Woodward (WWD) Q3 2026 earnings call transcript

Thank you, operator. We would like to welcome all of you to Woodward's third quarter, fiscal year, 2026 earnings call. In today's call, Chip will comment on her strategies and related markets.

Bill will then discuss our financial results as outlined in our earnings release. At the end of the presentation, we will take questions. For those who have not seen today's earnings release and presentation materials, you can find them on our website at Woodward. com.

A webcast of this call will be available on our website for one year. All references to years in this call are references to the company's fiscal year, unless otherwise stated, and all comparisons are to the prior year, unless otherwise stated.

I would like to highlight our cautionary statement as shown on slide two of the presentation material. As always, elements of this presentation are forward-looking, including our guidance, and are based on our current outlook and assumptions for the global economy and our businesses more specifically. Those elements can and do frequently change. Our forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties surrounding those elements, including the risks we identify in our filings with the SEC.

These statements are made as of today, and we do not intend to update them, except as required by law.

In addition, we are providing certain non-USGAP financial measures. We direct your attention to the reconciliations of non-USGAP financial measures, which are included in today's slide presentation and our earnings release. We believe this additional financial information will help in understanding our results.

Now, I'll turn the call over to Chip.

Thank you, Dan, and good evening to everyone joining us for our third quarter, 2026 earnings call. I'm pleased to report that Woodward delivered another outstanding quarter marked by strong financial and operational performance.

This continued momentum is the result of focused and disciplined execution by our global team as we deliver on strong customer demand for our products and services across our aerospace and industrial markets.

In the quarter, Woodward sales grew 21% year over year and adjusted EPS increased 43%. We delivered significant margin expansion, primarily driven by pricing actions. We are also seeing productivity gains from our lean transformation start to flow through our factories and improve margins.

Industrial sales were up 26% in the quarter, and the team did an excellent job leveraging fixed costs as volume increased across all primary markets.

Aerospace sales were up 19% with commercial OEM keeping pace with air frame or build rates, sustained commercial services growth, and strength and defense services. As we move through the final quarter of the year, we are well positioned to deliver on anticipated growth across our markets.

The growth trajectory in aerospace was reinforced last week at the Farmboro Air Show. In the many years I've attended the show, I can't remember another time when the industry remained so calm and collected during a period of such significant growth for current generation products and services. Several big aircraft orders were announced at the show. Commercial OEM and services outlooks are strong, and there is a sense that defense demand could also accelerate.

All of this was taken in stride as air framers and engine OEMs looked to component and service providers like Woodward to maintain focus and deliver on the demand created by the growing backlog.

In this high growth environment, it is helpful that supply chain visibility and predictability continue to improve. Disruptions haven't totally gone away, but we are working together with our suppliers and customers to manage through them.

During Air Show Week, we announced the partnership with HECO, establishing the third Elite License Service Facility for Woodward LRUs on the CFM Leap Engine. This is an important step for our airline customers throughout Greater China and the Asia Pacific region. Our services capacity strategy is well defined for the next several years, and we're now focused on executing that strategy to stay ahead of growing customer demand.

On the topic of capacity, we celebrated the recent completion of the expansion of our industrial segment, high speed fuel injection value stream in Glotten, Germany. The expanded production capacity is already supporting growing demand, particularly from Rolls-Royce's MTU Solutions Division, serving power generation applications.

I enjoyed being in Glotten with customers, community partners, and our amazing team members who completed this complex project on schedule, on budget, and without disrupting customer deliveries. It's a great example of how we're expanding capacity while maintaining the operational discipline our customers expect.

We've also announced additional footprint optimization decisions to support future growth and improve efficiency. This includes the decision to close our recently acquired electronic products facility in Canada and transfer production and engineering to existing Woodward facilities in Poland and Bulgaria. We're working through the transition and being thoughtful and respectful with our members. This move will generate meaningful cost energies while improving the returns on our THSA and related electromechanical product portfolio acquisition.

We also decided to move one of our Niles J-DAM production lines to our new Spartan Bridge facility to strengthen supply continuity for customers, provide flexibility, and support future growth.

Earlier, I mentioned that we're starting to see productivity gains flow through our factories. One area of significant progress is our automation journey. Those of you who visited our rock cut facility saw the deburring cobots in action.

This technology has become a platform for us and we are deploying it across Woodward plants. In another automation success story, we are working with the supplier to integrate machining, inspection, loading, and unloading into a lights out cell for key fuel nozzle parts. This will deliver capacity for our GTF high volume line, as well as efficiency and risk reduction.

Our automation investment objectives are fourfold. Expand capacity, increase productivity, and enable growth, as well as reduce our direct labor hiring demand.

We're targeting a reduction of approximately 1,000 incremental hires by 2029. In many cases, by automating repetitive, less desirable work. This represents about 50% of our projected hiring needs in that timeframe, equally weighted by attrition and growth.

As with our lean transformation, this is not about replacing people. We will continue hiring to support growth and manage attrition. We'll just need fewer new hires who will gain long-term workforce efficiencies.

Tying all this together from disciplined execution to investments in capacity and automated processes, we are on an exciting path for long-term growth and margin expansion.

Based on a strong third quarter and confidence that we will continue to execute well in the fourth quarter, we are raising our earnings guidance for 2026. Now over to you, Bill.

Thank you and good evening, everyone. As Chip mentioned, Q3 was an outstanding quarter. We achieved record performance in a number of areas. Net sales were $1.1 billion, an increase of 21%. Reflecting strong demand and increased output in both aerospace and industrial. We achieved earnings per share of $2.40 compared to $1.76.

Adjusted earnings per share were slightly better at $2.52, also compared to $1.00 and $1.76. Free cash flow was $87 million, bringing our year-to-date total to $196 million for an increase of 0.3%. At the segment level, aerospace sales for the third quarter were $709 million, an increase of 19%. The strong growth was primarily driven by commercial aerospace. Commercial OEM sales increased 34%, with our output generally aligned with steadily increasing airframer build rates.

Commercial services increased 24%, reflecting continued strength across the business. This included high utilization of legacy aircraft, growing LEAP and GTF activity, in solid service demand across wide-body and regional platform.

Defense OEM sales declined 6% due to a one-time revenue recognition adjustment. Excluding the adjustment, defense OEM sales would have grown in the mid-single digits.

Defense services grew 20%, driven by a large delivery of T700 spares and general improvements in casting supply. Aerospace segment earnings were $170 million or 24% of segment sales compared to $126 million or 21.1% of segment sales. The meaningful margin expansion was driven by strong price realization and increased leverage from higher sales volume, partially offset by inflation and unfavorable mix.

Price realization included a one-time retroactive pricing adjustment related to a contract that had been under negotiation for several quarters.

This adjustment contributed approximately 100 basis points to aerospace margins in the third quarter. Turning to industrial, segment sale for the third quarter were $401 million, an increase of 26%. Core industrial sales, which exclude the impact of China on highway, increased in 19%, driven by higher volume in all primary markets, as well as price realization.

Marine transportation sales were strong, increasing approximately 24% with higher shipyard output driving OEM demand. In addition, services also contributed to the growth. Oil and gas sales grew 11%, driven primarily by higher LNG infrastructure related volume.

In addition, upstream capital expenditures are shown signs of recovery, particularly in the Middle East. Power generation sales increased 19%, driven by higher data center demand for both base and backup power. Third quarter China on highway sales were better than expected at 40 million. We do not expect significant China on highway sales in the fourth quarter as we complete the wind down of this business.

Industrial segment earnings were $88 million or 22.1% of segment sales compared to $48 million or 14.9% of segment sales. The strong margin expansion was driven by increased leverage from higher sales volume and price realization, partially offset by inflation.

Core industrial margins were 21.2% compared to 15.6%. The China on highway business added approximately 90 basis points to segment margin in the core.

At the consolidated Woodward level, for the first nine months of 2026, net cash provided by operating activities was 352 million compared to 238 million, largely driven by higher earnings. For the first nine months, free cash flow was 196 million and increased of 23% over the prior year while increasing capital expenditures.

Our capital expenditures totaled 156 million. And we expect a meaningful increase in capital spending in the fourth quarter. As we discussed last quarter, we are carrying higher inventory levels to support demand.

In addition, our accounts receivable balance at the end of the third quarter was higher than expected due to collections time.

As of June 30th, 2026, debt leverage was 1.6 times EBITDA. Our strong balance sheet provides flexibility to act decisively as compelling opportunities emerge. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged.

We continue to support organic growth, selectively pursue strategic M&A, and return capital to shareholders. In the first nine months of 2026, we return 608 million to shareholders, 553 million through share repurchases, and 55 million in dividends.

We now expect to return approximately 700 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases in the fiscal year. Turning to our 2026 guidance, based on our strong third quarter performance and confidence in the fourth quarter, we are raising our 2026 earnings guidance.

For 2026, we now expect the following. Aerospace sales growth between 21 and 23%, with margins of approximately 23.5%, the top end of our previous range.

Industrial sales growth increasing to between 19 and 21%, with margins increasing to approximately 19%. And adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 22.5%.

Based on these updates, we are raising our adjusted EPS guidance to between $9.30 in $9.50. All other elements of our fiscal year 2026 guidance remain unchanged.

This concludes our prepared remarks on the business and results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. Operator, we are now ready to open the call to questions.

Afternoon, Gavin. On the aftermarket growth rate, obviously very difficult comps that flow down a little bit, anything to call out in terms of either customer behavior or identify it for the slowdown. And then if you could speak to how spare LRUs are trending relative to the elevated past few quarters, that'd be great.

Sure, the inputs that we've received from airline customers and other MRO shops have been fairly steady to increasing, I'd say, across the LEAP GTF product portfolio and quite steady on the legacy and wide body and regional. So no real slowdown that we see on inputs, which is good based on the macro environment that we're involved in, inputs are strong.

So we like that. As far as spare LRUs go, from a macro standpoint, I'll say a few things I'll turn it over to Bill.

From a macro standpoint, as part of our strategic planning, we were updating kind of how the entire fleet ratios are looking for the spare LRUs compared to a number of engines in the field. We're very satisfied that we're tracking well to the predictions and the model that we had at the start of the program. So we don't think there's an overdue backlog or pull forward or anything going on like that. We feel like we're tracking to the model largely over an extended period of time. Now that can vary quarter to quarter based on when airlines place POs or when they decide to take action on crossing certain delivery concentration marks. I don't know, Bill, do you have anything else on that?

I'll just add chip that into three LRUs performed very well, they were strong. And I would expect that going into the fourth quarter that they'll remain level elevated, but probably will come down slightly from what we experienced in Q3. More like the first half.

Welcome.

So the way we look at this and we measure it is really on just sort of monthly inputs to our shop that we receive on the LRUs. So V2500 fuel control, CFM-56, HMU, G-E-N-X, G-90, all of these LRUs inputs as we measure them per month. We don't, we see sort of a normal variation in noise, not anything that would say there's a trend.

It's slightly up over time for the wide body. It's relatively stable for regional and it's relatively stable for legacy narrow body. Does that get your question?

Yeah, I'm not really sure exactly what the content of that presentation was because people are now talking about sort of base grid power demand versus behind the meter demand and things associated with data centers. They're talking about them a little bit separately. And so for the data center demand, we do see that growing at a quite a high rate.

Whereas the demand for, I'd say, more generic grid-based power generation is a little bit less than that, but still reasonably strong.

We are working very closely with each of our power gen customers on how to handle this good challenge associated with this demand. Last earnings call, I pointed out that for a number of years, I've said, we have the right amount of capacity to deal with the power gen demand, but sequentially numerous customers have come to us and continue to increase their forecast for 2027, 28, and beyond into the early 2030s. And in order to, if all those cases are true, we'll have to expand capacity to be able to serve those levels of demand. So right now we're in the process of having very detailed discussions with our customers about what the risk case is for all this demand and trying to make sure that we understand it and we'll make a prudent allocation of capital to capture this fairly unique opportunity that we find ourselves with the right products on our side, on the right customer products to capture this demand.

It's one of those things that I think will be in a better position to talk about what that looks like at our investor day.

Welcome.

Afternoon. You talked about, hey, Chab, it sounds like, you know, there was this Rev Wreck issue on the defense side. There was a benefit on the arrow margin side. What we're kind of the clean as you guys calculated and what we're kind of the clean, incremental arrow margin, you know, what was at this quarter?

Yeah, the exact incrementals, I'll have to get that on arrow. Backing out the pricing item, it would take their earnings rate from 24 down to 23%. So I would expect those increments would still be pretty good there. And then on the Rev Wreck item for industrial that did not have a margin impact. So the incrementals are as reported.

Right, sorry, that's the defense. Yeah, that is right, and it is on the arrow defense side. Arrow defense side.

Sure, sure, David. First, let me, the clean incremental is about 31%. So just to cover that off, and then going to your question. Yeah, so, you know, in our original guide, we assumed some efficiencies in our turns.

I know we got it in us, I know we have the right initiatives lined up, and I know we're gonna get there. But we also started seeing clearly that the air framers were gonna deliver on the rate increases. And as we were sitting there, and to get that turn improvement, it would cause us to have some changes in supply chain and our commercial team, and then introduce the level of risk that with the demand growth we were seeing, we just weren't willing to take. So while we're not getting efficiencies, we're also not getting worse.

So that added the investment inventory beyond what we had in our original investment, in our original guidance. And so that's eaten up sort of the EPS growth in the guidance that you're seeing and is being eaten up by that, if that makes sense.

You're welcome.

Hello, Lou.

Yeah. Yeah, so Lou, it is operational, but it had to do with one of our growing product lines, business lines here, not have as much growth this quarter and seeing some of the other business lines come through that had higher margin rates. And so the mix of sort of business unit, the mix of products played favorably for us this quarter. Now, I expect that the business unit I spoke that has a little more negative mix, we'll come back next quarter and I would expect that we see the core industrial earnings back to what you saw in the first half.

Yeah, so I just add that the industrial team has shown themselves to be very good at executing on volume leverage. And so as they continue to work Kizans and respond to the customer demand in the gas turbine side and the resub engine side associated with power gen and the steady increase in marine and other applications that they're well-positioned.

But as Bill said, we had some mix, tailwind this quarter, but I still like the direction that they're going and how they're performing.

Yeah, I've asked that question a few times myself, Lou, and the team has come back. They have the, there's some big chunks, as you can imagine, that's associated with what we have to get done in 24. It's primarily around finishing the Spartanburg facility, around purchasing this production machinery for a 350 spoiler.

And again, those are pretty chunky. So we've got a line of sight to it. Five to 10 is in the mix there, but I think we will consume most of that and get to the 290 that we got it towards uncapital expenditures.

You're welcome.

Yeah, Gautam, we'll describe that in more detail at our investor day, but I'll leave you with these thoughts, which is like as we stand today in a growing demand environment where both we and our customers are able to get price and we are able to accelerate our lean transformation on the floors of our factories and get efficient in our supply chain, we can improve, you know, further from this point. We said mid teens at the last investor day, and we've been demonstrating better than that fairly consistently.

But as far as like getting better from where we are today, we're obviously investing and challenging our teams and driving to continuously improve. However, don't know what the environment is going to be in the future yet, and you know, there are other factors that come into play, but we like the investments we're making and automation. We like the investments we're making in our lean transformation.

And like you referenced, the product portfolio, we've really made some efficiency moves there to optimize the portfolio and how we serve customers and are able to run our factories. So I believe we're on a continuous improvement journey. There's quite a bit more productivity in play, but there are other factors to deal with as well and we'll be, we'll be, give you a full some explanation of what we see at our investor day.

Welcome.

Okay. So I always feel generous, but I'm not that generous to give up the customer. But as it relates to the price overall, we're guiding for the full year for that to be close to 8% for the company. And in third quarter, price was 10%. And aero contributed more than a 10% in the industrial less than brought it down to the 10%. So that's kind of where those items came from.

Kyle, and I can't remember the first part of your question. I guess you referenced, Kyle, the core flow through, which I would encourage us not to use that number. Bill was just cleaning up the flow through number for one of the earlier questions in terms of removing that one time price reconciliation from the financial.

Sure. I'll start and flip it to Bill real quick. But, you know, I'd say we've really made it through the luck, the, the, all of our LTA agreements for the first round that we close out sort of post 2022. So from now forward, it should moderate and I'll let Bill kind of fill in the blanks there.

Yeah. Chip, I think you covered it. I think as we look at going forward that I would expect price between three and five percent of would be a more normal normal rate and it will price will still play a role in margin expansion.

Along with work and some of the other muscles, as we talked about, it's up to us to fill in the fill in the rest with productivity, which we're, we're well deployed to achieve.

Welcome.

I guess the way I described is no real change from prior quarters in terms of defense. It's sort of, you know, our, we're seeing price roll through for some smart defense in three queue, but I think in four queue that starts to moderate. So we're not, we're not holding out defense. So we as a large growth lever in this environment, right, right this minute.

Again, the future we see a lot of potential for it to, for defense to have a longer run at these higher levels, especially in smart defense. But we don't have any indication that that's going to happen anytime soon. So I think sort of a moderate performance in OE in defense. So we is what we can expect.

It feels like that that sort of stocking level of the customers has returned to normal to slightly below what their MRP systems would like. So we still feel a strong pull on delivery. A lot of this rating, the growth is due to our ability to get more products through the factory. So, you know, the combination of working with our suppliers and inside our four walls, increasing that production is what led to that growth plus some price.

So I don't see anything unusual. And we feel like we're pretty much following the airframe or rates. In some cases, we're there demand for our increased rate is ahead of their rate break. So we do sometimes see an earlier, earlier break in the demand for us.

Welcome.

Hey, Noah. Hey, thanks for taking the question. How would you frame at this point? What's possible or likely or realistic in your aerospace aftermarket growth rate of the next four to eight quarters compared to what you've been able to achieve in the last four to eight quarters?

Well, that sounds like a trick question. So we see, we like the long term story and what we shared at investor day last time was kind of a a cartoon of graphs that show that we believe that the Woodward case could likely grow at twice the rate of the overall market based on our product positions in terms of what's the install where the install base is growing.

So we still believe in that cartoon and those graphs. We believe we see the proof points along the way with the input we're seeing from leap in GTF and how strong that the newer wide body products are performing. So we believe that that story is playing out in front of us as far as exactly what happens in the next few quarters.

We're not in a position to reveal that because. You know, it could be a little bit little busy up and down, but we believe will be in a position to update that chart for you at the investor day. It's just that it is obviously, again, the other use in those move can also make the quarters a bit a bit lumpy.

So I think the. I'm not sure. Look at the multiplier effect. Yeah. Yeah. The multiplier effect is the hard part to answer. Because the multiplier for something like the 787 is comparing to something so old is not really very much into our MRO system because, you know, the large amount of the 767s let's say are on. They're in the freighter class and not, not many shop visits, so I wouldn't get into the multiplier answer, but from a G. E. N. X. and G. E. 90 standpoint.

These are the major customer platforms that we're on with significant LRUs that require a good amount of service. And those are very good businesses for us and we work very closely with the G. E. through the convergence joint venture to service those LRUs. And we really like that business. It's going very well and growing.

That's a great question, Noah. And, you know, the one that we're we're working through right now is we develop our annual operating plan for. Our fiscal 27. So it's a little premature for us to guide that because that I mean that is the guidance for next year really in terms of earnings growth. So we've been saying that for a while. You know, those are the incrementals we believe in long term.

We've got to do the work to make sure that we're putting a robust plan out there for next year and we'll guide accordingly.

Welcome.

So I think, you know, from our standpoint, automation is a pretty, pretty generic way of approaching machining assembly test.

Material flow transport logistics and that really serves all and markets equally from a sort of an inside out standpoint. It's not really market driven. It's more manufacturing driven. So I feel like it's spread equally amongst the and market that we serve.

So the ones that we're struggling with the most are the ones that like the entire industry has on the on the forefront of their work list. So castings and forgings as well as as rare earth metals as we look forward. We haven't had a big problem yet with those, but that's one that we all forecast coming to be a big challenge within the next few quarters. So we and our customers and suppliers are all working together to try to allocate the right capacity to keep everybody building what they need to build. A few chords away from now on the rare earth. That's sort of an industry level work as far as on the castings and forgings.

We've been working very hard to transition from castings to and forgings to billet that's hogged out on a CNC machine. It's not a very efficient use of material, but it sure is a better way to ensure continuity of the supply chain. So we've taken a lot of of design for manufacturability approaches to control our own destiny on the supply chain. That all being said, we're still carrying five to 10 problematic suppliers that sort of pop up as problems in either the arrow or industrial segment.

And so we just have to stay tuned to companies that run into trouble. We have for anything that has to do with machining. We have rapid response center set up at three different sites. We've processed over 15,000 machine pieces through the through that network of ours in order to bail out suppliers. So we're very active on that front. Hopefully one day it doesn't require quite as much effort, but for now that's what we're doing.

Thank you.

Yeah. So, you know, first of all, just the we feel good about that business and its continued strength. A part of what happened in Q3 was some good strength in Q2. We saw some shipments not get out of Q1. And in Q2, we were able to get out when we needed for Q2 as well as clear out some of the shipments for several reasons that got hung up and we were able to get all of those out. And so then that impacted Q3 from the sequential, but as you saw, the year over year was pretty strong. So again, we feel good about it and I wouldn't read too much into it.

Our plans are to expand margins. We're measuring each of our product managers and each of our business unit VPGMs on a margin expansion target. We rolled all that up and wrestled around and played catch ball with it through our strategic planning process. Now we just got to get it, you know, orchestrated into a annual operating plan that we all like.

But really the target is margin expansion. I believe we can do it. We've got, you know, invest. It's not just like saying do better. We have investments in automation and lean transformation productivity that need to bear fruit. And we're focused on doing that for FY27 without giving you a number.

Yeah. All that plus the moves we're doing to improve the long term performance of the business that require resource and and investments to accomplish. We think even with all those things going on, we've got, we have enough horsepower and capability to deliver margin expansion.

Then Chip, can you update us on the worth of businesses that in terms of the size of LEAP and GTF revenue base relative to CSM 56 and V2500?

We're still marching towards towards that crossover from a repair standpoint. I think as I said last time, we've already crossed it if you include repair plus Sparell or use. So I think right on track, but you know, the one thing we didn't model was the legacy business hanging on this well in terms of both price, work scope and volume. So we're excited about the race that we're in.

You're welcome.

Thank you very much, operator. Before we end the call, I want to let everyone know that we've finalized the date of our investor day. It will be held on Thursday, March 4, 2027 in New York City. I look forward to seeing everyone there. Thanks everyone for joining today's call.