Arxis Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Arxis reported a strong first quarter, with sales up 21% year over year to $459 million and adjusted EBITDA up 31% to $175 million, driven by broad-based growth across defense and space, commercial aerospace, and industrial technology.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management said 17% organic growth came from roughly one-third new business wins, one-third pricing, and one-third market growth, highlighting the company’s Arxis EDGE operating playbook and its ability to win and retain designed-in content.
  • Positive Sentiment: For fiscal 2026, Arxis introduced guidance of $1.86 billion to $1.88 billion in revenue and $720 million to $730 million of adjusted EBITDA, implying about 18% revenue growth and 27% EBITDA growth at the midpoint.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company said the balance sheet improved significantly after the IPO, with net leverage falling to 2.0x TTM EBITDA and annual cash interest expected to drop by more than $70 million, giving Arxis added flexibility for future acquisitions.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Management emphasized that the business entered the year with about 90% of 2026 already booked in backlog and said capacity is not currently a constraint, but free cash flow may remain lumpy quarter to quarter before normalizing later in the year.
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Earnings Conference Call
Arxis Q1 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Arxis first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Wendlandt, Head of FP&A and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Brian Wendlandt
Brian Wendlandt
Head of FP&A and Investor Relations at Arxis

Thank you, Josh. Good morning, and welcome to the Arxis first quarter 2026 results conference call. Joining me today are Kevin Perhamus, our Chief Executive Officer, and Azad Badakhsh, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations. Actual results may differ materially from those projected due to a number of risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our most recent SEC filings and today's earnings materials for a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. During today's call, we may also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in today's earnings release and related presentation materials. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevin.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. I'm Kevin Perhamus, CEO of Arxis, and welcome to our first earnings call as a public company. I'm going to start with a performance update, and then I'd like to walk through the Arxis business model, the playbook, and the long-term growth algorithm that makes us so unique. With that, let's get started on slide three. We delivered an outstanding start to 2026, with first quarter sales of $459 million, up 21% year-over-year, and Adjusted EBITDA of $175 million, up 31% year-over-year. The revenue growth was broad-based and highly diversified. New business wins, underlying market volume, modest price increases, and acquisitions each contributed mid-single-digit growth during the quarter, highlighting the balanced nature of our growth algorithm. We also saw double-digit growth across all three of our end markets.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

In defense and space, we continue to benefit from our alignment to key government spending priorities. In commercial aerospace, we are experiencing the benefits of ramping production rates, and within industrial technology, we are seeing solid momentum across several applications, especially medical technology and semiconductor. Overall, first quarter results reinforce our confidence in the full year outlook, and we are excited to initiate strong guidance for fiscal year 2026. In summary, we expect strong growth to continue with the midpoint of our guidance range yielding 18% revenue growth and 27% EBITDA growth compared to prior year results. In addition, our partnership with Arcline continues to be a significant strategic advantage in sourcing and executing acquisitions, including the successful completion of the Micro-Tronics acquisition in January.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Finally, following the IPO, we now have a substantially strengthened balance sheet and achieved net leverage of 2x, positioning us to continue deploying capital across our M&A pipeline. Moving on to page four. I want to remind everyone of our differentiated business model and playbook. Arxis designs and builds proprietary components, things like bearings, capacitors, connectors, and seals that perform in the harshest environments. These components are vital to the world's most advanced defense, aerospace, and industrial technology platforms. At the core of our model is a highly proactive and collaborative selling engine. Our engineers meet with our customers' engineers. They solve a problem which results in a custom product that gets designed into the bill of materials, typically as the only qualified part, and then stays there for decades.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Each of our business units own at least one foundational proprietary technology that dramatically improves the product performance and is exclusive to Arxis. Across our 46 business units, we own 67 of these technologies, which underpin the 90% proprietary revenue shown at the bottom of this page. Examples of these technologies include CryoFlex as part of our Pac Aero business and K-Ron within the Comatix business. When applied to a bearing, K-Ron transforms a standard bearing into a highly engineered custom product with 5-10x the value. You'll also see our end market mix on this page. Approximately 50% defense and space, 20% commercial aerospace, and 30% industrial technology. We are highly diversified across virtually every metric with 40,000 part numbers, more than 600 platforms, and over 5,000 customers.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

This diversification provides a highly stable foundation for the business and allows us to sleep really well at night. Finally, we have a nice balance between our two segments, Electronic and Mechanical Components. While the product families are quite different in the two segments, the underlying business model remains entirely consistent. Turning to page five, this slide summarizes why Arxis is so unique. It starts with the markets we serve. We operate in highly attractive end markets with strong long-term demand drivers, high qualification requirements, and very long platform life cycles. Those dynamics create durable demand for Arxis. The second piece is the nature of our products. Our components are highly engineered, proprietary, and deeply embedded inside our customers' platforms. Once we are designed in, those positions tend to stay in place for decades because the switching costs are high and the qualification cycles are long.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

The next three elements summarize our playbook, called Arxis EDGE. First, we operate with a decentralized structure. Our business units move quickly, they are empowered to make decisions, and are accountable for performance. At the same time, the whole organization stays highly connected through a common operating system, shared processes, and aligned incentives. We are also unified. Second is our new business engine. We systematically track opportunities across the portfolio, drive cross-selling between business units, and align compensation directly to growth generation. That creates a very proactive commercial culture and is the reason we can continue to grow faster than the markets we serve. Finally, M&A is embedded directly into the model. We operate in a highly fragmented market, and we've built a repeatable process around sourcing, underwriting, integrating, and scaling acquisitions without disrupting the broader organization.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

From the beginning, Arxis was built to be a long-term compounder, built by hand-selecting the companies with the best business models and integrating them one at a time into the Arxis playbook. We did this in partnership with Arcline. Let's look at slide six. Arxis and Arcline bring different strengths to the model. Arxis brings the operating side, engineering expertise, customer relationships, the playbook and processes that allow us to integrate and scale businesses while keeping them entrepreneurial, empowered, and decentralized. Arcline brings deep capabilities around sourcing, research, underwriting, and long-term portfolio strategy, with more than 60 investment professionals to support transaction evaluation and market analysis. This is a true partnership that creates a much more systematic approach to capital allocation than you typically see in an industrial company. We believe that combination, strong industrial operators paired with institutional-quality capital allocators, is a key structural advantage.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Moving on to slide seven. At the end of the day, everything we've discussed points to one thing: a business intentionally built to compound organically and through acquisitions. This model has produced and will continue to produce a highly durable financial profile. High single-digit organic revenue growth driven by strong markets, new business, and pricing. Approximately 50% incremental EBITDA conversion on that growth, translating into low double-digit organic EBITDA growth. This organic growth is supplemented by disciplined acquisition execution, which will provide meaningful incremental EBITDA growth. Ultimately, our objective is straightforward: to build a company that creates long-term value through world-class operational excellence and capital allocation, resulting in sustained long-term growth. A next-generation industrial compounder. With that, let me turn it over to Azad to provide more detail on our first quarter results and fiscal 2026 guidance.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. I will start with slide eight. The first quarter was a record one for Arxis and reflects the strength of both our business model and the operating playbook that Kevin just outlined. Sales in the quarter were $459 million, representing 21% growth year-over-year. This consisted of 17% organic growth and 4% contribution from the Oldham Seals and Micro-Tronics acquisitions. Growth was broad-based, with all three of our key end markets delivering double-digit revenue growth during the quarter. Turning to profitability, first quarter Adjusted EBITDA was $175 million, with Adjusted EBITDA margins expanding 290 basis points year-over-year to 38.2%. Margin expansion was driven by continued operational efficiencies across the portfolio, in particular within our MCS segment, where we remain focused on cost optimization initiatives.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

In addition, the Arxis EDGE playbook continues to reinforce new business wins and pricing across the organization, resulting in incremental EBITDA margin in excess of 50% for the quarter. Free cash flow for Q1 was $25 million, up 107% year-over-year. As is typical for our business, first quarter free cash flow conversion was seasonally lower. That said, several factors impacted cash flow during the quarter that are important to highlight. First, record operating performance naturally drove higher accounts receivable and inventory levels of approximately $29 million in Q1. In addition, free cash flow was impacted by approximately $50 million from several timing-related items, including $17 million related to customer billing timing on a few larger defense programs, driving an increase in net contract assets.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

$13 million from additional months of cash interest payments ahead of the IPO debt paydown, and $20 million related to annual bonus payments made in Q1. While some timing-related impacts may continue into Q2, we expect free cash flow to normalize over the remainder of 2026. Moving to slide nine, I'll provide a brief update on our capital structure following the IPO. First, continued EBITDA growth and strong cash generation supported further deleveraging during the quarter, with net leverage declining from 4.2x at the end of the year to 4x at the end of the quarter. Shortly after the quarter end, we successfully completed our IPO, generating $1.2 billion of net proceeds that all went to the company. Of that amount, $946 million was used to repay existing debt, with the remaining proceeds of $275 million going to our balance sheet.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

As a result, our net leverage declined further from four times to two times TTM EBITDA, significantly strengthening the balance sheet and enhancing our financial flexibility. The debt reduction is expected to lower annual cash interest expense by more than $70 million versus 2025, further supporting free cash flow generation going forward. We intend to deploy capital in a disciplined manner towards continued M&A. We have multiple sources of liquidity to support this, including free cash flow and $1.1 billion of available liquidity through cash on hand, our undrawn revolver, and our delayed draw term loan. I will conclude with a summary of our full year 2026 guidance. We expect total revenue to be in the range of $1.86 billion-$1.88 billion, and Adjusted EBITDA between $720 and $730 million.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

At the midpoint of the range, we expect 18% year-over-year revenue growth, including 15% organic growth, with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 38.8% at the midpoint. On the slide, we've also outlined our internal growth assumptions for the end markets that we serve. Across all three of our key end markets, we're assuming mid-teens organic growth, which reflects a combination of underlying industry volumes, new business growth, and price realization. Finally, on slide 11, we've outlined key assumptions supporting our full-year outlook. A couple of items to highlight. We expect total CapEx to be around $63 million, approximately 3% of our revenue. Moving on to interest expense. Following our debt repayment post-IPO, we expect that number to decline to approximately $135 million for the full year.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

We expect our effective tax rate to be around 25%, total annual depreciation and amortization of around $206 million, and finally, we expect total share-based compensation expense of approximately $155 million. We expect these levels to be elevated in the near term and normalize over the next few years. With that, I'll turn it back over to the operator to open the line for questions.

Operator

Our first question comes from Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. You may proceed.

Sheila Kahyaoglu
Sheila Kahyaoglu
Analyst at Jefferies

Good morning, guys, and congratulations on your strong start with the first quarter. You guided to all three of your end markets up mid-teens for the year toward the midpoint of your 2026 organic growth of 15%. Obviously, given what's happening with jet fuel prices and in the Middle East, just curious to see if you're seeing any changes in customer behavior across aerospace and defense? You also pointed to strong Medical markets as well as semiconductor. What level of risk are you seeing and opportunities in your plan?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Hi, Sheila. Yeah. We are guiding toward mid-teens growth organically in all three of the end markets. We're seeing very consistent growth across all of them. A couple of things, just want to, first of all, talk about how we are forecasting that guidance for the full-year. We are really not depending on any market information to do that at this point. We have Arxis EDGE and because we load all of our backlog and orders into Arxis EDGE across the whole portfolio, we can see exactly where we're going to land at this point. As we sit here in May, we have 90% of the year booked and sitting in backlog. Our full-year guidance is really just using that information.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

There's very low risk to that forecast, and we have great resolution and clarity into how things will end up from a market perspective. That's one of the great things about having EDGE as the system we use to. To forecast. You asked about fuel prices and conflicts. That can impact commercial aerospace aftermarket. Obviously, that's a relatively small piece of our business. Commercial aerospace overall is around 15% for narrow body and wide body. If you include business jet, it goes up to the 20%-23% level. That 5% continues to be strong for us. It's relatively small, but it continues to be strong and we're not seeing any changes there. We're not seeing any impact to the supply chain, lastly. The supply chain's pretty resilient, mostly in country. I just remind people that if we did have input cost changes on the supply chain side, we conduct our business PO to PO for the most part with very few long-term agreements. We could pass those increased costs along in the form of price increases if it happened.

Sheila Kahyaoglu
Sheila Kahyaoglu
Analyst at Jefferies

Got it. Strength across pretty much all end markets and 90% booked. I didn't realize you guys had such strong visibility. Maybe just following up on that 90% of coverage. How do you think about capacity, I guess, to flex upward if demand does materialize? How you think about that maybe across your end markets?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

It's another great aspect of our model, which is decentralized. We have 72 independent focus factories across our 46 business units. They're all carefully watching their capacity compared to customer demand, and they're able to flex up. We have plenty of capacity right now is the simple answer, and capacity would not be a constraint to achieving our guidance in any way.

Sheila Kahyaoglu
Sheila Kahyaoglu
Analyst at Jefferies

Got it. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Hey, good morning everyone, and congrats on being out.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thank you.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Kevin, you referenced being levered to where the spending priorities are within defense. Can you elaborate on that? What are some of the larger exposures and platforms, and where are you seeing growth in the end market?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Yeah. That's air defense, radar, missile systems, missile defense, electronics, electronic warfare, modernization. All of the priorities, the key government priorities that exist, we are broadly tied to and always have been. It just provides a nice backdrop. As I said before, though, we're not really relying on that information to create our guidance for the year. We have the year sitting mostly in backlog already.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Okay. The midpoint of the full year revenue guidance, working off of what you just reported for 1Q, implies around 1% sequential revenue growth, each of the remaining three quarters through the rest of the year. Is that roughly the normal seasonality of the business, or was there anything abnormal with timing in the first quarter?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

No seasonality. I mean, we're really pleased with the performance in Q1. We just want to be careful not to simply extrapolate a strong quarter across the remainder of the year. Again, thanks to Arxis EDGE, we have 90% visibility into the full year plan. We're just using that information to forecast the revenue for the remainder of the year.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Okay.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Yeah. Yeah, simple.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Makes sense. Then just last one, maybe you could just spend a little more time on how the M&A pipeline looks now versus your historical average, and how you're thinking the pace at which you think you'll be able to deploy capital towards acquisitions this year versus your historical average pace.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Sure. Just as a reminder to everybody, we started Arxis in late 2020. We've done 32 acquisitions since then. We do, on average, five to six acquisitions per year. It's always been a big part of our DNA. The company was intentionally built as a compounder to continue to do acquisitions in the future as well. We have this partnership with Arcline. We are working on acquisitions at Arxis. They have 60 professionals and a whole business development team that's out scouring the landscape for new deals. We've been active. I'd say five to six deals per year. We've been very active from the beginning. The level of activity that we have today is as high as it's ever been. We're working on many deals. It's difficult to predict the exact timing of if and when those will close, but it's as active as ever.

Noah Poponak
Noah Poponak
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Okay. I appreciate all the detail. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thanks, Noah.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed.

Kristine Liwag
Kristine Liwag
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Hey, good morning, everyone. KP, Azad, when you look at the business model for Arxis, you're targeting high single-digit organic growth. I just want to take a look at this revenue growth in the quarter where you really did much higher than that. When I think about the drivers of the 17% organic growth, can you parse out for us, how much did Arxis EDGE contribute to that? It's much higher than peers in all the different end markets that you're providing, especially in aerospace and defense. Want to understand a little bit better what the building blocks are, what was Arxis EDGE on new business, what was pricing, because you have the same end markets as some of those peers.

Kristine Liwag
Kristine Liwag
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Also when we look at this higher than peer growth for now, look, high single digit target versus 17% is a pretty big gap. How long do you think you can get this higher than high single digits organic growth to sustain? Thank you.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Okay. Hi, Kristine, and thanks. First on what supports the 17% growth, how do we break that down and what is really from Arxis EDGE. I'll remind people that we have this algorithm that we use to drive the business. There's three ways organically to drive the business, and when we think about that, it's the bottom line of the business. It's volume, price, and cost, VPC, and then inorganically, we have acquisitions, and we use EDGE to drive volume and price quite a bit. If you break out that 17%, it's roughly 1/3:1/3:1/3. A third new business growth as generated through Arxis EDGE and measured through Arxis EDGE, 1/3 mid-single-digit pricing, and 1/3 the market. Pretty simple, and we have great resolution into that as you know, and we can really see the numbers coming through there.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

In terms of your second question, and the long term. Long term to us just means beyond this year, beyond the guidance period. Beyond the current period, we're just going to remain disciplined and very measured. We don't have data yet to really forecast beyond the current period. We don't have enough data yet. We're forecasting the near term, using that Arxis EDGE 90% filled in number. The way we use that number, by the way is we know exactly where we should be in terms of firm backlog for each and every business unit at every month in the year. We know in May how much backlog we should have secured for each business unit in order to achieve a certain forecast. We're using math, and we're using data to support the near-term forecast, so we feel very comfortable with that.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

As we get data for next year and as we provide guidance for next year, we'll have a lot of data to do that as well. In the meantime, we're disciplined and measured about the long term.

Kristine Liwag
Kristine Liwag
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. Super helpful. You talked about you guys have been doing five to six deals on average per year. That was kind of the playbook that you've had with Arcline. When you look out now, considering the strength of the balance sheet, do you have a preference for larger deals versus smaller deals? Any additional color you want to provide regarding the pipeline?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Sure. We don't have a strong preference between larger deals or smaller deals. I would say that the smaller deals are more plentiful. There's going to be a lot more smaller deals to work on. We're going to continue to evaluate the deals based on, I guess, two main buckets. The first is, does it fit our business model? If it does, then we can go to the second bucket, which is the financial criteria. The financial criteria that we're using to evaluate new deals is, can we grow the EBITDA of the acquired business at a higher rate than the base of Arxis in the next three years? Will it accelerate our EBITDA growth? The second financial criteria is, can we buy down the multiple to less than 10x within 36 months?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

We're going to continue to use that criteria large or small, no preference. Even the market, not a strong preference, mostly the business model fit. The business model is what I described in the opening remarks.

Kristine Liwag
Kristine Liwag
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Got you. Thank you very much.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Peter Arment with Baird. You may proceed.

Peter Arment
Peter Arment
Analyst at Baird

Yeah. Hey, good morning, KP. Azad, congrats on the strong start to the year. Hey, KP, I think we all understand kind of defense and space and commercial aerospace kind of drivers. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in industrial technology. You called out semis as maybe a source. Maybe give us a little more color on what's driving the opportunity there. Thanks.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Yeah. In industrial tech, again, it's super diversified. There's a lot of sub-markets in that category. The two largest would be semiconductor manufacturing related to AI. Medical is the other large one, and then there's a lot of other factory automation, robotics, quantum computing, you name it. What's really nice about what we're seeing right now is that across that whole diversified subset of markets, it's up and to the right. We're seeing strength everywhere. Not one thing, it's in all of the above.

Peter Arment
Peter Arment
Analyst at Baird

Got it. That's helpful and just good to see. I know space is a relatively small, maybe percentage of the mix, but maybe opportunities there or your interest in growing kind of M&A there. Thanks again, KP.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thanks. The space sub-market for us is 3%-4% of our revenue, so not a very large piece. It does make sense that it is only 3%-4% because, if you look at the Department of Defense budget, space is 3%-4% of spending for them as well. We map onto the kind of the global market as a kind of a nice microcosm. There's no particular interest in space. When we're looking at new deals to add acquisitions to the portfolio, it's again, mostly tied to, is it a business model fit first and foremost? If we come across something that has space exposure that fits all the M&A criteria that we have, then we would certainly consider it.

Peter Arment
Peter Arment
Analyst at Baird

Got it. Just lastly, Azad Badakhsh, you called out kind of the free cash flow. Maybe you could just level set us for kind of cadence or expectations, kind of the dynamics from Q2 and balance of the year. Thanks.

Azad Badakhsh
Azad Badakhsh
CFO at Arxis

Absolutely. I would just remind everybody that free cash flow conversion can be somewhat lumpy in a given quarter, but that does generally smooth out on an annual basis. Zooming out, what I would ask everyone to try to remember is that, both our CapEx and our change in net working capital each tend to be around 3% of revenue on an annual basis. If you run the math on that, you should expect free cash flow conversion for the whole year to be well over 100%.

Peter Arment
Peter Arment
Analyst at Baird

Got it. Thanks again, guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott Mikus with Melius Research. You may proceed.

Scott Mikus
Scott Mikus
Analyst at Melius Research

Good morning, KP and Azad. Congrats on the quarter. A quick question on the defense and space side. We're seeing a lot of defense contractors reach multi-year production agreement with the Pentagon. Understandably, the primes want to protect themselves against inflationary pressures and same with their tier one and tier two suppliers. Are they pushing any of your operating units to sign up for long-term agreements instead of going PO to PO for some of these programs that they're looking for seven-year production runways?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Hi, Scott. Yeah. I would say it's very early days, when it comes to that. We are starting to hear conversations about multi-year agreements. There's some qualitative indicators that there may be more of that as we go forward. That has not impacted our backlog yet. That's not converted into actual orders. We have not signed long-term agreements at this time. We're hearing more and more conversations about multi-year agreements, so we'll have to keep you posted on that as we go forward.

Scott Mikus
Scott Mikus
Analyst at Melius Research

Okay. Got it. Also in the defense and space side, we're starting to see a lot of new programs come out, that are being won by some of these new entrants, whether it be Anduril, Shield AI, Castelion. I'm just curious, can you talk about the work that you do with those neo-primes, and how you see your products on those platforms growing over the coming years?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Sure. Yeah, we work with everybody. We're working on many new business opportunities right now across the whole portfolio. When we say many, it's in the thousands. As you go into Adjusted EBITDA, you can see this. All of the companies that you named are in Arxis EDGE, we are working with all of them on different opportunities, they're all at various stages. Some of them have converted to revenue. Some of them are pre-revenue. All of these defense technology companies, including the primes, all rely on engineered components to make their products. For the most part, none of them have vertically integrated down to the tier three, tier four base level components that we provide. We will be an important part of the supply chain for all of the above, for all of them.

Scott Mikus
Scott Mikus
Analyst at Melius Research

All right. Guys, thanks for taking the questions.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Myles Walton with Wolfe. You may proceed.

Myles Walton
Myles Walton
Analyst at Wolfe Research

Thanks. KP or Azad, could you comment on the PO backlog relative to where it ended the year at $1.2 billion? How did that grow? I heard you comment that 90% of the rest of the year is filled out, but just curious on that quantum.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Yeah. The backlog has increased. I think you referenced $1.2 billion, which is where we ended 2025, and so the book-to-bill ratio has been positive as we went through Q1, resulting in a higher backlog. The total backlog obviously is spread out over, it can be 12 months, 12-18 months. What we look at as a more important indicator, as I referenced earlier, is how much of that backlog is actually due this year, and how secured are we against this year, which is perfectly in line with where we should be considering our $1.87 billion revenue guidance.

Myles Walton
Myles Walton
Analyst at Wolfe Research

Then just looking at the kind of Q margins by segment, MCS, to your prepared remarks, had the best margin expansion, I think 37.6% EBITDA margins versus 30% last year in the first quarter. That level of expansion, what was the driver primarily? For the rest of the year, where do you think that can go and more medium term as well?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

The Mechanical Components did expand more rapidly than normal in Q1. They're using the VPC algorithm, so they're growing their volume, and they're converting their volume at greater than 50% conversion margin into EBITDA. They're pushing mid-single digit price. They have also the cost lever that they're pulling on right now. Remember in the Mechanical Components segment, we did a large acquisition in 2024 of Command, and there were a number of cost reduction opportunities that the team on the mechanical side took action on in the first half of 2025. Those cost reductions are still flowing through the P&L as we go through the first half of this year. We're at an elevated rate of margin expansion.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Because they started at a lower rate, they started at 30%, so there was a lot more room to expand the margin from that lower starting point. It will certainly modulate. I think we're going to continue to see good margin expansion on the mechanical side. They're still behind the Electronic Component side, there's no structural reason why they wouldn't have the same margins.

Myles Walton
Myles Walton
Analyst at Wolfe Research

Okay. That's great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Godyn with Citi. You may proceed.

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to talk a little bit about guidance philosophy, if you will, because you guys are new to the market. When I look at the guidance range, it's $20 million in revenue and $10 million in EBITDA. That's obviously unusually tight. It almost seems not worthwhile to ask what would get us to the high end versus the low end, right? K.P it sounds like the reason for that is because so much of it is locked in for the rest of the year. Can we talk a little bit about what approach we should expect going forward? Is the idea to set guidance in a very tight range at an extremely kind of conservative level, and then inevitably, as the bookings come in a little bit better, just keep raising it? Is there another way to think about the range?

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

Maybe we could just discuss what to expect going forward as you guys are delivering, performing very well and raising what is an extremely tight guidance range going forward.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Hey, yeah. Hi, John. Remember, we're using data, so you're right, we are probably a little more precise than normal because we're using the actual filled-in backlog and then extrapolating. We're 90% filled in May. We should be 90% filled in May. What does that result in a full year revenue number? Then if the orders accelerate, so like as we go into June, July, and the orders are ahead of expectation, then that would fill the backlog in faster, and we would raise the guidance. That would be our methodology. I think that answers your question. It is pretty straightforward. Nothing magical about it, just math and using data to drive the forecast.

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

I guess some companies in your situation might have, let's say, a $75 million range on revenue or $100 million and say $1.86 billion to whatever, $1.96 billion, and as bookings come in throughout the year, we're comfortable that the low end is extremely protected and the high end has upside. In your case, it sounds like that upside is inevitably just guidance raises from here, and the way that you guys are thinking about it is essentially setting the guidance range to what is the lowest realistic kind of number for the year based on your bookings. Is that fair? I'm getting at this idea that there's a $20 million revenue range for the year and a $10 million EBITDA range, but we're looking at a business that's growing mid-teens doing M&A, and has 50% incremental margins.

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

Is that tightness in the range really reflective of how you see the volatility in the business? Or is it a function of how you guys are thinking about guidance philosophy?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

I think it's probably a function of how we're thinking about guidance philosophy, and you did mention M&A, by the way, and this is all organic. We're not considering any future M&A in this guidance here. That could also change things quite a bit as we go forward. There's a lot of things that could change the guidance as we go forward. We are giving our opening guidance here in May. That will be unusual timing, right? Just because we just went public. In the future, the opening guidance would be a little bit earlier in the year. We might have a wider range on that, right? As we're establishing the initial guidance, because there will be more unknowns at that point in the year than there are in May.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

I would expect that as it fills in, we'll keep updating and I hope it gets tighter as we go through the end of the year, because we should start to converge on the actual number as we get into the fourth quarter.

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

Okay, great. That makes sense. Thinking a step ahead, you guys have your long-term guidance metrics. It feels like that's what you would default to at the start of any year for 2027 or 2028, just kind of picking a date in the future. Is that right, or should we be looking at the exit rate of the prior year in forming following year guidance?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

I would say that if we are providing guidance, say, for 2027, in the beginning of 2027, we're going to have more resolution, and we're going to actually have a significant portion of the year filled in at that point. We'll be able to give more accurate guidance than our long-term numbers at that point. I think that's your question.

John Godyn
John Godyn
Analyst at Citi

Yeah. With all the momentum in 2026, it certainly seems reasonable that carries forward. We'll see how that plays out. Thanks a lot, guys.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

All right. Thanks, John.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from David Strauss with Wells Fargo.

Joshua Korn
Joshua Korn
Analyst at Wells Fargo

Hi, good morning. This is Joshua Korn on for David Strauss. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the IPO. Wanted to ask, following up on the guidance for the year. I think it was materially higher, the growth rate, than kind of your thoughts during the IPO process. Just wanted to ask, I guess kind of what contributed to the better outlook, any certain end market segment dynamics, anything like that. Thanks.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Yeah. Hi, Josh. Yeah, I think it's just timing. Remember, we built the models that went into the IPO sort of roadshow at the end of 2025. It's several months ago now. We have a lot more data. Our backlog is filled in, and we can use that data now to kind of accurately forecast the year. It's as simple as that. It's a matter of when we built the different models and how much data we had at that time.

Joshua Korn
Joshua Korn
Analyst at Wells Fargo

Okay, great. Thanks. I'll just stick to one.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Kenneth Herbert with RBC. You may proceed.

Kenneth Herbert
Kenneth Herbert
Analyst at RBC

Yeah. Hi, good morning, Kevin and Azad. Maybe just to start, remind us, is there any seasonality we should keep in mind as we think about specifically on the Adjusted EBITDA, the cadence here from the first quarter through the rest of the year to end up at the full year just under 39% number?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

No, I don't expect any seasonality in the margin or the revenue. It's pretty straight.

Kenneth Herbert
Kenneth Herbert
Analyst at RBC

Okay. Helpful.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

I would just add, Ken, what's more important than seasonality, I think it's just normal quarterly variability. The quarters could move and modulate a little bit. The full year guide is what I'm most confident in. It's why we're not providing individual quarterly numbers.

Kenneth Herbert
Kenneth Herbert
Analyst at RBC

Yeah. No, that's appreciated. I guess as you think about the quarterly variability, could that really just come down to timing of shipments, I guess, and anything that could impact that where you might not have control relative to cost items, price, I guess, is where you could see the volatility quarter to quarter?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Different platforms and customers have different delivery schedules. Things will move up and down as we go through the quarters. It will even out and converge around the mean over an annual period. It's just normal variability of a manufacturing business.

Kenneth Herbert
Kenneth Herbert
Analyst at RBC

Okay. Perfect. Thanks, Kevin. I'll stop there.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

All right. Thank you, Ken.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. Our next question comes from Louie DiPalma with William Blair. You may proceed.

Louie DiPalma
Louie DiPalma
Analyst at William Blair

KP, Azad, and Brian, good morning, and congrats to you, Rajeev and the Arcline team. What is the status of the 2025 class of acquisition/block units, so M-Wave, RMB, OSG, Spira, and the Micro-Tronics deal, in terms of the cost synergies and the general P&L performance. Specifically, I'm wondering, are there more optimizations in store for these deals from last year, or are they already generally integrated?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

First of all, we're really happy with the performance of all the businesses that we acquired over the whole time period, but especially this cohort that you mentioned. Strategically, they're all, first of all, an excellent fit with the business model, right? Proprietary, engineered, mission-critical products, strong customer relationships, long platform durations. I would say operationally, financially, and culturally, they're all performing very well, meeting or in some cases really exceeding the objectives that we had when we acquired them. One of the strengths of Arxis is that we're so diversified across our business units, so the broader performance of the portfolio is a lot more important than the performance of any one individual asset or cohort of assets. The decentralized and diversified nature of the business units is really the thing to focus on. As a group, we're doing really well.

Louie DiPalma
Louie DiPalma
Analyst at William Blair

Great. Are there more optimizations in store for these deals from last year?

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

I would say there's more optimization in store for every business unit. Every business unit doesn't stop pushing volume, price, and cost once they get integrated into the Arxis system. It's a continuous process and never-ending. I think we'll continue to see improvement across every business unit.

Louie DiPalma
Louie DiPalma
Analyst at William Blair

Great. One final question. You highlighted, KP, new business wins as a contributor to the 17% organic growth. I think you also discussed how roughly one-third of the growth came from these new business wins. Can you provide more details on either the platforms or the products for some of those new business wins? Were they for next generation platforms, as you mentioned you're working with all of those neo-primes, or were they takeaways from struggling suppliers on existing platforms? Any color there would be great. Thanks.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Our new business wins, just like our existing business, is super diversified. There is no one thing that I can point to. There's no one product or platform or project. It's 1,000 things. There's roughly 1,000 new business opportunities we booked business against in Q1. It's diversified. You asked about the neo-primes. They are in there. It's kind of proportionate to the size of the revenue that they have, so it's not a majority of it, but it is a piece of it.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

If you think about how much of that is truly new business development and where we are working hand in hand with the engineers and getting designed into a platform that is in the early stages of production or maybe there's a system on a platform that's been in production that's being modernized, that is the vast majority of it, because that's our business model, is to go in and work with the engineers and get in at the ground floor, get designed into the bill of materials. There is a portion of the new business which is the customer's having a problem, either a performance problem, a quality problem, a delivery problem with a different supplier, and then we come in to address that, and we can displace them. That's like an 80/20 rule.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

80% is new, and 20% is we had to step in and help out and displace somebody else.

Louie DiPalma
Louie DiPalma
Analyst at William Blair

Great. Thanks, K.P., and thanks, Azad and Brian.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

All right. Thanks, Louie.

Operator

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Kevin Perhamus for any closing remarks.

Kevin Perhamus
Kevin Perhamus
CEO at Arxis

Okay. Well, thank you. We're really pleased with how the business is performing and the excellent start that we've had as a public company. As we discussed today, we believe that Arxis has built a differentiated business model with attractive long-term growth characteristics. We remain confident in our ability to continue executing and creating value over time, and we appreciate your time today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

Operator

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Executives
    • Azad Badakhsh
      Azad Badakhsh
      CFO
    • Brian Wendlandt
      Brian Wendlandt
      Head of FP&A and Investor Relations
    • Kevin Perhamus
      Kevin Perhamus
      CEO
Analysts