Teledyne Technologies Inc (TDY) 2026 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the Teledyne fourth quarter earnings conference call. Here is our first speaker, Mr. Jason VanWees.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the earnings call. This is Jason VanWees, Vice Chairman, and I'd like to welcome everyone to our fourth quarter and full year earnings release conference call, and we released our earnings earlier this morning before the market opened. Joining me today are Teledyne's Executive Chairman, Robert Mehrabian; President and CEO, George Bobb; EVP and CFO, Steve Blackwood; and Melanie Cibik, EVP, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer and Secretary. After remarks by Robert, George and Steve, we'll answer your questions.

But of course, before we get started, attorneys have reminded me to tell you that all forward-looking statements made this morning are subject to various assumptions, risk factors and caveats as noted in the earnings release and our periodic SEC filings. And of course, actual results may differ materially. In order to avoid potential selective disclosures, this call is simultaneously being webcast and a replay, both via webcast and dial-in will be available for approximately one month. Here is Robert.

Thank you, Jason. We concluded 2025 with the largest quarterly orders, sales and non-GAAP earnings and as well as operating margin in the company's history. Consequently, I'm optimistic about 2026, both due to the performance of our businesses in 2025 as well as the new leadership in place with George Bobb, as CEO, and multiple senior executives with added responsibilities in our business segments. Getting back to 2025, fourth quarter sales increased 7.3% from last year, while non-GAAP earnings increased 14.1%. For the full year, sales increased 7.9% and non-GAAP earnings increased 11.5%. Throughout Teledyne, our defense businesses remained healthy and our short-cycle commercial businesses continued to recover with most product families increasing either sequentially or year over year.

In Digital Imaging, Teledyne FLIR performed very well with particular strength in unmanned and other defense surveillance systems, while within marine instrumentation, we achieved record sales of autonomous underwater vehicles. In terms of capital deployment, 2025 was our second largest year in history with over $850 million spent on acquisitions throughout the year and a $400 million for stock repurchases within the fourth quarter.

Nevertheless, having generated approximately $1.1 billion in free cash flow for two consecutive years, we ended 2025 with a leverage ratio of just 1.4 times. Last week, we continued our string of pearls strategy with the acquisition of DD-Scientific, a UK-based manufacturer of high-performance electrochemical gas sensors. Gas sensors are not only a critical technology component used in our environmental instruments, but such sensors are also an attractive consumable business with high recurring revenue.

Turning to 2026. While it's still early, we are reasonably confident in our current outlook for both revenue and earnings. That is we believe full year 2026 revenue will be approximately $6.37 billion and non-GAAP earnings at the midpoint will be approximately $23.65, both of which are consistent with current consensus estimates. As in 2024 and 2025, we expect normal seasonality in 2026 with approximately 48% of sales and 46% of earnings in the first half of the year.

George will now comment on the performance of our four business segments.

Thank you, Robert. In the Digital Imaging segment, fourth quarter sales increased 3.4% despite a tough comparison, primarily due to strong sales from Teledyne FLIR. Specifically, infrared imaging components and subsystems, many of which are used in our customers' unmanned systems, increased over 20%, while sales of FLIR surveillance products and complete unmanned air systems also grew. FLIR Maritime sales were also a record due in part to imaging systems for unmanned surface vessels and continued positioning of the business to industrial and defense markets. Sales of sensors and cameras for industrial machine vision applications increased year-over-year but were offset by lower sales of X-ray detectors and scientific cameras.

In the fourth quarter, we were awarded our first production rate contract in the loitering munition market, under the Marine Corps Organic Precision Fires-Light or OPF-L program. Also on December 19, the US Space Development Agency awarded four prime contracts for 72 Tranche 3 Tracking Layer missile warning, missile tracking satellites, and we were selected to supply space-based infrared detectors to 3 of the 4 primes. This continues our very strong participation across each of SDA's tracking layer programs and positions us well for future Golden Dome-related contracts. Non-GAAP operating margin in the segment increased 180 basis points to 24.7%, a record for the segment since fully incorporating FLIR in 2021.

In the Instrumentation segment, which consists of our marine, environmental and test and measurement businesses, fourth quarter total sales increased 3.7% versus last year. Overall sales of marine instruments increased 3.3% due to strong sales of interconnects used in offshore energy production and for US Virginia and Columbia class submarines as well as the record sales of underwater autonomous vehicles that Robert mentioned earlier.

However, these were partially offset by some reduced sales of products for hydrography and oceanographic research. Sales of environmental instruments increased 6.1%. This primarily resulted from higher sales for gas safety, an ambient air and emissions monitoring instrumentation, combined with stabilization in sales of laboratory and life sciences instruments.

Sales of electronic test and measurement systems, which include oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers and Ethernet traffic generators increased 1.4% year over year, but greater than 10% sequentially from the third quarter. Instrumentation non-GAAP operating margin in the fourth quarter decreased slightly on a tough comparison.

However, it increased 36 basis points for the full year 2025 to a record 28.4%. In the Aerospace and Defense Electronics segment, fourth quarter sales increased 40.4% primarily driven by the Qioptiq and Micropac acquisitions as well as organic growth of other defense electronics and commercial aerospace products. Non-GAAP segment margin decreased year over year due to comparatively lower current margins at the recently acquired businesses.

For the Engineered Systems segment, fourth quarter revenue decreased 9.9% due in part to delayed contract awards originally anticipated in the fourth quarter. However, despite the lower revenue, segment operating margin increased 259 basis points due to better performance on fixed-price contracts.

I will now pass the call back to Robert.

Thanks, George. In conclusion, I want to reflect on our performance over the last couple of years and the path forward. In 2003 and 2024 -- '23 and '24, the strength of longer-cycle businesses, including Teledyne FLIR, marine instrumentation and Aerospace and Defense Electronics was largely masked by declines in certain short-cycle markets such as industrial machine vision, electronic test and measurement and laboratory and life sciences.

I believe our results in 2025, prove the balance and the resilience of our business portfolio, allowing us to cut costs, improve earnings and significantly grow free cash flow and deleverage, while simultaneously deploying capital on acquisitions and opportunistic stock repurchases. Throughout 2025, as comparisons in East, in some industrial markets, and others began a nascent recovery and the strength of our longer-cycle businesses began to show through, today, we remain confident in executing our strategy of operational excellence, focused acquisitions and stock repurchases when we believe the market does not reflect the broad base of our technologies and competitiveness.

As we enter 2026, we believe growth again will be led by our long-cycle business. However, unlike the recent past, we currently believe that none of our short-cycle businesses will contract on a full year basis. In addition, our leverage ratio remains at the lowest level in years, providing ample financial flexibility to continue our strategy.

I will now turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Robert, and good morning. I will first discuss some additional financials for the quarter not covered by Robert, and then I will discuss our first quarter and full year 2026 outlook. In the fourth quarter, cash flow from operating activities was $379 million compared with $332.4 million in 2024. Free cash flow, that is cash flow from operating activities less capital expenditures, was $339.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, a record for Teledyne compared with $303.4 million in 2024. Cash flow increased year-over-year in the fourth quarter, primarily due to favorable operating results in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to 2024.

Capital expenditures were $39.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with $29 million in 2024. Depreciation and amortization expense was $84.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with $77.2 million in 2024. We ended the quarter with $2.12 billion of net debt. That is approximately $2.48 billion of debt less cash of $352.4 million. Now turning to our outlook. Management currently believes that GAAP earnings per share in the first quarter of 2026 will be in the range of $4.45 to $4.59 per share, with non-GAAP earnings in the range of $5.40 to $5.50.

And for the full year of 2026, we believe that GAAP earnings per share will be in the range of $19.76 to $20.22 with non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $23.45 to $23.85. I will now pass the call back to Robert.

Thank you, Steve. We would like to take your questions now. Operator, if you're ready to proceed, please go ahead with the questions and answers.

(Operator Instructions)

Greg Konrad, Jefferies.

Maybe just to start on the outlook for revenues. I mean, you gave a little bit of color around short cycle, but just thinking about that 4% growth, is there any way to parse organic versus inorganic given the smaller recent deals, plus how you're thinking about long-cycle growth in backlog versus maybe initial assumptions around the short-cycle businesses overall?

Okay. Greg, let me start with organic versus nonorganic. We think most of the growth would be organic about 3.6%, nonorganic, a little over 4%, 4.2%, about. In terms of short and long cycle, I don't see a lot of differences between those two. We think that we have probably a little smaller increases in certain areas like environmental and test and measurement, maybe a little over 2%, but that will be offset with a healthy increase in our marine instruments, about 5%.

And we think FLIR will grow just under 5%, maybe 4.6% to be accurate. So I don't see a lot of difference between short and long cycle. And as I mentioned before, we don't believe over the years, the total year in 2006 -- '26, we're going to see shrinkage of our short-cycle businesses that we have before.

And then maybe just a follow-up to that. I mean, you had really strong digital imaging margins in Q4. I think you called out a contingent liability reversal. But how are you thinking about the exit rate for digital imaging and maybe the biggest opportunities into 2026, given you've talked about a 24% target in the past?

Yeah. Let me start with the question on the contingent liability. I think if you look at that and you balance it out versus RIF costs. We've been reducing costs as we go along. Fundamentally, it added about 50 basis points to our margins in Q4.

So even with that, we have a 24% margin or a little in excess of 24% margin in 2025 fourth quarter. For the full year 2025, digital imaging margins came in at about 22.6%, which was about 30 basis points improved over the prior year. 2026, we're a little more hopeful, and we believe that the margins would go up maybe another 80 basis points and get to about 23.4%. And with good luck, I hope we'll get to the 24%.

Amit Mehrotra, UBS.

This is Zack Walljasper on for Amit Mehrotra today. My first question is just the implied 1Q guidance suggests about 10% earnings growth year-on-year, while the full year guidance like implies about 7%. Just can you give some help just around the cadence of the year and like the implied deceleration because compared to last year, the earnings comps are relatively similar 1H versus 2H.

Yeah. It's easier comps in Q1 versus last year. We improved obviously, earnings, as you said, throughout the year. Traditionally, we've been about 48% in the first half of the year in revenue and 46% in profitability. We believe that's about going to be what happens the coming year. Now I'm hoping that we can improve on both of those numbers as we get the year started. But it's the -- we just got through three weeks of the 2026, so I'm hesitant to go further out on a limb than I have.

Andrew Buscaglia, BNP Paribas.

I was hoping you could add some color to some of these bigger -- seemingly bigger defense awards you're talking about, specifically the tracking layer program which seems very topical currently. Can you -- any way you can size that -- the size of that award or the contribution you expect Teledyne to receive in '26 and beyond?

Yeah. I will -- perhaps that's a question I can pass to George.

Sure. So on the tracking layer, of course, we provide very high-performance infrared arrays. And that program for us will be north of $100 million over the next few years.

And what are -- you sound like you're selling to these 3 of the 4 defense primes. What can we expect in terms of margin contribution from something like that? Is it higher versus corporate average or lower or what?

I would say it's about average. I mean, we -- yes.

Yeah. It's -- as George mentioned, these are going to probably be fixed-price contracts. So our performance will improve again as it always does as a function of time. So early on, maybe our margins will be a little less. But overall, these are really good programs for us.

And this -- I imagine this is multiyear, you'll see this -- so you'll see additional contribution years out or is this something in 2026 that subsides thereafter?

So we'll start to perform in 2026, but it will be over a two or three year period.

Jim Ricchiuti, Needham & Company.

I apologize if you gave this on the call, I had to jump off momentarily. But did you provide an order number? And Robert, any color as to how the book-to-bill was in the main segments of the business?

Not yet, Jim, but I will now. First, we -- in the fourth quarter, which is our most recent numbers that I can get, we think instrumentation as of whole would be -- is about 1. Digital imaging is above 1 or 1.06. Aerospace and defense is higher at 1.25. Engineered Systems is under 1, but that's a lumpy business, and we've had some big orders during the year. So total for Q4 is 1.07. And then for the full year, if you take everything for the full year, it's about 1.08. So we feel very comfortable that in all of our segments, we're either at 1 or better than 1.

Got it. What were the full year sales from the unmanned business again? If you provided it, I apologize. And I'm wondering how you're thinking about the growth in the total unmanned business in 2026, just given the pipeline?

In 2025, I would say our unmanned businesses combined, all combined, are about $500 million. We think that will be a little higher in '26, maybe 10% of our overall revenue.

Jonathan Siegmann, Stifel.

And maybe just following up on autonomous and unmanned. The record underwater vehicle sales, can you talk a bit more about the drivers? Last year's reconciliation bill had significant funding increases in this area. And just how relevant is this to your business? And are you seeing any benefit of it?

Yeah. As you know, we have -- in the underwater vehicle, where we have both manned and unmanned. In the manned vehicles, we are the sole supplier to the Navy Seals, and we not only have provided all the vehicles, but there's continuous revenue from parts and maintenance. The new stuff that we're doing goes to a whole range of subsea products. Some of them have to do with infrastructure, anti-submarine warfare and some of them have to do with just observations and measurements.

For example, our gliders are deployed in front of large naval operations to measure temperature and density and salinity, which all of these affect acoustic sensors and speeds. So you have to compensate for those. We also have really good program wins, not just in the US but especially in Europe for security of harbors. And we provide a whole range of underwater vehicles from very shallow ones that go only 1,000 meters down deep to very large vehicles that go as deep as 3,000 meters so -- or more. And so we have a whole suite of, I would say, I'm just looking at a picture, I think I see about 10 or 12 different underwater vehicles that we're selling not just in the US. These are autonomous vehicles, but also especially in Europe.

Great. And then on the loitering munitions, congratulations on that production award. Can we expect to hear anything about developments with the Army with your product?

Thank you. Well, there is a program called LASSO, you may be familiar with. It's a development program. And it hasn't all been announced, but it's coming up, and we're one of the participants in that program. But overall, I would say, there's not just the loitering munitions that we have introduced, but we're working on some new ones as well.

So you'll hear more about that as we both develop our products as well as we win programs. I just want to make sure that when I was talking about unmanned on a question that Jim asked, our 2025 revenue on unmanned, both air, ground and underwater was about $500 million. We think that will grow about 10%. I said it'd be 10% of revenue in 2026, but it'd be probably closer to $550 million. Sorry, I needed to correct that.

Go ahead, please.

Guy Hardwick, Barclays.

I just wonder how you guys feel about M&A, particularly maybe larger M&A versus share repurchases. Obviously, I saw you bought back $400 million of stock in Q4 with the stock price's big move upwards since then. And maybe that looks relatively less attractive than M&A, but I think a sense from a few months ago that you weren't particularly encouraged by M&A prices, except for maybe bolt-on deals. Maybe you can give us an update of the M&A picture and whether small versus large...

Sure, Guy. First, let me go back to the stock repurchases. We've been very conservative about stock repurchases. When you look at our 26-year history, we've all in bought maybe $1.2 billion and only at times where our stock was really -- we believe was really undervalued with respect to our peers and the market. So I would say the fourth quarter purchase was opportunistic as it was twice before in our history that we bought stock.

Our primary driver has always been acquisitions. And you mentioned the larger acquisitions. First, we consistently like to buy what we call the string of pearls, small acquisitions that we can tuck in like the one we just announced, DD-Scientific in the UK, would like to do that continuously regardless of whatever else happens.

On the larger acquisitions, we have a pretty good list of what's coming up, both from private equity people who bought a range of products and businesses and combined them. And we don't mind paying a reasonably good price for an acquisition as long as the quality of the mix of the businesses we're getting is there. Where we're hesitant -- and we mentioned before, where we're hesitant is when we're buying a fixer upper and we're bidding 15, 16 times EBITDA, somebody else walks in and pays 21, 22 times. We really don't think that's for us. But having said that, based on what we see, there's a whole range of acquisitions, what we call for us large would be, let's say, we pay $1 billion or thereabouts. There's a whole range of those that are coming, and we're more encouraged than we were in 2025.

Okay. And just -- that's very helpful. Just one quick modeling follow-up question. In Digital Imaging, what was the FX contribution in the quarter?

I can just talk to you about in general, the total contribution in -- for the year was about 40 basis points. It started negative in the year in Q1, picked up, ended in Q4 about 80 basis points and averaged out for the whole year at 40 basis points. So it was there, but it was not that significant.

Joe Giordano, TD Cowen.

I wanted to ask on memory. Obviously, prices are up a ton, and I believe there'd be applicability for you guys having to buy that across whether it's instrumentation or T&M and elements of digital imaging. So can you comment on what you're seeing there? How big a percentage of sales it is and how effective you've been able to pass that through to people?

Yeah. Thanks, Joe. First, we don't see a risk, net risk in that area. Some of our businesses, as you said, specifically more geared towards test and measurement instrumentation do use memory and may have some constraints in supply cost inflation. Ironically, memory and storage suppliers are also reasonably large customers of our test and measurement instrumentation businesses. So if they spend incremental CapEx buy -- for proper buy to, call them, memories, then that's generally good for us because that's a higher margin contribution business for us. But coming back to what I summarized, net risk is not there.

That's good to hear. Curious -- I guess two more for me. One, can you just run us through the organic kind of by segment, what you're thinking for next year? And then I also like a bigger picture, do you think -- there's been talk from the government about restricting defense companies and what they can do with their balance sheets and how they spend their money. Do you see yourself -- I think I know your answer, but do you see yourself in that population of companies that would be potentially targeted there? And if no, does it make you want to do things that others can't because you have less restrictions?

Yeah. Well, let me tell you, we've never been driven by what others do anyways. As I said, our preference is buying companies and investing in our businesses. But let me go back. Teledyne, as said, we've rarely bought our shares back.

So $1.2 billion in share buybacks over a 26-year history is not a whole lot considering we generate that much cash in the last two years every year. Having said that, we've never paid a dividend. And we're more concerned about investing. If we can't buy companies, we're more inclined to invest in our businesses. For example, just last year, we increased our CapEx by 40%, and we increased our R&D spending by 10%.

So if we can't find really good acquisitions, even though last year was a good year for acquisitions, we invest in CapEx and R&D, and we're going to do that moving forward. There are pockets of our businesses that are performing really well and like where we supply cooled and uncooled infrared sensors and cameras to our various customers will increase more CapEx there.

Having said all of that, we've always been a commercial company, albeit we do have significant defense businesses, can go as high as 30%. But overall, also most of our defense businesses are fixed price businesses. I don't think it really applies to us. But nevertheless, since we don't buy a lot of our own stock, I don't think I'm so concerned about that. Now you asked about revenue.

Organic, we believe organic revenue growth, I mentioned this before, but I'll do it very quickly. In Digital Imaging, it'd be about 3.5%. Overall, it'd be around that 3.5%, 3.6%. Aerospace and Defense may be a little higher. Instruments would be around that. But we like the fact that it's around 3.5% to 4% in our various businesses. We don't expect any of our businesses to decline.

Alex Preston, Bank of America.

I just wanted to touch on 737. It seems like we got some more certainty on rate increases at the end of '25. Just wondering if there's been any change to your thinking on destocking into '26.

I'll ask George to answer it. I don't think so. But George?

Yes, I would say no major change. And I would just keep in mind that our overall Commercial Aviation business is only about 5% of the business and only about 1/3 of our aviation business is OEM and only a portion of that is Boeing. So no major change there for us.

Rob Jamieson, Vertical Research Partners.

Guys, nice quarter. Just quickly on test and measurement. Just can you go through some of the demand drivers there? Was that mostly the Ethernet test again that was driving the strength? And did you see any kind of improvements in some of the other end markets that you serve that might be related to like auto or anything like that, that you could provide insight on?

Yeah. I would say, Rob, in the immediate future, our oscilloscopes, high-end specialty oscilloscopes are doing well and will continue to do so, both from the auto market as well as from motor control and power control in the larger data centers. And also, we have a product, a small company that generates Ethernet traffic capability, so we can simulate that. And basically, what's happened to the Ethernet, it's moving to the terabit range, 1.6 terabit to be accurate. And we do have products in that domain.

In some of our protocol analyzer business, we expect a little slower start in '26, primarily because that business is very dependent on where the large suppliers issue or produce chips. Before they produce their chips, they use our protocol analyzers, the engineers to develop the chips. But until they issue the chips, the users don't buy our protocol analyzers. So there's a little gap in that domain with the two major producers of chips having delayed things. But as we move into the year, that will even itself out. So that's the best answer I can give you.

No, that's helpful. And then just looking at some of the legacy machine vision and CMOS X-ray businesses in digital imaging. Are there any -- as you see the machine vision business starting to recover and you don't expect that to be negative this year, are there any particular end markets or exposures there where you'd expect the most upside? And then I guess on the X-ray CMOS sensors business, just some of the commentary that we've seen recently from Dentsply that they're expecting recovering sales in the second half of '26. Just kind of aligned with -- I know you talked about seasonality in the second half, but would you continue to expect like a sequential improvement for the medical portions within DI as we move through 2026?

I'll ask George to pick that up, please. But in general, I'd say we're going to do okay in the machine vision domain because of mask and semiconductor inspection, et cetera. I'll let the X-ray for George to comment on.

Yeah. I would also just add on the machine vision side, we saw good single-digit growth in both machine vision cameras and machine vision sensors in Q4. And we expect in that overall industrial and scientific vision to be up kind of low single digits in 2026. So we were certainly seeing the recovery there. And as Robert mentioned, that's areas like semiconductor mask and wafer inspection and the inspection of electronic components. On the X-ray side, really, we're kind of anticipating flat year-over-year in 2026. We have not built in a recovery in that business in 2026.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to management for final comments.

Thank you very much, operator. I'll now ask Jason to conclude our conference call.

Thanks, Robert. And again, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And of course, if you have follow-up questions, my number is on the earnings release and all our news releases are available on our website. So thanks, everyone. Talk to you later.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.