know, we are generating cash to do all of these things. And so I think that we'll continue to examine is there anything else that is appropriate we could bolt onto the company. I'm still thinking in that vein. I'm not anticipating any very significant deals, no matter what you write in your reports. so i just want to get that one in there just in case but i could have a rush of blood to the head but most unlikely so i don't find it enticing to do things which take us out of our out of our lane and um and i don t think i'm going to answer the second part of your question okay last one um i think the helmet story and as i look at my note there's 60 upside to my price target so how much story is about technology differentiation process and more what part of the helmet story excites you most from here and what do you think investors are under appreciating i think that there's so much of what we do which is not necessarily visible you see the outcomes but don't see what goes into it and and so I think I think i see that and I mean not surprisingly and so you know I think the outcomes really will continue to be good and healthy and and we've taken ourselves a long way we've established I I think, a technological leadership position, a supply leadership position and just want to keep being anal about trying to be the best at what we do. Great. Well, thank you so much, John, for joining me. Thank you. Thanks. And we look forward to February.