Management of Crane NXT Co, a maker of products including ones for the gaming sector, says the company has achieved sales of about US$1.49 billion, the majority from its Crane Payment Innovations (CPI) business.
“We’re ending 2024, based on our guidance coming out of the third quarter call, at about US$1.5 billion in sales,” stated Aaron Saak, Crane NXT’s president and chief executive. He was speaking on Tuesday at the 25th Annual New Ideas for the New Year Conference, hosted by brokerage CJS Securities Inc.
Mr Saak said the CPI business generated sales of “about US$870 million” in full-year 2024, while sales in the security and authentication technologies business stood at “about US$620 million”.
The US$1.49-billion figure for last year would represent a year-on-year increase of circa 7.2 percent from the US$1.39 billion in net sales reported for full-year 2023.
In November, when it announced its third-quarter results, Crane NXT had updated its guidance for sales growth for 2024 to between 6 percent to 8 percent.
At the time, the company said its net leverage stood at circa 1.7 times, a figure that Mr Saak said on Tuesday gave Crane NXT “capacity” for continued mergers and acquisitions (M&A). “We have a very rich M&A funnel,” he added.
In May last year, Crane NXT completed the US$270-million acquisition of OpSec Security Group Ltd, a provider of brand protection and authentication services.
In October, Crane NXT announced a definitive agreement with De La Rue Plc to acquire the latter’s authentication business for GBP300 million (US$365.9 million currently) in cash. The acquisition is expected “to be completed in the first half of 2025,” confirmed Crane NXT’s CEO in his Tuesday’s remarks.
In that same month, Crane NXT said it had completed the acquisition of the “smart packaging” assets of TruTag Technologies Inc. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Mr Saak stated: “We feel very confident that we will execute our continued M&A activities similar to the OpSec and De La Rue.”
The executive said such acquisition would be “both in the security and authentication technologies segment,” but also in other areas “that are one-step adjacencies” from the group’s CPI business.
On the conference, Christina Cristiano, Crane NXT’s senior vice president and chief financial officer, said the company expects the performance of sales in the gaming segment within the CPI business to return to normal by the second half of this year.
“The gaming market has been going through a correction of inventory levels with our OEM [original equipment manufacturers] customers, where inventory levels got higher than normal as a result of long lead times,” observed Ms Cristiano.
“During Covid and right after that, our lead times went up to over one year, and a normal lead time would be anywhere between eight and 12 weeks,” she explained.
The CFO added: “We’ve seen a built of our backlog as a result of over ordering, that our customers have been working down now over the last year, year-and-a-half. We expected this to be resolved by the end of 2024 but … it’s taking a little longer than what we thought. It will happen now more towards the middle of 2025.”
Ms Cristiano said the CPI business, outside of gaming, was “growing at mid-single digits”.
In June, Michael Mahan was named as president of CPI business, with effect from July 8.
