Today's discussion also includes certain non-GAAP measures, which are defined and reconciled in our MD&A. With that, I'll turn over the call to Randy. Randy, please go ahead.
Thank you, Glen, very much appreciate the introduction there. We're going to go through our entire deck. The first part of the deck is designed for potential shareholders or potential investors. Obviously, I think most of the people on the call here are already shareholders. We're going to go through that part relatively quickly. We'll get into the quarter. We actually have a short video to play after the presentation, to give our investors a glimpse of what we're doing at North Carolina, and we'll get into the question answers as Glen talked about. I'm going to turn the first part over to Jordan. Jordan, over to you.
Thanks, Randy. Cellular Concrete, we're a specialty contractor. We're a leading provider of lightweight, cost-effective, and durable cellular concrete for infrastructure projects. We provide solutions to customers' geotechnical challenges using cellular concrete, and we do this on time, on budget, and with extreme quality. Customers choose cellular concrete because one or more of its physical properties as well as its competitive cost advantage, and we have a strong competitive advantage in the market. Our financial strength and overall growth trends have been positive. Our compounding annual growth rate has been 25% since 2017. The last three years, we've had very consistent positive financial results. We've had a record 2025 in almost all of our KPIs, a record adjusted EBITDA, cash flow from ops, operations, and earnings per share. 2026 is also forecasted to be another great year.
You can see some of our financial metrics on the right there in the chart. I won't go into that, but I will just remind you guys that CEMATRIX is an industry leader. The global cellular concrete market is significant and is expected to continue to grow. Increased infrastructure spending in Canada and U.S. provides very healthy tailwinds. I will say that our team and corporate timeline hasn't changed. Our management there and board of directors is still the same as last year. I won't go through that, nor the company timeline, but I will just touch briefly on the insider ownership status. Our shares outstanding are 149.7 million shares fully diluted, 157.8 million shares approximately. Of which we have insider ownership at around 11% or 16 million shares, with the bulk of that being between Randy and I at roughly 14 million shares. Next slide, please.
Just to give you a quick product description, I'm sure many of you are familiar with this, but Cellular Concrete is made by mixing cement, water, and a foaming agent. That foaming agent is basically injected into a slurry and waits for the cement to harden around it, leaving inside of it air pockets that make it lightweight, and also provide plenty of strength for the customer. Our key properties include cost-effectiveness, low density or lightweight, a high bearing capacity. It's extremely pumpable, highly flowable and self-leveling. Self-compacting, has thermal insulating properties, is durable, and highly excavatable. Our primary applications include a lightweight engineered fill, MSE walls or retaining wall back fills, flowable self-compacting fills, pipe and culvert abandonments, tunnel and annular grout, and shallow utility and foundation installation, to name just a few.
We're going to skip the next couple of slides here, MJ. Yeah.
I'll take it over then.
Thanks. Thanks, MJ.
Thanks, Jordan.
You bet.
Before we get into the quarter, let's review some previous financial highlights. As Jordan mentioned, we had a record year in 2025. Our EBITDA was higher than the previous 20 years combined at CAD 8.3 million. If you even add up 2023 and 2024, we are exceeding that. If you think about the rule of 40 for great investment, our year-over-year growth was 27% plus our EBITDA margin of 18%, so we are exceeding that as well. Our revenue is growing. As Jordan mentioned, we have a positive bottom line. We're generating cash. We talked about CAGR already, the adjusted EBITDA being a record in 2025 of CAD 8.3 million. Our cash flow from ops was CAD 8.2 million in 2025, and EPS CAD 0.027. We have CAD 16 million in our bank, as of June 30th.
That's more than what we had at the end of December 2025, given our earnings as well our good collections. If you're new to CEMATRIX and the construction industry and you're joining us today on the call, there are some keys to understanding our business. Revenue growth will be lumpy. It will not be a staircase. Financial results will be variable based on the timing of when large projects and stops. Construction is a seasonal business with higher revenue in warmer months. On average for us, for the last five years, we have 18% in Q1, 17% in Q2, 34% in Q3, and 31% in Q4. We are a specialty construction contractor, our margins tend to be higher than GCs, but we do have more idle time and more fixed cost.
Project size impacts margins, so larger projects have more competition, and as a result, lower margins. We have excess capacity that enables us to do significantly more revenue with existing equipment and staffing levels. We'll review some of our Q2 financial results and some of the highlights. I will not go through this slide, but just as a FYI and good reference, you can see that in our presentation. We'll post our presentation on our website. As you know, our financials are also available on SEDAR+. Let's briefly walk you through the financial result for the quarter. We did have a few records for adjusted EBITDA and revenue, to name a couple. Revenue in the quarter was CAD 18.7 million. That's a 76% increase from last year. When you looked at year to date, we did CAD 26 million.
That's a 50% increase over the CAD 17.3 million we did in 2025. When you look at gross margins on a dollar per basis, we are above what we did last year, but our percent is a bit lower. I'll encourage you to go through our MD&A. We have a discussion on our key contract structure that we've had in 2025 that benefited our margins. If you were to normalize these margins, for the quarter, we would be one point above, and for year to date, a couple points below. We are on track to the 30% that we mentioned in Q1. That's a reasonable target. The change in our cost structures for SG&A have given us CAD 200,000 for the quarter in improvement, and for the year, CAD 300,000 in improvement. That's also despite record revenues as well.
That leads us to operating income of CAD 4.3 million in Q2. That's a CAD 2.5 million increase from last year, and CAD 3.1 million year to date, which is a CAD 2 million increase from last year. We have record adjusted EBITDA this quarter at CAD 5 million. That's a CAD 2.6 million increase from the CAD 2.4 million last year, and CAD 4.4 million year to date, which is a CAD 2 million increase from last year. We also have positive cash flow from operations before and after, including working capital changes, CAD 4.8 million in Q2 compared to CAD 2.4 million last year, and CAD 4.2 million year to date. It's a CAD 1.9 million increase from last year. As I mentioned, also positive including working capital, CAD 1.1 million in Q2 compared to CAD 0.8 million last year.
We have a CAD 6.6 million increase in cash flow from ops this year to date at CAD 5.7 million. I talked about cash already, so we have CAD 16 million in the bank as of the end of the quarter. This is a good slide. It puts the quarter in a long-term perspective. As you can see, our revenue growth line is trending up. That's a good visual. Again, in orange, this is year to date numbers compared to until full year value. You can see at CAD 26 million, we are above what we've accomplished in some of our previous year in our history of the company. We already talked about gross margins. Again, the trend line is growing. We're at 20% for the quarter. Having said that, we're close to 3% we've mentioned previously on our call. It's a good target moving forward.
Finally, for backlog, our backlog remains strong despite our record sales. We announced CAD 26 million since the beginning of the year and our backlog at June 30th was CAD 61.5 million. We have the largest project on our backlog on the way. Looking at our share price. Our achievements are getting recognized in the markets. Since 2025, we've outperformed the TSX Composite Index. When you look at our share price at July 24 to CAD 0.51, it increased 96% since end of the year 2024 when it was at CAD 0.26. If you look at our low of March 14 at CAD 0.16, it's an increase of 209%. We have no plans to raise capital or issue new shares.
Our share outstanding as of today is 149.7 million. We have 4.9 million options outstanding and 3.1 million RSUs. It's good to note that since we implemented our NCIB program, we repurchased 2 million common shares already this year. We've put some key financial ratios for you. You can see that they are all trending up. Obviously, as we make more monies, these are all going to trend in the right direction. We thought it would be a good point of reference for you to look at. I'm going to turn the call to Randy.
Just as a point of clarification, MJ, the NCIB of 2 million is since we started the program, so some of that actually happened last year.
That's correct. Yeah.
It wasn't all this year.
Yep.
Perfect. Yeah. Next slide, please, MJ. We always like to end with this slide that just says, why should you invest in CEMATRIX? We really summarize it into these five bullet points. One is we're an industry leader. That industry leadership positions us well to capitalize on the large opportunity in the growing infrastructure construction segment space. We are a growth company. We've had growing revenue, positive adjusted EBITDA, positive cash flow from operations, and a strong balance sheet. We still believe that we're currently undervalued based on traditional valuation metrics. Whatever you want to use as that metric, a multiple of forward revenue, multiple of EBITDA, an EPS multiple, but the gap is closing. We've been telling investors about this for a year and a half now. More and more people are catching on.
To the new rally at CEMATRIX and the gap is closing, but we still believe there's more to go. As MJ mentioned, we don't have any capital raises required or planned to fund a burn rate. The only new capital should be in support of an accretive acquisition. Further to that, we also have capital to deploy, so we're looking to continue to grow organically and via acquisition. We believe that the first acquisition we do should be done 100% with our balance sheet, which means it's 100% accretive to shareholders. That's what we're working on. On the right-hand side here is our investor relations contacts. Retail, send it directly to CEMATRIX at the information there. Institutional, please send it to Bristol, attention to Glen.
As Glen mentioned, our company is covered right now by Beacon Securities, through Russell Stanley, who's going to join us on the call. That's in summary, our great quarter. We're going to go now to play this short video we have of our project at North Carolina, just to give investors a sense of what we're doing there and the scope and scale of it. Generally speaking, we don't like to share videos of projects that are ongoing, but this one we've talked about a lot. It's the largest project going on in the industry, so all of our competitors know about it. We thought the investors might appreciate a chance to take a look at what we're doing. Thank you, MJ.
You're welcome.
We'll turn it over to Glen to organize and run our Q&A, and we'll answer any questions that investors might have.
Super. Thanks, guys. Again, to our covering analyst, please raise your hand, which we have. We'll pull Russell into the queue now to ask a question. Russell, you are live.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Excellent. Congrats on the quarter. It looks like a firing on all cylinders quarter for you. The release indicates we should probably be expecting Q3 of this year to look a lot like Q3 of last year. That implies a bit of a dip sequentially in revenue, which is a little counter-seasonal. I'm wondering if you can talk to what's behind that. Did you have some work in Q2 that was pulled forward from Q3? Is there anything else that might explain that dip, given you're coming down off of an excellent quarter? Thanks.
It's a really good question, Russell. I appreciate you pointing that out. It really gets to one of these core tenets that we are trying to educate investors on all the time, which is our revenue is really highly dependent on when large projects or large scopes of work start and stop. We really benefited in this second quarter from having a really large tunnel grouting job start and finish in the quarter. That's really the difference. If you had taken that job out, it had landed more in our traditional busier time, you would've seen that normal sort of lower Q2, higher Q3 format. As we've spoken about many times, we don't really worry too much about when projects start and stop. We don't worry too much about what that means for the financial cutoffs.
We worry about running a good business that makes money. That's the most important thing that we pursue and follow and track.
Thanks for that. That's great color. Maybe on profitability on SG&A, MJ mentioned you came in at CAD 2.2 million in the quarter, a bit better than what we had penciled in. I know you've worked to take costs out where possible. Is this current level more or less sustainable? Were there any other kind of tailwinds in the quarter? Is this kind of level we should probably expect more or less going forward? Thank you.
It's also another really good question, Russell. I'm always a little hesitant to say that this will be the new normal. It's hard because there are some sort of one-offs in SG&A, things like legal expenses can go up or down depending on what projects. I would say that we do expect overall SG&A for the year to be lower than last year. That's kind of what we're trending. We're not necessarily taking every dollar saved in SG&A and putting it in our pocket, so to speak. We're also going to reallocate some of those savings to continue to beef up and expand our sales and sales support team. I would say overall, you should expect SG&A to be lower. How much lower is still to be determined, I would say, Russell.
That's great. Maybe one more strictly financial question. Just on cash flow. Receivables increased quarter to quarter in dollar terms, day sales actually came down a fair bit, by my math, to about 65 days. Well below prior norms, which obviously helps on cash flow. Wondering what you're doing very differently. You were very busy on the top line, to see it converting to cash is particularly impressive.
It's funny, right? Whenever financial results improve, the impression always is that we've done something different or better, the reality is we always do the same thing. We're always following the same process, sometimes we work with customers that pay quick, sometimes we work with customers that don't pay quick. We were lucky enough to, in Q1, collect some receivables related to an account that had been outstanding a while. That really helped. In Q2, we were lucky enough to be working with a couple of customers that pay really quick, that helped. Nothing new is being done. We're always doing the same things. It's just, I think, we got lucky in terms of the quality of customers that we're dealing with in terms of payment terms.
Got it. Thank you. That's great. Maybe my last question for now is just on M&A. I always ask this, can you talk about what you're seeing? You talked about Plan A being competing cellular concrete producers, Plan B, kind of adjacent lightweight construction materials. Just wondering what you're seeing on that front, where your level of optimism is and how receptive people are to talking. Thank you.
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing this up, Russell. Obviously, we're the type of people who like to do things and then show that we've done them as opposed to talk about what we might do. I will say, we recognize the importance of M&A. We recognize the importance of growing the top line. We're in conversations with a lot of people. I would say the vast majority of them don't have an interest in transacting. Some of the ones that do have an interest in transaction are, frankly, out to lunch on valuation. We have to find that sweet spot between what's a good valuation and what's a good fit for our company. As I've said many times, we will never do a transaction just to do a transaction. I won't do a transaction just to grow top line.
I will only do it if I think it's accretive to our bottom line and is going to add value. We are not overly focused on revenue. We're overly focused on making money, and that's our primary driver. Long-winded answer to say we're working on it, but I don't have any indications to say whether something's going to happen in the next six months or even next two years. Just that we're working on it, and we understand the importance of it.
That's great. Thank you for the color. Congrats again. I'll get back in the queue.
Thank you, Russell. Appreciate it.
Super. Thank you, Russell. If you have more questions, please put your hand up again. We will now go to our questions through the webinar portal. First question. It's a two-part question. The first part is, what sort of personnel and equipment utilization does a quarter like this represent to grow from here? Assuming you can win the work, do you need to hire more people or buy more equipment? The second part is following up on that is on operating margins. Is there any more juice from higher utilization rates?
There's a lot of questions there, Glen. That's going to be testing me.
I'm happy to repeat any of it if you'd like.
All right. Let's see how I can do. We don't disclose or discuss utilization rates. I will say the second quarter was busy. I think realistically, we had capacity to do even more revenue. As we've spoken about many times, there's a lot more capacity in our equipment. We've got more equipment than crew. Our crew, in some cases, was running pretty hard and flat out without a lot of extras. That was pretty close on a crew size to capacity, but there's probably a bit more to squeeze out of some of our businesses. Some of them were flat out, and some had a bit more capacity. What was the second part of the question, Glen?
The second part, I guess, is what does higher utilization do for your operating margins?
Yeah. Well, I think the answer to that is obvious, right? Higher utilization is definitely going to help margins. We talk about that all the time, right? You can basically break our margin down into two components. The first component is what kind of margin do we make when we're working on a job site, and then what's our margin after we take that job margin, we call it, and pay for all the bench time or indirect costs associated with making that money, whether that's shop, whether it's repairs and maintenance, whether it's non-billable time. All those costs still have to be paid in addition to the SG&A. Higher utilization always results in higher margins, with all else being equal.
The other thing that obviously impacts margins is the way we bid jobs, the way we execute jobs in the field, and then lastly, the size of the job. The larger the job, the more likely that that margin's going to be lower because competition on large jobs is always pretty high.
Thank you, Randy. Next question. Can you talk about the impact of U.S. tariffs on cement, if any, and are you planning to expand your employee base, and if yes, how many and in which areas?
Boy, these guys like these multi-part questions. Tariffs are really interesting, right? Because the U.S. administration has announced their latest rounds of tariffs, but they're not actually implemented. They often end up being a negotiation tactic or strategy where a big tariff is announced, but then when it comes time to actually implement it, they back away or lower it. It's really hard to say exactly what the impact is. It was something we took note of for two reasons. One, because it specifically named cement, and two, because of the rate. It was very high. It wasn't the 10% tariff we talked about before.
Canada is a net exporter of cement. The likely outcome in the Canadian market is likely lower cement prices because we're going to have supply now that maybe used to be destined for the U.S. and may be put in the Canadian market. Likely outcome in the U.S. is in the border states where that Canadian supply would go, might mean higher prices in the short term, but it really depends on how the market reacts, whether they believe it's a permanent structural change or it's a temporary negotiating tactic. It's a long-winded answer to say, "I don't know," but it's something that we're monitoring. Most large projects that we do, we lock in the price of cement with our provider so that we have cost certainty there. They've always honored those commitments, so we don't actually expect any negative impact on our margins in the short term.
If it does go up in the long term, we'll build those increases into the cost to our customers. Unfortunately, I think what it'll mean in the end is the cost of construction is going to go up in these border states, because cement is heavy and logistics is a big part of getting the cement to the market. If you have to increase distribution or transportation times or distances, it's going to just cost more. In the short term, you can't increase cement capacity. That's a long-term investment. Anyway, we're still paying attention to that situation.
Okay. The second part of that question was, are you planning to expand your employee base? If yes, how many and in which areas?
Yes, we're always looking to grow our sales and sales support team. We've talked about it many times where the constraint on our team is our ability to sell. That's where we're going to continue to add. We don't discuss employee counts or employee counts by profession to investors. That's not necessary, but we continue to invest in sales and sales support resources to grow our company.
Thank you. Can we expect an improvement in SG&A in the second half of 2026, similar to what CEMATRIX delivered in the first half of 2026?
I think the simple answer is yes. The caveat to that is I do want to invest in these sales and sales support resources, I do think you'll continue to see SG&A trend lower than last year.
Thank you. I have a couple of questions on this topic, I'll frame it all for you right now. How would you describe the pipeline of opportunities compared to this time a year ago? Is it higher, similar, or lower? I guess just looking for visibility into 2027.
The pipeline that we're seeing right now for our opportunities to bid and win is growing. We track the size of that. We pay less attention to what the size of it is, because you can have opportunities in there that might be very big, but have almost 0% chance of actually occurring. We look more at actual real jobs. How many bids are we putting out? What's the size of those? Are we winning the same percentage or more or less? In all of those metrics, we're doing better. We're seeing more activity, we're winning more of that activity, and we're really optimistic. As to what 2027 looks like, it's far too early for us to say. We're still focused on delivering 2026.
I guess similar line of questioning, can you talk about the type of projects that you're bidding on, I guess, in terms of scope?
No. We won't talk about that here, Glen. Other than say, we're not seeing anything different. It's not like one certain application is kind of growing faster than others. We continue to see the benefits of not only us building the market through education and successful execution, but we see our competitors doing the same thing. We see a healthy competition or a healthy competitive environment as a good thing. Our competitors are out there doing a good job, and they're also out there educating the marketplace, and we're happy to go head-to-head with anybody and feel like we would win that. We have nothing to fear from competition, and we really view them as being an extension of our selling and marketing efforts.
Thank you. Are the warrants period finished and were they exercised?
The warrants officially expired yesterday at close of business. To the best of our knowledge, we don't believe they're exercised other than 10,000 that were exercised before Q2 ended. We believe the vast majority, if not all of them, except for that 10,000, went unexercised.
I guess a similar question just with more specificity, confirming that all the CAD 0.60 warrants have expired.
I believe that to be true, Glen, but until we hear officially from our transfer agent, I can't say for 100%, but I would be very surprised if someone was exercising a CAD 0.60 warrant when we're trading at CAD 0.51.
Okay. Thank you. Can you talk about, I guess this is a broader question, as you run the business, the main or key risks that you see for the company and ways that you mitigate those?
We do a good job of going through the risks in quite a lot of detail in our AIF, annual information form, and the MD&A, that's probably a better place for that investor to go to. If I maybe bring the conversation up a level to say, a version of this that I hear a lot is kind of what keeps you up at night. The honest answer is not very much, because we've got a really great team that's executing at a really high level and performing. The things I worry about, obviously, are safety. I don't want to ever have to make a phone call to someone's family that something's happened to our people. I worry about quality, we spend a lot of time in our company talking about quality, making sure we're doing a good job.
It takes a lot of work to win a piece of work, if you win it and you put all that effort in and you don't execute in the field, it's a bit of a disaster for your reputation and for your company.
Yeah.
Warren Buffett, I think, actually summed it up the best where he says, "It takes you 20 years to build a reputation in your company, you can tear it down in 5 minutes." When you think about business like that, you think about things differently, that's how we think about things here. We spend a lot of time on that. Honestly, for me, myself, I spent a lot of time on that question that you asked me earlier is, how do I make 2027 as good or better than 2026? We had this same conversation a year ago talking about 2025 when we're on track to have a great year. What am I doing about 2026 to deliver a good year? I spent a lot of time thinking about that.
How do I position this company and our company to have another good year?
Okay, super. Thanks, Randy. Sorry, one more question has just come in. Rather than buying a competitor, at what is a likely higher multiple could you expand spending on an integral growth? Example, double or triple a sales team, buy another machine or two, and use excess funds to continue with the NCIB.
Sure. What that person's talking about is essentially could we greenfield something? We could. Greenfield takes a lot of work. There's years where you're probably not even breaking even. We want to make sure we exhaust acquisition opportunities first. If those don't present themselves and there's a market that we're really interested in, we'll do absolutely that. We'll place a salesperson in that market, place a piece of equipment in that market, we'll greenfield it from the bottom up.
Okay. Super. There are no further questions in the queue, I'll ask you for some closing remarks, we'll end this conference call.
Okay. Just wanted to say thank you to our investors and potential investors for this opportunity to talk to them. We're obviously really proud of our second quarter results. That's the best second quarter we've ever had. Third highest revenue in terms of any quarter that we've ever had. Our highest single adjusted EBITDA of any quarter. Second, third, fourth, first ever highest cash flow from operations. As we've said many times, I say it kind of each quarter, I've never been more optimistic about the future of our company, never been happier to be a shareholder of this company leading this company, just really excited for our future.
Okay, super. Thank you, Randy. Thank you, MJ. Thank you, Jordan, and thank you to our audience. This concludes this conference call.
Thanks, Glen.
Thank you very much.