At curtiss-wright, where innovation is core to our culture, we understand the critical importance of developing new capabilities and technologies to support our customers while aligning to the fastest underlying growth vectors in our markets.

Guiding our internal focus is Curtiss-Wright's Innovation System - a cloud-based, cross-enterprise platform that every employee can access, and under the spirit of One Curtiss-Wright, it spurs ideas and encourages collaboration across the organization. We maintain a rigorous stage gate review process to ensure that the strongest ideas move forward and to learn from our experiences and failures when they do occur. We continue to identify ways to improve our efficiency and connectivity, including the use of data analytics that enables us to turn innovative ideas into long-term solutions for our customers. This process is further supported by our Innovation Champions focused on promoting, encouraging and driving innovation in their organizations, as well as enhanced corporate oversight and selective funding to help advance certain projects. We typically have over 1,000 ideas in the Innovation System at any given time, many of which have the potential to become actively pursued projects. As these ideas evolve into R&D projects, our analysis of market and customer trends, and expectations for return on those investments, are critical to ensure each innovation is aligned with opportunities to enhance our future organic growth.

In 2024, Curtiss-Wright, once again, grew its total investments in R&D at a faster pace than sales - and we did so while achieving record financial results. We are fueling our competitive advantage by accelerating our investments in innovation and R&D, and balancing opportunities that will drive short-, medium- and long-term growth across the entirety of Curtiss-Wright's portfolio of technologies. These investments are often coordinated in close alignment with our customers, as we develop innovative new products to help maintain or enhance our position as a critical supplier and influence our value proposition. In addition to enhancing our current solutions, we seek opportunities to expand our content and to apply the resources and intellectual property (IP) developed under one investment to other markets we serve. This has become a proven avenue of success for Curtiss-Wright. Overall, across our portfolio, we have successfully managed our global engineering resources by balancing internally-driven investments and by securing customer funding, and we're constantly evaluating opportunities today which may become meaningful drivers to Curtiss-Wright not only in this decade but well into the 2030s.

Within our Aerospace & Industrial segment, we have maintained a steady focus on investments in power management electronics to support electrification in the industrial vehicles market particularly with on-highway and off-highway vehicles. Within Commercial Aerospace, we are identifying ways to support decarbonization with innovations in sensor technologies for extreme temperature environments that will be key contributors to current and next-generation engines, enabling higher efficiencies and lower emissions.

In Defense Electronics, Curtiss-Wright is an industry-leading supplier of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) embedded computing technology. Within this business, we continuously invest in internally-funded R&D to advance critical, trusted computing and secure communications solutions that maintain our technological leadership, stay ahead of our customers' needs, and speed the delivery of next-generation technology to the tactical edge. This includes rugged Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) based solutions to accelerate the deployment of leading-edge compute technologies into multi-platform solutions (as pictured on the left), which can be a key differentiator in our customers' bids and proposals to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In addition, through our Fabric100™ product line, this ecosystem of very high-performance processors, network switches and processing units, such as GPU and FPGA modules, brings state-of-the-art expertise to enable faster data communications capabilities for sensor and mission processing applications.

Lastly, in our Naval & Power segment, Curtiss-Wright has been a crucial supplier of naval nuclear propulsion equipment since its inception to the industry more than 60 years ago, and today, we remain aligned with the DoD's top shipbuilding programs. We have also continued to benefit from consistent customer-funded development in support of next-generation programs which will secure our future for decades to come. In commercial nuclear, we continue to benefit from customer funding supporting the development of advanced and small modular reactors where we are actively engaged and pursuing business on all major designs, and thus far, have announced contracts awarded by X-energy and TerraPower as we continue to support their efforts to decarbonize the existing energy infrastructure and create clean and reliable energy. We are also leveraging our significant experience in reactor coolant pump technology for Westinghouse on the AP1000 reactor in the development of critical subsea pumping technology solutions to support offshore drilling and production platforms.

Looking ahead, we will remain dedicated to making balanced, targeted, and disciplined investments in both core IP and customized solutions, while pursuing the highest returns on our investments, to drive long-term profitable growth.