Welcome, everyone, to the first presentation here in Arcadian Loft number one at the Planet MicroCap Showcase Toronto in partnership with MicroCapClub . I'd like to introduce our first presentation of the day, which is a fireside chat hosted by Russell Stanley from Beacon Securities, as well as the management team from McCoy Global.
Thanks, Robert. Good morning. My name is Russell Stanley. I'm the Managing Director of Equity Research at Beacon Securities, and I'm the analyst that covers McCoy Global at our firm. McCoy produces equipment used in oil and gas well construction, and most importantly, has developed a suite of next-generation products called smart products that contributed almost 60% of sales through the first half of this year. The market cap is about $100 million. We initiated coverage of the company back in mid-August with a buy rating and a $5.50 target price. We've not done any banking for the company, and I don't own the stock. It closed yesterday at $3.44, so our target represents a potential return to target of 63%, including the dividend, which offers a current yield of almost 3%. We view McCoy as an undervalued and overlooked plan.
The need for oil and gas operators to reduce on-site labor requirements and operating costs, improve safety, and operating efficiency and consistency. Interestingly, McCoy has managed to deliver strong revenue and earnings growth despite what you likely know as a broader weakness in global rig activity, and it's been strong adoption of smart products that has driven that growth. By comparison, the company's closest peers tend to see their revenue and earnings ebb and flow more directly with active rig counts. That is something that stands the company apart. Most importantly, perhaps the street seems to at least partially recognize that. The stock is up 28% year- over- year, and that's against the average loss of the peer group of about 14%. McCoy's stock has outperformed the peers by 42% over the last year. I think evidence that the market realizes that McCoy is not just another energy services stock.
For the next year, we expect the company to deliver adjusted EBITDA growth of a bit better than 50%, more than double earnings per share on 13% sales growth and margin improvement. The balance sheet is very clean: $6.6 million in cash at the end of the last quarter, and the company repaid the last of its straight debt about two years ago and still has over $12 million in available credit. The technical picture looks solid. The stock recently bounced off its 200-day moving average and into a possible fracture of its 50-day moving average. In terms of potential catalysts, we see the Q3 results, dividend increases, contract wins, which is something we'll talk more about, and M&A activity as possible drivers.
With that, I'd like to hand it over to the CEO, Jim Rakievich, to take you through a brief overview of the business, and then we'll walk through some Q&A on stage. Jim.
Thank you, Russell, and good morning, everybody. I'd like to give just a brief overview of who McCoy is and what we do, and then we'll move into the fireside chat. As Russell described, we have a pretty clean balance sheet, and we do have a very disciplined approach to capital allocation, and we'll talk about that perhaps a little later. Really, tubular running services, the business we're in, just to quickly describe that, in every well that's drilled around the world, whether it's for natural gas or oil, offshore, land, or shelf applications globally, they have to run casing in every well and it stays in the well forever. Steel pipes that are screwed together, and service companies go out into the field and typically perform that job of running all that casing in those wells. It sounds easy.
Screw pipes together, put them in the ground, no problem. It's complicated. These wells, they can't leak. Imagine 300 threaded connections on steel pipe that have to be intrinsically safe and not leak. Every connection, the data has to be collected. There is a very specific range of tolerances on those connections that the manufacturers of the pipe provide. Our job is to essentially develop technologies and equipment so that those service companies can go out in the field with our technologies and do that job safely, efficiently, and with very little risk and wellbore integrity. We are a global leader. We've been in this space. This is an area of the oil and gas industry where we have a deep knowledge, and our brand is known around the world. We're based in Edmonton. That's where our corporate office is.
Our technologies are produced, our data acquisition technologies are produced just on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, and all of our hardware and equipment is produced in Lafayette, Louisiana. Those are our U.S.A. hubs. We look after all the North American and Western Hemisphere markets from those locations. In the Eastern Hemisphere, we operate out of our Jebel Ali facility, which is just outside of Dubai, and we look after the entire Eastern Hemisphere from that hub. We just moved into a larger facility there. We have a distribution warehouse. We have a rental fleet, technical support service, and we ship product to 50 countries a year. That's where we operate. Just a smattering of the kind of customers we service, large multinationals like Weatherford, Expro, Nabors, and then regional players in the Middle East, for example, like Al Masaood, like we show on here, deep water drillers.
We operate in the deep water market, and we'll hopefully get a chance to talk about that a little later. This is a really important slide here. We have the broadest offering of technologies, and this is very important to our customers so that when, especially in the Eastern Hemisphere, where rather than go to five or six companies to get equipment packaged so they can go do their jobs in the field, they can come to McCoy as a one-stop shop and get all of those technologies. This also demonstrates the moat we have when we talk about, hopefully in the fireside chat, what we've developed in our new technologies, which are very unique and new to market that we're just coming to the market with on automating this process.
You have to be able to have all of these technologies talk to each other and be smart and driven by software. This slide here shows you that first segment up here, the smart products. That didn't exist four years ago. Our revenue was generated mostly from the second segment, hydraulic power tonners and other capital equipment. That is the legacy equipment that's been used in this business for 30- 50 years. We've transitioned our revenue to the new smart p roducts. Obviously, the market is showing acceptance on individual products already, not including the fully integrated package, and our margin profile, of course, is representative of what that means to the customers and what we're able to achieve. Our financial performance, imagine active rig counts in the U.S.
from 2021- 2024 have declined significantly, yet we've been able to manage growth in those markets, all because of new technologies. This slide shows you where we've been on the left, where we were last year in the center, and where we are currently. We've achieved our goal of commercializing our smarTR package, and we are just in the first inning of that program. This has been our journey. We spent $30 million U.S. roughly on our technology roadmap that we developed in 2017, and it's included a couple of acquisitions and product development. This slide here, I'll end with this slide. This is where our growth has been. It's not been on traditional equipment. It's been on the adoption by the market on our smart technologies that we've developed.
All of this yellow here of the new smart technologies is only the initial response from the market in one market. That's in West Texas, predominantly in the U.S., in a market that has declining rig count. With that, I think we'll move to the fireside chat.
I think my first question here, and I guess it relates to the room, it's good to see a strong turnout here for the first one of the day. Maybe just high level, when you look at oil pricing and sentiment there, oil pricing is weak and trending lower. WTI and Brent both kind of around their 52-week lows. OPEC+ releasing more product into the market. Just high level, can you help investors understand the opportunity that you have despite those headwinds as far as the commodity outlook goes?
Sure. Obviously, if anybody reads the headlines on what's going on in the oil and gas market, the price of WTI is down. Active rig counts are down again. There's quite a few headwinds, particularly in the North American market, U.S. These headwinds do impact McCoy for sure, particularly in our conventional equipment, the equipment that has been traditional equipment used in this market. There's a tremendous amount of that equipment in the market that's been put into that place. Imagine there were 1,800 rigs drilling in the U.S. probably six, seven years ago, and now there's maybe just over 500. There's plenty of traditional conventional equipment out in the market. We're going to be impacted by the decline in those sales again.
However, we think in the U.S., we're going to continue to, we just shipped a very large order that we got, the large order that we announced of $11 million of smarTR package back in April. The first package got shipped. We're going to ship the remaining packages by the end of this year. With all of that, 2026, we expect to see market adoption of that smarTR . Probably more importantly in this challenging market, when we look to the, with McCoy , you've got to look to, we do operate globally. In the Middle East, we see some real upside next year. That upside is in, for example, in the United Arab Emirates. The way the national oil companies work in the Middle East, they do long-term contracts. That's not the way it's done in North America.
The casing running contracts, the TRS contracts are going to be distributed by mid-next year. We'll likely find out who the contracts are awarded to and the rig allocations to the service companies. Imagine this, we're talking about in the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait next year, they're going to be issuing new three to five-year contracts for over 100 rigs. That's the way that business works there. We anticipate that probably by Q1, we're going to start to get an indication who's getting those contracts, and then we're going to have an opportunity. The real opportunity here is not to sell more of the equipment we have. They've made a very significant shift in the technical requirements that they are no longer allowing mechanical casing running tools to be used, which every customer in that region has a tremendous amount of mechanical CRTs that they've used for a long time.
Because of safety issues, drop strings, and efficiency issues, they've decided that they're going to move and demand hydraulic casing running tools be used with these contracts. We commercialized our first hydraulic casing running tool last December, and we shipped four tools to Saudi. We ran through all of the process to get qualified this summer in Abu Dhabi, and we were very successful in all of those field trials and met or exceeded all the KPIs. Why is that important? We have one other competitor that has hydraulic CRTs to sell to those clients. With that, I'm not suggesting for a minute we're going to sell 100 of these tools to that market, but think about it in these terms. We're going to sell somewhere between zero and 100 to that market when those rigs are allocated, and each tool is $750,000 U.S. each.
If you look at that, if you recall my last slide where we had the yellow bars, that was one tool, initial tool that we entered the market with. That's a new smart flush mount spider. That tool was, you saw the impact that had, and that tool was $250,000 U.S. We're talking about a tool that's 3x the value. To follow on in these challenging times, in 2027, the same process is going to take place in Saudi with Aramco. Aramco's contracts are up, and in 2027 is when they're going to be issuing those bids out in Saudi. All indications are they're going to mandate hydraulic tools as well. They have a slightly larger market to put these tools into. You know, today, even with their reduction in rig counts, we're talking 230 rigs. We think that even in spite, the markets are different. We operate globally.
We treat our markets different. We've been in the Middle East for a long time. We're physically there, and we've been selling into that market for 25 years. We understand how each market works and how to approach those markets from a sales and marketing perspective. I think that's a long-winded way to answer your question that in spite of these headwinds, I think we'll be okay. However, one last thing in the North American market with our smarTR , the adoption, those are expensive packages. These headwinds will probably slow down some of that penetration, but we'll get there.
Thanks for that color. My next question is, I'll hand this one to Bing Deng, the company's COO here on my right. Bing, can you talk about the sales cycle and the process and the dynamic here? Your direct customer is the energy services company. They're employed by the E&P company. Can you talk about how that dynamic works and what the energy services company's motivation is for buying smart p roducts?
Thank you, Russell. Taking new products to the existing market is not easy. We've developed, the last five years, we've been developing products that's going to be transformational in the tubular running service world. Our approach has been always partner in a declining market environment. Our customers are getting pricing pressure. In order to protect market share, they're sacrificing margin. There are always going to be a few early adopters, innovators that are willing to take a risk to take something new, to try something new, and to differentiate themselves versus the competitors. What we've done over the past several years with the new products is to partner with those early adopters and develop a relationship with them and go to the E&P and talk about the value proposition, the differentiation of our products.
Through a set of demonstrations, we'll validate what is different, why the E&P should use our technology. Once the E&P sees what we're doing and the differentiation between the smart p roducts versus conventional running, they will look to require the product, and the sales cycle becomes easy. Once E&P says this is something we want, the service company really has no choice but to buy it. I'll give you guys some good examples. We introduced a product called the FMS back in late 2022. FMS is a simple product that replaces some manual equipment. We partnered with a large service provider in the West Texas market, took the product to a multinational E&P, and performed three months of demonstration on why the product is safer and more efficient. We did it on only a production string.
Once the E&P saw the performance, they said, we'll try it on intermediate string, we'll try it on surface string. They started mandating this product across all the rig operations. Two and a half years later, we have probably over 100, more than 100 tools in the market. The tool we're selling on an FMS product, that's $250,000. The tools that we're replacing are $10,000. Manual set of equipment, because of safety and efficiency, our customer is willing to pay $250,000. That's the process we typically go through for new product introduction.
Thanks for that and the additional color around pricing. Maybe for Jim, a question around capital allocation. You pay a dividend. You also have a buyback in place. Your business isn't typically very CapEx intensive, though there are working capital requirements. Can you help investors understand your capital allocation priorities, perhaps rank order, your use of cash in the business, especially given the opportunity in front of you?
Sure. We have a pretty disciplined capital allocation process at McCoy . Our first priority is to invest in our strategy and our growth opportunities that we develop. When it comes to those growth opportunities, however, we have some hurdles we have to cross before we get approval. That is, our return on that capital investment has to meet or exceed our cost of capital, bar none. We're not going to spend a bunch of capital on a technology that we hope works and might bring a return. We have to be very confident that we're going to achieve our goals on the financial and strategic side at the same time. That's our first priority. We think that's the best initial use of capital. After that, M&A is also an area we review. We did a really critical transaction in 2017 to kick off our new technology roadmap.
We did an additional one that was another very strategic fit in 2019. We haven't bought anything since. We look at stuff all the time. We're very selective. Again, the returns, we have to be confident that our returns will meet our requirements. After that, any excess capital, we return to shareholders, both in the form of share buybacks—we have a normal course issuer bid in place—and then a modest but sustainable dividend. That's where we allocate capital.
I just saw the one minute sign. I'll have one more question in for you, Jim. What is it that you think that the street or the market misunderstands about McCoy or underappreciates with respect to the story at this point?
I think what the most misunderstood thing about McCoy is what we've built and Bing and his team have built on our technology roadmap with this smart technology. We are at the first inning of the game. The opportunity is this. There's probably 1,600 land rigs operating in the world today outside of Russia and China. We're talking in the countries we can sell to. The smarTR package, we've got only the initial packages delivered or being delivered into West Texas to one customer. We have the FMS that we've deployed. That's one component of our smarTR package that we've had great success with. The Smart Hydraulic CRT is going to hit the market pretty hard next year. Think of those 1,600 rigs, and we estimate that one of our smarTR packages can look after two rigs because they're mobile and can move around.
What's our market opportunity? Half of 1,600, 800 rigs, is our opportunity to sell the smarTR package to the market. They're not all going to adopt it, but think of that number and think of the fact that that smarTR package is between $1.2 million U.S. and $1.5 million U.S. That's the size of the total available market over the next five to seven years. That's on just hardware sales. After that, we have a strong recurring revenue stream at McCoy that is underestimated. Recurring revenue of replacement parts, technical support, rental. Most importantly, all of these smart packages come with a SaaS component. In order for that smarTR package to work, you have to subscribe so that you have access to all of the reports and the real-time data.
If you look out into the longer term, what we've developed here, we're at the very, very, very early innings of generating what should be a fantastic revenue and margin future.
All right. I think that wraps it up. Thank you very much for coming. Enjoy the rest of your day.