Teledyne reported record Q2 sales up 10.2% (roughly half organic, half acquisitions) and record non-GAAP EPS up 13.5%, with organic growth accelerating across every segment and orders exceeding sales for a seventh straight quarter. Strength was led by defense and energy, with foreign defense up over 15%, marine up 16%, and Aerospace and Defense Electronics up 36.2%, though FLIR's gains were partly offset by a downturn in the DALSA/E2V imaging business. Management raised full-year revenue guidance but cautiously forecast Q3 sales flat with Q2, citing roughly $15-$20 million of possible short-cycle pull-forward ahead of trade-policy announcements, and lifted its buyback authorization to $2 billion as acquisition prices ran high.

What went well
  • Teledyne reported record quarterly sales with second quarter sales up 10.2% (roughly half organic, half acquisitions), the highest total and organic growth in almost three years, with organic growth accelerating for three straight quarters and across every segment.
  • Non-GAAP earnings per share increased 13.5% year-over-year to a record for any second quarter, and orders exceeded sales for the seventh consecutive quarter, with total book-to-bill around 1.1 times.
  • Energy and defense businesses performed very well, with U.S.
  • government defense up 12.5% (primarily organic) and foreign government defense up over 15%, while marine instruments rose 16% on strong offshore energy production and subsea defense sales.
  • Aerospace and Defense Electronics sales jumped 36.2%, and Instrumentation operating margin expanded 149 basis points to 27.6%.
  • Digital Imaging delivered its greatest organic growth in three years on record growth at Teledyne FLIR, where defense margins have risen from below 15% to over 20% over three years.
  • The balance sheet remained strong with debt-to-EBITDA of 1.6 times, and the board raised the stock repurchase authorization from $896 million to $2 billion.
What went wrong
  • Management was cautious that second quarter strength in short-cycle businesses (mainly instruments) may have reflected roughly $15-$20 million of demand pulled forward ahead of planned U.S.
  • trade policy announcements in the third quarter, leading them to forecast Q3 total sales essentially flat with Q2.
  • Cash flow from operating activities fell to $226.6 million from $318.7 million a year earlier, and free cash flow declined to $196.3 million from $301 million, primarily due to higher income tax payments.
  • The DALSA/E2V (DOSA) imaging business has been in a downturn, with its camera and especially sensor sales down, pulling its margins down about 100 basis points year-over-year, and the company took roughly $5.3 million in severance/restructuring charges (about 9 cents) in Q2 that it did not exclude from non-GAAP margins.
  • Commercial aerospace OEM sales declined due in part to on-again, off-again export restrictions.

Management Commentary

Read the Q2 2025 summary ↗
Jason VanWees
Vice Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Welcome to Teledyne's second quarter earnings call. Thank you, and welcome to Teledyne's second quarter earnings call. Here's our first speaker, Mr. Jason VanWees. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Jason VanWees, Vice Chairman. I'd like to welcome everyone to Teledyne's second quarter 2025 earnings release conference call. We released our earnings earlier this morning before the market opened. Joining me today are Teledyne's Executive Chairman, Robert Mehrabian, President and CEO, George Bobb, EVP and CFO, Stephen Blackwood, and Melanie Cibik, EVP General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Secretary. After remarks by Robert, George, and Stephen, we will ask your questions. Of course, before we get started, our attorneys have reminded me to tell you that all forward-looking statements this morning are subject to various assumptions, risks, and caveats as noted in the earnings release and our periodic SEC filings, and, of course, actual results may differ materially.

In order to avoid potential selective disclosures, this call is simultaneously being webcast and replayed, both via webcast and dial-in, and will be available for approximately one month. Here is Robert.

Robert Mehrabian
Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Thank you, Jason, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Today, we reported record quarterly sales. We've achieved greatest total for an organic sales growth in almost three years. Second quarter sales increased 10.2%. Half organic, half acquisitions, and accelerated for three quarters in a row. Sales also increased organically in every segment. Non-GAAP earnings per share increased 13.5% from last year and were also at record for any second quarter. Finally, orders exceeded sales for the second, seventh consecutive quarter. Our energy and defense businesses continue to perform very well due to market strength, but also our specific portfolio of technologies serving growing sectors such as unmanned air and subsea systems, space-based sensors, NATO defense spending, and offshore energy productions.

Sales from our shorter cycle environmental and test and measurement instrumentation businesses also increased single digits, mid-single digits, and this is about the greatest level in a few years. Organic sales growth in digital imaging was also the most in three years, primarily resulting from healthy growth in our Teledyne FLIR's defense and industrial businesses. Nevertheless, we're being a little cautious, worrying about whether second quarter strength in our short cycle businesses resulted from accelerated demand in advance of planned U.S. trade policy announcements in the third quarter. Consequently, we're currently forecasting that total sales in the third quarter will remain essentially flat with the second quarter. Despite spending $770 million year-to-date on acquisitions, our current debt-to-leverage ratio, debt-to-EBITDA, is 1.6, with only fixed-rate debt and approximately $1.17 billion out of $1.2 billion available in our credit facility.

While we're pursuing a number of acquisitions, mostly smaller ones at this time, we will consider stock repurchases when we feel larger acquisitions are too pricey, as we found in the second quarter, and where Teledyne offers the best value. Therefore, our board of directors increased our stock repurchase authorization from $896 million to $2 billion. We will use that, as I said before, if appropriate. George will now briefly comment on the performance of our four segments.

George Bobb
President and CEO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Thank you, Robert. In the Digital Imaging segment, second quarter sales increased 4.3%, which was the greatest year-over-year growth in three years. The performance largely reflected record growth at Teledyne FLIR, where the defense and industrial businesses increased nicely, largely driven by international defense sales, as well as complete unmanned air systems and commercial infrared components and subsystems for the overall unmanned market. We had another quarter of strong orders, with a total Digital Imaging book-to-bill of 1.1 times, but it was especially nice to see bookings of 1.2 times in our industrial and scientific vision systems businesses collectively. Non-GAAP operating margin decreased marginally due in part to greater severance costs, which we did not exclude from non-GAAP margins. In the Instrumentation segment, which consists of our marine, environmental, and test and measurement businesses, second quarter total sales increased 10.2% versus last year.

Overall sales of marine instruments increased 16% due to both strong offshore energy production and subsea defense sales. Sales of environmental instruments increased 5.6%, primarily due to higher sales of process gas safety and emissions monitoring instrumentation. Sales of electronic test and measurement systems, which include oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers, and Ethernet traffic generators, increased 5.5% year-over-year. Instrumentation operating margin in the second quarter increased 149 basis points to 27.6%, and 134 basis points on a non-GAAP basis to 28.5%. In the Aerospace and Defense Electronics segment, second quarter sales increased 36.2%, primarily driven by acquisitions and organic growth of defense electronics products. While commercial aerospace aftermarket sales increased, this was offset by a decline in OEM sales due in part to on-again, off-again export restrictions.

Overall segment operating profit increased year-over-year, but GAAP and non-GAAP segment margin decreased year-over-year but increased sequentially, primarily due to comparatively lower current margins at our recently acquired businesses. For the Engineered Systems segment, second quarter revenue increased 3.3%, and segment operating profit increased 395 basis points due in part to a relatively easy comparison with last year, but also strong execution on a number of government programs. I will now pass the call back to Robert.

Robert Mehrabian
Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Thank you, George. In conclusion, I want to thank everyone at Teledyne for delivering double-digit top and bottom-line growth. Also, we're very optimistic about our long-term outlook. Our growth in our long-cycle business portfolio remains very stable. Most of our short-cycle businesses have returned to reasonable sales and orders growth. As I mentioned earlier, we're a bit cautious because of the near-term pullings, perhaps as a consequence of various tariff scenarios. Having said that, we remain very optimistic about the future given our portfolio and where the markets in our domain are moving. With that, I want to turn the call to Steve.

Stephen Blackwood
EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Thank you, Robert, and good morning. I'll first discuss some additional financials for the quarter not covered by Robert, and then I will discuss our third quarter and full year 2025 outlook. In the second quarter, cash flow from operating activities was $226.6 million, compared with $318.7 million in 2024. Free cash flow, that is cash flow from operating activities less capital expenditures, was $196.3 million in the second quarter of 2025, compared with $301 million in 2024. Cash flow decreased year-over-year in the second quarter, primarily due to higher income tax payments in the second quarter of 2025 compared with 2024. Capital expenditures were $30.3 million in the second quarter of 2025, compared with $17.7 million in 2024. Depreciation and amortization expense was $86.5 million in the second quarter of 2025, compared with $77.8 million in 2024. We ended the quarter with $2.3 billion of net debt.

That is approximately $2.62 billion of debt less cash of $310.9 million. Now turning to our outlook, management currently believes that GAAP earnings per share in the third quarter of 2025 will be in the range of $4.39-$4.54 per share, with non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $5.35-$5.45. For the full year 2025, we believe that GAAP earnings per share will be in the range of $17.59-$17.97, with non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $21.20-$21.50. I will now pass the call back to Robert.

Analyst Q&A

Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Thank you, Steve. We'd now like to take your questions. Carrie, if you're ready to proceed with the question and answer, please go ahead.
Andrew Baskoglia — Analyst, BNP Paribas Asset Management
Hey, good morning, guys.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Morning, Andrew.
Just wanted to touch on your guidance for Q3 and some of the caution you're citing. Where exactly is this pull forward within your business segments? Can you comment on, are you seeing this more with some of the short-cycle businesses versus long-cycle? If you could add that to your comments.
Yeah, I think. Andrew, the comment is primarily about short-cycle businesses because the longer-cycle businesses, we have reasonably good visibility as to where things are and where our programs are. Short-cycle businesses, especially things like instruments, we get sometimes two weeks, three weeks, book-to-bill cycle times. We kind of are a little cautious. We worried that maybe $15-$20 million, mostly in that domain, may have been pulled in. Now, we're not sure. Listening to our folks, that seems to be maybe the case. There's little of that in our longer-cycle businesses like Teledyne FLIR Defense, for example.
Okay, that's helpful. Can you comment on order activity in some of these longer-cycle businesses? I know you guys had a press release out. Supporting U.S.'s stance on dominance and wondering if you've seen an order uptick within unmanned systems or the components you supply to them.
Yeah, I think. Specifically, if you look at our unmanned systems in FLIR. And generally in FLIR. First quarter, we saw book-to-bill of 1.17. This quarter, just a little over one. Even Digital Imaging, excluding FLIR, recognizing that the comps are easier. We saw an uptick on orders, book-to-bill, as high as 1.2. In the other businesses. Lumpy businesses like Engineered Systems is way over one, but we know that's lumpy. Overall, I think our book-to-bill has been healthy. As we mentioned earlier, this is like, it's about 1.1 across all of our portfolio. It's the seventh consecutive quarter that we've seen that. Looking at that, you have to be positive. I am. We're always a little cautious, maybe too cautious. Let me leave it at that.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew Baskoglia — Analyst, BNP Paribas Asset Management
Hey, good morning, everyone. Better to be safe and cautious than sorry, Robert. I do want to ask you. Yeah, I did want to kind of maybe push you a little bit on digital imaging. The book-to-bill is strong. I think this is the second quarter of 1.1 book-to-bill or higher. Yet you still really only have, I think, modest organic sales growth factored into the second half. Could you just help us reconcile why we would not see more of a meaningful pickup in sales just based on those bookings?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah, it's a kind of story of two chapters. FLIR is strong, even when some of the short-cycle businesses, like in cameras, etc., in DOSA to Viggo down. Our industrial businesses seem to be holding up pretty well. In the FLIR, both our ability to sell cores, infrared cores, as well as cameras, they seem to be all right. Of course, FLIR Defense is just doing really well. Some of the problems that we have is in our DOSA E2V. Now, remember, that business has been on a—it's been down. And while we're getting a little order pickup, it's easier comp when you go to book-to-bill than a business that's down. On the other hand, George and the managers in that business have been able to take cost out, reorganize where necessary.
As George mentioned, we took a little hit in Q2 because we count our cost expenses, cost-out expenses in our non-GAAP. So that business is stabilizing. Again, we think some of our longer-cycle businesses that we see growing are going to be more like Q4 and maybe early 2026. Maybe that's why that we're kind of where we are in terms of what you mentioned, being a little cautious.
Damien Carras — Analyst, UBS
Okay. Just to clarify, you have not really seen the short cycle start falling off in kind of real time, but your assessment was, "Hey, maybe there is $15 million-$20 million of a little uplift that we got." You have not seen that yet.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
No. There are different forces operating in our management. Some of them are a little more cautious than others. And frankly, over the last 25 years, we've learned the hard way that being a little cautious pays dividends over the long term, even though sometimes you look at your stock after an earnings like today and say, "No, no good. Did you go and punish?" Having said that, we'll be fine. I think we're just going to be fine.
Damien Carras — Analyst, UBS
Okay. Fair enough. Really appreciate that. Then my second question, the aerospace and defense margins did come in quite nicely. Would you maybe be able to elaborate a little bit? Was there any pricing or business mix factors, productivity? Maybe just give us a sense for what drove that margin strength. Is there anything that we should be bearing in mind the rest of this year as we update our models?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah, Damien, I'm going to let George pick some of this up. In general, what happens is if you look at the margins. When we make acquisitions, the margins go down because our acquired businesses, by and large, have lower margins. If you look at Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, our margins improve in those acquired businesses. Now, if you exclude the acquired businesses, yes, our margins are very healthy, excellent execution. George, you want to comment on that?
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. I think I would just say in the legacy defense electronics businesses and the aerospace business, margins continue to be strong. In the new acquisitions, we acquired two companies here in the last several months, Micropack and Key Optik. We had a good uptick in Q1 in the margins in Micropack. In both of those acquisitions, we're doing what we always do, which is work on improving the margins as we integrate those companies.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah, Damien, just to kind of put things in perspective, I think. Our shareholders might benefit from this analysis. If you for a second, if you exclude FLIR. We've spent $1.9 billion in cash acquiring businesses that are of some significance, 47 of them. What we paid for them at the time we acquired them was nine times EBITDA. If you look at the same businesses today and you look at the EBITDA and say, "What did we pay for it?" It's 3.4 times. That is really just simply improved margins. Even when you include FLIR, which we've only had it three years, even there. What we paid when we acquired and what it is today, there's about 100 basis point improvement. Having said that. That's really the operating book that we have. Acquire businesses, don't overpay. Focus on improving margins, do your 80/20, anything else you have to do.
Go from there. If you look at our overall businesses, no matter which year, how many, which segment, it's the same story.
Damien Carras — Analyst, UBS
Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. Good luck out there.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Thank you, Damien.
Greg Konrad — Analyst, Jefferies
Good morning.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Good morning, Greg.
Greg Konrad — Analyst, Jefferies
Maybe just to follow up on your guidance that Q3 would look similar from a top-line perspective relative to Q2. I mean, I know what you did with the EPS guidance, but has there been any change to the revenue guidance you gave on the last call just as we think about kind of expectations for Q4?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Let me stay with Q3 for a second, if I may, Greg. The way we're looking at it is we're looking at getting some uptick from acquired businesses in Q3, maybe about 5%, similar to Q2, and very little organic. Again, the reason we're doing that is we're just kind of looking at our short-cycle businesses. It's almost impossible to predict where they're going to end up. Now, we have raised. Overall, we've raised our guidance for the year, of course, primarily because Q2 came in higher. Even with a flat Q3, we've raised our guidance for the year in terms of revenue by almost $20 million-plus. Given our conservative nature, for us, that's a hefty increase. We think for the year, we'll have probably about $6,030,000,000, maybe a little more. We'll have growth of 6.3%.
We're assuming most of that, 4% plus, 4.2%, will come from acquisitions, maybe 2-plus percent from organic. We are also looking at effects, effects, and other things. There are a lot of moving parts, but that's the best we can do at this time.
Greg Konrad — Analyst, Jefferies
Thank you. I appreciate that. Maybe just to dig into industrial and scientific vision a bit, I think you called out the book-to-bill was 1.2 in the quarter. I appreciate some of the short-cycle commentary. Any additional color in kind of what you're seeing in that business, either from an end-market perspective and how you're kind of thinking about the outlook for the year?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Sure. Why don't I ask George to address that one too?
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah, sure. In that part of the business, the industrial and scientific vision, what we saw in Q2 is the machine vision cameras business had year-over-year growth in applications like semiconductor mask and wafer inspection. The machine vision sensors business was down year-over-year on sales but had an orders uptick year-over-year. Both machine vision cameras and machine vision sensors had increases in orders year-over-year. As you mentioned, overall book-to-bill was 1.2. We still think that business for the full year is relatively flat. I think we're encouraged by some of those order trends that we saw in Q2.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
As we mentioned before, George, and even before George, we took cost out. We have kind of stabilized. We feel we have stabilized that business to a revenue stream that is lower than it used to be. Now we can focus on improving the margins, as we have done in other businesses. George, you did that in marine as an example.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
That's right. I would say we run the same playbook always, right? Which is we focus on getting the cost structure right and growing from there.
Greg Konrad — Analyst, Jefferies
Maybe just sneak in one last one. I mean, you gave a lot of positive defense commentary. I mean, if we think across the businesses, can you give some color on what overall defense was up and how maybe international contributed to that, just given some of the positive commentary?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. There are two parts. I think that's a really relevant question at this point. We have U.S. government defense, and we have foreign government defense. The U.S. government defense improved 12.5% year-over-year. It was primarily organic, primarily. Foreign government also improved, and over 15%. There's a very good reason for that. Our defense portfolio is spread across different countries and different products. We have a very strong presence in Europe. For example, our very well-known nanodrones are not made in the U.S.; they're made in Europe. On the other hand, some of our other drones are made in Canada, and some are made in the U.S. When we look at growth, we look at Europe where defense spending is increasing. We have a nice footprint of manufacturing facilities across Europe. As you well know, in-country production is the insourcing. It is a key.
If you already have an existing footprint, that's really good. The other thing is that everybody's talking about unmanned. Yes. Unmanned systems are not new to Teledyne. We built our first unmanned drones during the Vietnam War. We built 5,000 Firebase that were used as targets and intelligence gathering. Unfortunately, when we got our divorce from Allegheny, they sold our best drone business, which was the Global Hawk. They sold it for $155 million to Northrop. That business just went away. It's only come back because of FLIR. FLIR has a very strong portfolio of drones, both very small nanodrones and others. The other part that we are enjoying is that in the first 20 years of our new history, we got unmanned vehicles. We bought 21 companies, underwater companies, marine companies. We have underwater unmanned vehicles that are equal to as many as we sell that are above water.
Finally, the issue on drones is low cost. The lower the cost, the better. We are fortunate because of FLIR that we can supply sensors, EOIR sensors, both for our drones as well as other people's drones. We're happy to sell people sensors. That's a big market for us. The combination of being the company in infrared, having infrared and visible sensors, and packaging them for our drones and selling them for other people's drones has put us in a nice place in this environment. I know that's a very long answer to a short question, but I think the context is important. Drones are nothing new to Teledyne.
Greg Konrad — Analyst, Jefferies
That was great. Thank you.
Noah Poponak — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Hey, good morning, everyone.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Morning, Noah.
Noah Poponak — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Do you guys have growth in orders versus growth in revenue or a book-to-bill for the first half of the year in what you would call broadly defined short cycle or in machine vision and instrumentation?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. I think in instrumentation, which would be short cycle except for parts of Marine, Noah, that are defense-related, which are underwater vehicles again, I think it's just above one because in Q1, it was 1.04. In Q2, it's 0.97. So average is a little over one, let's say one. That does not change much across the businesses. Environmental is a little healthier, surprisingly. TNM is healthy, but still just below one. Marine is obviously above one. On digital imaging, as George mentioned and I mentioned, we're getting a— We're kind of getting a little bit of an uptick in our DALSA E2V where we had, we took some cost out, and we had lower revenue. Q1 was 1.02. Q2 is 1.23. We're cognizant of the fact that you get good book-to-bill when your revenue is down. Nevertheless, it's way over one. FLIR is really healthy over one.
It's 1.17 Q1, 1.02 Q2. So average is way over one. We feel good about those businesses right now.
Noah Poponak — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Okay. Yeah. I mean, we're all thinking about the same thing here with the back half growth guide. I recognize the pull forward you're mentioning, but $15 million-$20 million is 1% of the revenue in the quarter. If you had the acceleration to the 6% organic growth in the quarter, and you're saying 3Q and 4Q are 1 and 1, you're sort of saying what was 6 and 1 is 5 and 2. You're still, adjusted for the pull forward, you're still projecting a not insignificant deceleration in total organic revenue growth when the long cycle's growing 5%-7% and you're telling us the short cycle's getting better, I guess.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Exactly.
Noah Poponak — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Is the short cycle—I guess if instrumentation book-to-bill is still below one. And you've only seen a short window of digital imaging orders getting better. Plus there's just a lot happening in the macro. I mean, I guess I'm trying to get at how much of what you're saying about 3Q is a very bottom-up plan versus you guys said, "Hey, given all those mixed inputs and we need a little more time to feel good about short cycle, let's just call the third quarter flat sequentially and hope to beat it and see what the indicators are in three months.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. No, exactly. In the next three days, starting right after this meeting, we go into operations reviews with all of our businesses across the globe. They all come in here. What we got to do is George and I have to sort through that they do not sandbag us. People have a tendency to be cautious. We got to challenge them without getting them to become too effervescent. It is a balance. I am hoping that we will get some of these poolings in Q3 and Q4, right? I mean, as long as this whole international trade is volatile, who knows?
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. I thought volatile trade was causing push-outs, not pull-ins. I wonder if your guys aren't telling you that.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
The reason I say that is it's both. If people think tariffs are going to go up in a certain area from a sales perspective, then they might like to get their orders in and get under the tariffs. On the other hand, it could be the reverse if tariffs are high and they think they're going to go down. Right now, it's so uncertain. Every day you pick up the paper. No, today's Japan 15%. Somebody else is at 18%. We are very cautious and we are looking at that just like you are. Yeah.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay. I get it. Fair enough. Could you spend another minute on the Digital Imaging margins. And what you're thinking happens in the back half and you've spoken to your medium-term framework. Just given those stepped back a little bit in the quarter?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. Noah, again, there's tale of two cities. In FLIR. Margins have continuously increased. For example, in FLIR Defense, when we acquired the business, our margins were more like just below 15%. Today, they're over 20%. Over a three-year period, that's a pretty healthy improvement. FLIR margins, by and large, have improved. Now, the flip side is because of the downturn in our camera and sensor, especially sensor business. The margins in DALSA E2V have gone down. Now, overall, together, if you look at— By the way, we also, as George mentioned, we have some charges we took in Q2 to kind of right-size the business. So the margins, if you look at DALSA E2V year over year, they've gone down 100 basis points, but I would attribute most of that to the cost out.
Flip side, FLIR margins are as high as 24.2% in Q2 of this year, and they've gone up about 30 basis points. When you look at the overall digital imaging, even with 100 basis points down in DALSA E2V, digital imaging as a whole, even with the cost out, is only down 10 basis points or flat. That, to me, is encouraging because for a long time, everybody was saying, "Gee, what are you doing with FLIR?" FLIR is doing really well. It's carrying the day. As soon as we straighten out, which we are, George straightens out with his people, the DALSA E2V picture, we're going to be fine.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Interesting. Okay. That's super helpful. What did you take in charges in millions of dollars in the quarter?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
About 5.3. 5.3, the way I look at it, every $600,000 is a penny.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
It's about 8.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
9 cents.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay. Got it. Thank you.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Thank you, Noah. By the way, thank you for sending those three prepared questions. It is very helpful to me.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. We'll keep doing it. Thanks again.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. We're still there. We did that in Q2. We improved it 57 basis points, not to nitpick. Right now, we're at 55 for the year. 60 is a good number. George, what do you think?
I think that's right. I think, yeah.
That's where it is.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Looking at the instrumentation business, the marine portion of that business, the marine instrumentation business has generated strong growth, it seems like for the better part of a couple of years now. I wanted to, if we could, maybe just if you could talk a little bit about the drivers there. It's both, I think, both defense and commercial. Subs. Is it sustainable at these, given what you're seeing?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
I'm going to let George answer that. From a sustainability perspective, there's two ways to look at it. One of them is the growth. Are you going to sustain a 15% growth going forward year in, year out? The answer is no. Is it sustainable because it's at a high level? Yes. Because we have really unique products. George, you want to add to that?
Yeah. I would just add, so the energy part of the business is about 40% of the marine business. We continue to see strong growth there in the subsea interconnects for oil production, for example. Offshore. Streamers for geophysical surveys for oil and gas exploration. We expect that to continue at least for the next few years, subject, of course, to oil prices, which we can't predict. On the defense side of the business, that's probably, give or take, 30% of the marine business. What's driving that? Subsea unmanned vehicles. A lot of demand for unmanned vehicles. Globally in particular. We also have a nice submarine interconnect business there where we're on platforms like the Virginia and Columbia-class submarine. That business is doing well.
I think in that case, on the defense side, certainly think that's sustainable given the overall environment geopolitically, particularly where we're selling vehicles into places like the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea. Certainly, submarines are among the U.S. Navy's top priorities.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay. Last question. If I could just slip one other one in. It sounds like Micropack margins were up. That's going well. Are you still thinking in terms of Key Optik being able to add about $0.15 to EPS this year?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
The answer is yes. Both in Micropack and Key Optik, as we look Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Margins are consistently improving and projected to improve. That's our storybook, right?
Yep.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Thank you.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
By the way, Key Optik turned out to be a really good acquisition. It's very interesting. There's a part of it that's in the U.S., which are energetics, etc., when you separate missiles from what drives them. In Europe, especially in the U.K., it's a lot of military applications which are very closely tied to what FLIR makes. What George has done is has the U.K. part report to Jifen. By the way, that's spelled J-I-H, capital F-E-N. Reports to Jifen Lee, who runs our FLIR Defense. She's integrating that into FLIR Defense, even though we're reporting in a segment. Doesn't matter. It's how you manage it and how you enjoy the fruits of having similar products, different customers. Key Optik makes products in Europe. We can sell those products now in the U.S. Of course, the opposite is true with FLIR. There we go.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Thank you.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. I think you got it. I think we sell it to our drone products. And our drone products are obviously not just the ability to put our sensors in, but we're developing new drones all the time. The latest drone that's going to go into pre-production is a weaponized drone. We have a very competitive drone there called the R1. The other thing is that we have unique drones in the small nano drones, which you've seen, the Black Hornets, which are growing in revenue and in adoption by many countries. On the sensor side, we have this large business in Santa Barbara that makes cooled and uncooled infrared and infrared plus visible sensors. We sell them to anybody. We're not going to just sell it to our own. Actually, we make a lot more revenue selling it to other people.
Our $200 million worth of product plus that they make, they also enable another $800 million of revenue across Teledyne by the sensors. I'm sure other people are enjoying the same thing. Basically, you want to make sensors for other people. It's very simple. The math is really simple. The larger the production floor, you spread your cost and development across a broader sales channel. The more sales you have, the better your margins, consequently, because you have more. We'll sell it to anybody. We do, actually. We sell to competitors. We sell to people that are not competitors. We sell to both defense companies and non-defense companies.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Got it. Okay. For the one big beautiful bill that passed, are there any changes that we should consider for the R&D tax changes or any other new programs that you guys see a lot of runway from?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Yeah. There are two. One has to do with the writing down, the R&D, which obviously, it's good if you can accelerate it. The other part is really the cash tax portion. We think that would be lower in the second half of the year by as much as $30 million. Flip sides. R&D credits, you can accelerate. The other side, you're expected to pay $30 million more in taxes than we're expecting now, too, where calculations show. We're obviously very busy trying to figure out all the R&D expenditures that we have across the company. It's been good from that perspective.
Stephen Blackwood — EVP and CFO, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Got it. Thank you.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Of course.
On Golden Dome, there seems to be some funding coming through to that program. Can you talk a little bit about which Teledyne products have the most relevance to? Are you already engaging with some of the industry partners? Just give a sense of how big of an opportunity that could be for the company. Thank you.
Thank you. It's a little too early to kind of be too specific. We have a lot of activity there, coordinated activity. I'm going to let George answer that.
Sure. The one big beautiful bill act did include some funding to advance the Golden Dome concept. In general, we've got a large presence in space-based imaging and electronic subsystems that go into things like missile tracking. We would expect, given our presence on, for example, the Space Development Agency Tranche programs, overhead persistent infrared programs, things like that, that we'd have opportunities mostly in the space-based sensing, but also some of the electronic subsystems.
Yeah. And we're trying to coordinate our response. We're getting some early requests for proposals from some of our customers. We're positively inclined towards that. Now, historically, we have participated in the defense systems that they use in the Middle East that Israel uses. This is very different, obviously. It's bigger. It's broader. It's more space-based. Because we have a pretty rich heritage of space imaging, both in science and defense, by the way, they overlap. As George mentioned, we play in all of those domains. You're going to have to use those if you're going to have any kind of a broad defense system looking down. I don't know if that answered your question.
Thank you. It's very helpful. On the share buyback authorization, I'm just curious whether we should be taking that as an indicator that the pipeline of activity is slowing down or whether you're starting to see value in the stock. If you can maybe expand on that, that'd be helpful.
Sure. It's, again, tale of two cities, right? Last time we bought stock, the stock was at $400. Now it's over $500. So you ask yourself, is that a wise thing to do? I think the most important thing is to have the optionality on the table. In terms of acquisition availability, there are available acquisitions, but they're insane in prices. People are paying 19, 20 times EBITDA for products, for businesses that you got to go and do three, four years of hard fixing. We, one case as an example without mentioning the exact nature of it. We bid a price which we thought was a stretch for us. And somebody bid a price 30% higher. It just blew us out of the water. There are acquisitions with the insanity of the price until it kind of moderates. We're going to sit on the sideline.
We may buy our stock back if that's the best value. We would also, if we look at, we have all fixed debt going forward. The longest fixed debt, the cost to us in terms of is about 5%. And right now, we're earning just north of 4%. You look at that and you say, "What do you do? Sit on $800 million-$900 million of cash, or do you use some of that?" Not all of it, some of that to redeem some of the bonds. The good thing is our debt-to-EBITDA ratio is 1.6. If we do nothing, it'll go down to 0.5 next year, in the next year. It's a nice place to be. We may buy our stock. We may buy businesses if insanity prevails.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Hi, Joe.
Apologies if you said this in the beginning. I missed the very beginning of the call. Just relating to the pull forward, the potential there, I know it's not a huge number, but were you seeing tangible reductions in orders in early July that confirmed something like this? Or is it more just something that you're just maybe worried about but aren't seeing evidence of it?
The answer is no. We did not see it. We are just. It is. The cautious nature of Teledyne to kind of not be effervescent. We have not seen it. I hope we will not see it. I hope we can say next quarter that we pulled forward. We have not seen any evidence, no.
Got it. Okay. Last quarter, given all the controversy around tariffs and we did not know what was going on and raising prices, you guys were building in some kind of contingency on the demand side related to price actions you may have to take to combat. Now, as tariffs have de-escalated, have you removed any of that kind of contingency from the guide now that we are three months further along and the tariffs are coming in at lower rates?
Yeah. There are two parts to this, as you well know. One of them is on the sales side. The other part is on the cost side. Let me deal with the sales side. The good thing about Teledyne, in terms of tariffs, is that 82% of our revenue on the sales side comes from U.S.-based businesses that are selling to U.S.-based customers or international locations selling to international customers. In that way, 82% of our product is under the tent, and we do not worry that much about it. Of the other 18% of the sales, approximately 75%, or 14% of the total 18, are U.S. exports to international locations. That can have an effect. Fortunately for us, only 2% of our sales are to China in that domain. Finally, 4% of our external sales are from Teledyne international locations to U.S.-based customers, where new tariffs may apply.
We have products that are extremely unique, like magnetrons for X-ray cancer treatment, which are unique products. We think that is not going to be affected much. Having said all of that, we will see some impact, but it will not be very large. On the cost side, that is a different story. We import about $700 million of material, which enters our cost of goods. If you assume tariffs are, let's say, 11%, that is $80 million. We can probably mitigate some of that by using U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the fact that we are doing U.S. military, DOD products. That leaves maybe $60 million in the cost, which is $15 million a quarter, which we have to make up with price increases. I do not know. That is as wholesome a picture as I can give.
What I'm getting at is I think you guys were factoring in every % of price that you need to do will kind of destroy demand to a certain extent. Do you still feel that way? Is that kind of contingency still in the guide?
No. The answer is no. We've become less cautious in that domain.
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Teledyne's history would repeat itself. How's that? I think. No, I think it all depends on our short cycle business because we have a really good view on the long cycle. We're seeing growth in, as George mentioned, we're seeing growth in our test and measurement. We're seeing growth in our environmental, surprisingly. If those hold up, we'll be fine.
Great. Can you talk a little bit more about the test and measurement business and the performance during the quarter and your expectations for the second half? I think last quarter, you called out that you saw strong Ethernet test sales, and that's related to AI. Just curious if there are any additional areas of strength you saw during the quarter, any additional color?
Let George answer that, please.
Sure. We had about 5.5% organic growth in the test and measurement business in Q2. It was our third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. Fundamentally, the protocol sales drove most of that growth, but the oscilloscope sales were also kind of slightly higher. On the oscilloscope side, it is driven by some of the high-speed applications, also driven by some power and motor drive analyzers. On the protocol side, yes, it has been driven by those network applications, high-speed communications, things like PCI Express. We continue to, again, that business has stabilized. We have seen nice consecutive growth in three quarters, year over year. We still expect the business to be up kind of low single digits for the full year. It is solid for now.
Yeah. Anything that increases traffic increases requirements for larger storage capacity, and anything to do with AI is, of course, just that. Would benefit our protocol businesses.
Perfect. Thank you.
Terry, how are we doing?
Robert Mehrabian — Executive Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Okay. Let's go to Jason then.
Jason VanWees — Vice Chairman, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Again, thanks everyone for joining us today. If you have follow-up questions, feel free to call me at the number on the earnings release. Terry, if you'd give the replay information over the call, the webcast, we'd appreciate it. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you.
Source: TELEDYNE TECHNOLOGIES INC earnings call transcript (2025-07-23). Management commentary and analyst Q&A are reproduced as delivered; speaker roles as stated on the call.

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