Okay, welcome to the Bel Fuse presentation. Excited to have these guys here today. Joining us, we have Farouq and Lynn from the Bel Fuse team. Going to give us a presentation, and then we're gonna follow it with some Q&A. So at this time, I'll turn it over to Lynn and Farouq. Thanks, Patrick, and hello, everyone. Appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedules to learn a little bit about Bel Fuse. We think we have a good story, and we're happy to share it. Also, thanks for the Oppenheimer team for the opportunity to present here today. Maybe we can move over one page here. That's our safe harbor statement. A little bit of an overview of Bel Fuse. We are in the business of powering, protecting, and connecting circuits, and we've been around for roughly 75 years. We just celebrated our 75th anniversary in January. This is a big milestone for us in our industry that's gone through heavy consolidation. So we're very proud of our success here. We've been in the business of serving customers throughout our history, engineer-to-engineer type relationships. We're headquartered in West Orange, New Jersey. We are on the Nasdaq, annual sales a little bit short of $600 million on LTM basis as of 3/31, an adjusted EBITDA of roughly 18%, $107 million. You know, you'll hear the theme of diversity of our business as a source of strength, and we define that across these different categories here. I think the underlying theme is trying to develop and go after good business across good markets and geographies. From a product perspective, Power Solutions is a little bit under 50% of our business, Connectivity a third, and Magnetic Solutions a little under 20%, given some of the issues going on there. But historically, this has moved a little bit over time, given the fundamental underlying drivers of the business, and demand drivers there. From an end market perspective, our largest end market here historically has been a little bit down, given some of the challenges in that market, is networking and data centers. So really in the business of data generation, transmission, and storage. And then industrial would encompass things such as test and measurement, automation, general industrial, and oil and gas, to name a few, aerospace and defense. While distribution itself is not an end market, we do serve a lot of end markets that roughly mimics our own, quite frankly, makeup. As we get through the segments here, you'll see what some of those things are. There's some challenges today in that channel as we think about a little bit too much inventory going on, going on there, but ultimately, we'll work our way through it. From a customer standpoint, we're roughly 70% direct to OEM and 30% through distribution, and geographic mix is largely North America, followed by Europe and APAC. Just some logos of some of the select customers that we've had for a very long time, and I think ultimately, it's a testament to our engineering and product capabilities here. In terms of some of the sectoral themes that are going on and tailwinds that are helping drive our overall industry that Bel Fuse is a beneficiary of, we have them obviously layered out here and maybe to call out a couple of them. Artificial intelligence, AI, is a big discussion topic starting kind of early last year, and we do believe that this is a driver over time of our business. And we started speaking about it a little bit more on the previous call, but there's some exciting things going on there. As we think about the E-mobility EV, we do industrial E-mobility. And as we think about the big-ticket items such as school buses, mining equipment, ground support vehicles at airports, we ultimately believe that these things will go in the green direction, and we are positioned pretty well to play in that market. Obviously, industrial E-mobility lags a little bit the consumer side of things, but ultimately, we think it's on the pathway there. So one of the unique things of being here after 75 years, historically, we see one or two tailwind sectoral that are driving the industry. We happen to be right now in a time where there's a few different underlying themes that ultimately will benefit Bel Fuse and the industry here. Looking a little bit more at the three segments of Bel Fuse, Power Solutions, which is roughly 50% of our business here, I would say this is our most diverse product set, end market, price points business. We are touching a number of various applications all the way from industrial to rail, lighting, medical. This is where we service largely some of the consumer businesses as well, but we're largely a non-consumer business. This one, I'd say, has gone through a very impressive change of trajectory as the team has really done a nice job focusing on improving gross margins and the profitability of this segment. There, we had some issues in it here, but as we've seen some of the businesses pick up, such as E-mobility, and also some of the other rail business here is kind of picking up, where historically, rail has been a little bit slower, but these are nice businesses, high margin, good growth drivers, fundamentals underlying there. So power was somewhere that we started a lot of work on throughout time, quite frankly, but we started seeing the inflection point early in 2022. Connectivity Solutions, this is our harsh environment connector business. Again, it's a pretty diverse business here. This is where we service the military, and commercial air, end markets. On the defense side, we're largely on munitions and communications, commercial air, really a combination between OEM business and MRO. So a lot of good, fundamental, components driving that business. We also, the distribution for this segment has been a very good performer, so despite some of the challenges that we see out in the market, our connectivity business is a little bit bucking that trend here, given some of the end market and applications and the end markets that they are selling into. Connectivity is also, has kind of gone through some of their challenges, historically with some of the issues with, the commercial airlines, defense spending. But obviously, given the world that we're in today, we're seeing more of that ramp up here post-COVID and some of the conflicts that we see in the world. But again, these are harsh environment military application-type specific connectors. On the magnetics business, this is really largely levered towards network and cloud. So as we think about data centers and telecom, and source devices, this is where we service that market. Also, obviously, distribution, and then a little bit on the industrial side as well. We have our main product in this business is what we call ICMs, Integrated Connector Modules, also our transformers. This segment has been pretty impacted with too much inventory in both the networking, cloud, and distribution, and given the less diversity here, a little bit in terms of the end markets and product set, you see some of this big drop-off as we see on the revenue side on the lower chart. Obviously, the margins have also come down on this segment. This segment was pretty busy at work last year, doing a pretty big facility consolidation. So ultimately, while we're going through these tough times, at least it's a better cost structure that we think ultimately sets us up once the inventory side of things clears out a little bit in this channel. As we speak about some of the drivers, we really tend to think about the world in terms of end markets and the fundamental demand drivers there in terms of where things are going. As we look out to 2024, we think aerospace, defense, rail, niche industrial, are going to be pretty healthy performers and growers. While space we have in medium term, we are starting to see some of the nice things from space come in. As we've spoken about our previous call, historically, last year, we were a little around $4 million. We've done $2 million in the first quarter here. Expect that to be $7 million. Again, these are high margin type businesses for us, very harsh environments. Same thing on AI. We're seeing some nice things early in the ramp, if you will, but we're seeing some nice things there, and especially in our power side of the business, where we are a little bit general purpose, high-end power supplies that are really kind of plug and play. So we're seeing some really good things there. End markets that we're expecting a rebound in kind of the second half, maybe into Q3, Q4, is really on-premise wiring, networking, distribution is another one, and then consumer, maybe a little bit towards that end. But these are important markets for us as we clear out some of the inventory issues there. But again, ultimately, and when we look through the noise of their recent term and gyrations of the inventory channel, ultimately, we're very bullish on these end markets. From a. Again, looking beyond that, we have obviously EV infrastructure, as we talked about AI and space. So ultimately, we like the mix of our business. It tends to be in more medium design cycles slash long design cycles, embedded customer base, as opposed to the very heavily commoditized, heavy consumer and auto. So again, we like our mix. The diversity of the mix, both products and end markets, is a source of resiliency for us, despite some of the challenges we were going through here. Just to give a little perspective here in terms of where we're seeing the growth come in. So aerospace, as we talked about, roughly a quarter of our business is levered to the OEM side and three-quarters to MRO. Obviously, they're both, interconnected in terms of getting on the OEM side, allows you to play on the MRO side of things. And as we all know, pre-COVID, there was a lot of grounding issues that were going on in the segment. I think coming into COVID, there was grounding, really all over the place, and we're starting to see that nice recovery. In the middle of that trough of an end market, in early 2021, we did an acquisition that really kinda helped us gain a little bit more scale in this market with some nice positions, which kind of allowed us to scale as we saw the demand and the build rates come back. We're bullish on this demand drivers here, whether it be on the OEM side or MRO, and we see consumers flying, and planes are still being consumed. So ultimately, we think that this will be a good business for the time being, and we saw the 200% growth between 2021 and 2023. Defense, again, we're heavy on the munitions, as we said, and communication side. For years, pre-COVID, we saw a little bit of shifting in the spending, defense of where it's going, maybe a little bit away from hard munitions. Unfortunately, given the world that we're in today, there's been an increased spending and production of these components. We generally, connectors is what we supply into this end market. We're seeing a nice growth from 2022 to 2023, 24%, and we do expect that to continue. We service this end market through our U.K. facilities that tend to focuses on the Europeans, and then obviously on the North American side, between Mexico and the US. So we have both sides of the pond of where we spend our time. Rail has been a very good end market for us. Again, these are all high-margin type businesses. We service this market through our power segment, anywhere from braking systems to battery charging, and various signal controls. We are focused largely on the passenger side market, passenger train cars. We've been in this business for a very long time, with strong reputation for product excellence and performance. As we're seeing some of the investments in the world coming out of places like China and India and Europe, we are a beneficiary of that and so are our customers. We saw the nice growth rate here, 2023 over 2022, around 33%. We saw our Q1 sales in 2024 up roughly 50% over Q1 2023. So again, nice end market, growing end market, good investment going on there, and a product set that we are excited about. E-mobility, as we alluded to earlier, we tend to be on big-ticket items, not your consumer-type focused business. This is an interesting case study. We're seeing some themes similar to E-mobility in space and in AI. We've been in the E-mobility business since roughly 2011, but for years, it was low single digits, maybe mid-single digits of revenue, millions a year. It was really more of sampling, testing, making sure that all that information works, and getting some mileage under these vehicles. And then in 2020, roughly into 2021, we started seeing some nice pickup, where we started breaking out of the mid- and low single-digit revenue numbers into something more than double digits. And we saw a nice step-up 2022 over 2021, almost 100%. We saw another nice growth in 2023 over 2022, roughly, call it a little bit maybe under 50% there. And then we continued to kind of see the strength. Yeah, it is going a little bit. This end market is going through a little bit of challenge right now, given that we cover a wide set of customers, anywhere from start-up folks that are going through the fundraising cycle in this interest rate environment, all the way to kind of the household names, multi-million dollar companies, where there's maybe a little bit of demand, softness there. As we think about these, our high price point products, if we look at an average school bus, ICE versus e-mobility, e-mobility is around 3x that price. So as we think about subsidies and the big push for going green, it's ultimately there, but we're going a little bit of a, maybe a softness here in 2024, as the world stabilizes a little bit. And then with that, Lynn? All right. Thank you, Farouq. So for those of you who may be new to our story, this slide just goes through the journey of transformation that we've really been on since 2021. I won't touch on all of these, but we'll highlight a few. So back in February 2021 is when Farouq joined us as our first CFO. So he was the first executive hire that came from the outside. Being familiar with the industry, you know, he definitely brought a fresh perspective, came in asking all of the right questions, which was really critical as we started on this journey. Also in 2021, we completed our five year ERP implementation project. We've acquired, you know, 15 companies over the last, you know, decade-plus, and we had, you know, between six and eight different ERP systems around the world, which makes it hard to pull together all of the data, as we're making business decisions. So, the ERP implementation completion was a huge milestone for us, and that allowed us to get to SKU level profitability, which was one of Farouq's first questions that he was looking for when he joined. And that, that's been pivotal to our margin enhancement story. In 2022, we went through and used that newfound data and went through and did some targeted pricing actions, just making sure that we are, you know, at or slightly below, you know, the market for our products. And then towards the end of 2022, we did announce four facility consolidations. The large one was in China, related to our magnetics business, and then there were three others within our connectivity segment in the U.S. and the U.K. So that was a large undertaking. Those four facility consolidations were all complete by the end of 2023. And then as you can see on here, a lot of the other items revolved around strengthening our bench and basically just putting in tools so that we can measure to manage. So as we look at our management team today, you know, when I started 16 years ago, the executive team that had been in place had really been together for a couple of decades. So over the last three years, we have seen a significant amount of change on the management team under Dan Bernstein, who's our CEO. Dan is the second CEO in our company's history. His father started the business back in 1949. So it's really nice to see this kind of refreshment of the executive team under Dan's leadership, and it's really a testament to his commitment of change. So you'll see the individuals with the dark blue boxes have been new to the team, either through outside hires or internal promotions, in the last three years. And then, as announced last year, Dennis Ackerman, who heads up our power segment, will be retiring in July of this year, and Steve Dawson, who is an internal promote, who came to us from ABB's Power-One segment, he will be taking up the lead on the power segment, effective in July. So all of the items that we went through on the journey slide, you know, has really helped us result in this financial transformation that we've gone through. You can see on the upper left-hand side, from a revenue perspective, it's been, you know, nothing overly exciting. You know, if you look from 2021 through, you know, the most recent trailing 12-months period, we've had some growth. But what we have been able to achieve, even with not much movement on the top line, is our margin expansion. So we were running at about 25% gross margin, and we've been able to increase that to 35% in the most recent trailing 12-months period. Much of that had to do with the factors that I outlined on the previous slide. But in addition to that, we did go through the process of divesting a non-core business. We walked away from a portion of our low-margin business that was in our magnetic segment. As I mentioned, we had cost savings from our four facility consolidations, just maintained that pricing discipline. Now that we have SKU level profitability, we're able to make, you know, better real-time decisions when it comes to to pricing. And, you know, I think importantly, we just have everyone rowing in the same direction today. Everyone from, you know, R&D, developing the right products, our sales team selling the right products. We, we've also enhanced our, our bench in Europe on that sales team. That's been completely revamped, you know, in the last couple of years. We've, we've also done a lot of work on the procurement side. So really up and down the entire P&L, we have kind of touched upon, you know, numerous aspects. It was not one item that allowed us to have this, this margin expansion, which I think is important. I know we do get the question a lot of, you know, "How did we achieve these results so quickly, and how sustainable is it?" So we kind of, you know, methodically went through many different aspects of the business, and really changed the mindset of the organization from the top, you know, all the way down throughout the various departments. So you can see on the upper right-hand side here, our EBITDA margin went from, you know, call it mid-single digits up to 18%. In the first quarter of 2024, we actually hit 19%, so just significant improvement on profitability. And that leads to the bottom left here, where you can see it translating into increased cash flow generation. So our cash balance, and we're now investing in T-bills, it's around the $120 million mark. So it definitely just kind of flowing through as cash flow. We have started doing buybacks. We implemented our first buyback program that we announced last quarter. It was a $25 million buyback program, and we're about $11 million into that program. On the inventory, there had been a buildup of inventory in our whole industry. So we saw 2022 as kind of the height there. We do continue to make progress in bringing our own levels of inventory down. We still feel that there's some work to do there, but we are making progress. And on this last slide is just our share information. So we have about 12.5 million shares outstanding. We do have two classes of stock. Our Class A is voting and has about 2.1 million shares outstanding. Class B is non-voting and has about 10.5 million shares outstanding. They both pay quarterly dividends. We've been paying these historically for several years. So it's been about $0.06 per share per quarter for Class A, and $0.07 per share on the Class B side. Our market cap and enterprise value are around $770 million, and our current EV to EBITDA is 7.1x. And then just the stock chart, you can see we've... You know, based on our financial results that we've been able to achieve, our stock price in the last two years has gone up by 240%, compared to the overall Nasdaq, which was up 35%. And that concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn it back over- All right. Thanks, Lynn, and thanks, Farouq. Yeah, thanks, guys. Maybe if I could just take a quick minute to remind the audience, if you do have a question for the Bel Fuse team, please submit it in our message board, and I can relay it from my side. While we wait for those to come in, maybe I could start. You know, Farouq, you did mention a potential for a second half rebound. I'm wondering if you could dive into maybe what degree and speed you are maybe anticipating a recovery, and maybe what hurdles you see that you need to get over to release that recovery? You know, that's a good question. It's definitely been the talk of the industry and talk around here at Bel Fuse. And as we look at the world we're in, you know, I think on the last call, we went through a little bit of a longer explanation to make sure that we highlighted this will be a little bit of a rolling recovery. What I mean by that is different end markets will recover at a maybe a little bit different speed. And then within the end market, it really depends on the customer. So what we really look forward to is inventory depletion levels. As we look at our distributors, making sure that the inventory is coming down, we get all the POS data in our world, so we see the POS components going out of the warehouse. So we monitor the inventory levels. Same thing on the networking side as well. We keep an eye out on the inventory levels. Ultimately, when that comes down, we expect to see orders to come through, or at least in a more healthy cadence. Where we are now from an inventory level, it's pretty low, and in a lot of cases, it is at a pre-COVID level. The good news there is that's pretty low, so we don't expect it to get, you know, significantly more worse, and we've kind of guided already to where we think it will go. So given the inventory levels and where they're at right now, it's you know it feels like it's we're itching for a turn. We've started to see some of these green shoots in the second quarter. We've got some orders in from customers we haven't got in a while, which means that they've depleted their inventory. Now they're kind of back in the well. So we're a little bit optimistic. We've got the second half recovery kind of roughly, you know, end of Q3, Q4, again, just from a maybe a critical mass, but we expect to see some recovery heading into that. I I think the question is how fast and how big? So I think we just wanna... You know, is it gonna be a hockey stick? We, we should not anchor to that. I think we'll see just some nice growth rates from there as the market gets back into more normal cadence. Okay, makes sense. Here's one from the audience: "A lot of your products are produced in China. How do you think about the risk that new tariffs could be introduced on Chinese product, and what are you doing to mitigate that risk? Yeah, so that's a good question. You know, when we look at our business mix, or manufacturing mix, let's say, I think we think it's pretty decent. So for example, let's talk about the China risk for a second. Our magnetics business is largely manufactured in China, and call it 75% of it stays in China. We sell to the contract manufacturers there, and the contract manufacturers ultimately sell it to the end customer that bears the, you know, the risk of getting out of China and taking it to other places. So generally, we manufacture largely for China, for China type thing, right? So as we think about the tariffs on that as well, obviously, there's the China risk of it. As we think of the tariff side of it, not really too impactful, I'd say, on the magnetics business. On the other extreme end, our connectivity business, where our manufacturing footprint really there is U.K., U.S., Mexico, not too much, but they do bring some various componentry back into the U.S., and I'd say we got tariffed in 2019 mostly on that segment. Ultimately, as an industry, it's gonna work through the 2019 tariffs if we were to look at that as a mini case study, and that cost has gone passed on to the end customer. So connectivity will be more tariffed, not much China exposure. Some of the raw materials does come from China, so that would be a concern, but ultimately we expect to pass that along. Power is a little bit of a mixed bag. From a manufacturing perspective, we have three factories, one in China, one in Slovakia, one in India. So obviously, the one in China would be impacted, but similarly, a lot of it kind of stays there in China. But our Slovakia, India facilities also import a lot of their raw materials from China and so forth, but not necessarily tariffs, but you got the political risk there a little bit. Ultimately, I think it is a concern. I think we, as an industry, we worked through it in 2019 on tariff side. Our China exposure, while we do have exposure, obviously, and, and, you know, it's not insignificant, I'd say we're probably decently set up compared to some of our peers. Okay, great. Farouq, on the last earnings call, and you, you talked about this, a little bit today, you talked about hitting a breakout point for space application. Maybe can you talk about where you're investing in this market and what you anticipate for that product line over the medium term? I'm sorry, was that for the AI products, Ted? Space. I believe- Space You mentioned it. Yeah - for the space application. Yeah. So space is a... You know, we've been in space for, you know, since the seventies. Space historically has been a very low volume type environment, but we've been in it for a very long time. And kind of that element has allowed us, given we have this long history of performance and knowledge and credibility in the space, it allowed us, when space became more commercial with some of the satellites or some of the, you know, maybe tourism-type items, we were one of the first into that end market. So for years, that's how we see these things develop. We We saw it in E-mobility. We're seeing a lot of kind of testing and sampling and all that kind of good stuff. But we started seemingly hit more of a breakout in space as our customers were getting scale and have publicly talked about some of their growth ambitions to launch various things up there. So space last year was $4 million, which quite frankly was a pretty big number, four-ish. We did $2 million in the first quarter, and we guided towards $7 million. Now, $7 million on roughly, you know, $600 million of sales, maybe not that great, but that's a connectivity business. So $7 million on $210 million, with big kind of growth rates behind that on a high-margin business, I think is very key for us. So space is exciting. We think there will be a lot of interesting things going on there. And again, you know, we're long design cycles. We've been in that business for a very long time, and now I think the good thing is we're potentially at a breakout point here. It sounds exciting. We're definitely- We got about a minute left, so if I could just... Sorry? We're definitely excited about it, for sure. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, we do have about a minute left. Lynn, if I could sneak one in for you. You did mention the growth margin and the quick rise there. I know you mentioned some of those were non-recurring items that were benefiting the growth margins, but I was wondering if you could talk about your margin progress for the year there and, you know, what tools you're deploying to remain resilient in this declining revenue environment. Yeah. So I think, you know, when we talked about the power segment on our last call, that was really where we had called out that a portion of that margin profile was not sustainable. So I think we posted margins of 44% for our power business, and we really view that more as like a high 30% margin segment. But overall, you know, I think a lot of the initiatives that we've done over the last few years, you know, everything from just making better business decisions, more educated business decisions. So everything is data-driven right now. So, you know, as we may be faced with, you know, pricing questions from our customers, we, we now have the data to make those business decisions, and, and maintain our margins as best that we can. You know, we, we do continually look at our, our footprint around the world. We did announce, last quarter that we have another facility consolidation happening in Pennsylvania. So, you know, I, I think this journey that we're on will never really end. We'll, we'll always be fine-tuning, and making sure that, you know, our cost structure is in line with where it needs to be, and, and that our, our pricing is where it needs to be. All right. Well, we're out of time. Let me extend my thanks to the Bel Fuse team, Farouq and Lynn. Appreciate your participation today. I know you have a couple meetings left, so good luck, and thanks again.