Thank you for standing by. My name is Joe Diaz, and I will be the conference call operator. Welcome to the Zedcor first quarter of 2025 financial results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. We will be having a question-and-answer session at the end of the call, and questions will be limited to analysts only. I would now like to turn the conference over to Amin Ladha, the Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. Joining me on our call today, we have our Zedcor President and CEO, Todd Ziniuk. Earlier last night or later last night, before markets opened or after markets opened or after markets closed, Zedcor issued a news release announcing our first quarter financial results. This news release will be available on our website and under the Investor Relations tab, and is filed on our CDR profile. Please note that a portion of today's call, other than historical performance, includes statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities law. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. Forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions. This discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements that is appended to our news release.
Please review our press release and Zedcor's reports filed under CDR Plus for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the projections. We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin, and adjusted EBITDA on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definitions set out in our management discussion analysis. In addition, reconciliations between any adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in the MD&A. An important non-GAAP measure that we use is adjusted EBITDA. The company believes that adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the company can use to fund working capital requirements, fund future growth initiatives, and service future interest and principal debt repayments.
Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income determined in accordance with IFRS. Please note that all information is provided in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Following the prepared remarks by Todd and I, we will conduct a Q&A session, during which questions will be taken from our analysts. Moving on to a review of our first quarter financial results, we had record revenues of CAD 11.5 million in Q1 2025. This exceeded our previous high set just last quarter by CAD 1.2 million and is an increase of 87% year-over-year. Our recurring revenue for Q1 2025 remained steady at over 85% of total revenue. We also had record adjusted EBITDA of CAD 4.1 million. This was a 116% increase year-over-year, and the EBITDA margin remained strong at over 36% for the quarter. Our tower count and customer base continues to grow across North America.
More importantly, our weekly tower production, which is a key metric for us, continues to increase. During Q1 2025, our tower production count grew by 229 towers, which was over 19 towers per week, despite some slow holiday weeks and a slow start in January, as our component suppliers restarted production after Christmas. We have met our previous goal of 20-25 towers produced per week and have the ability to manufacture 30-35 towers per week with the ability to ramp up based on customer demand. This is a new slide we added in. It shows the 12-month highlights. It is something new, and we just wanted to talk about it as we feel it highlights the team's efforts and can show the growth trajectory given our rapid expansion. Revenue for the last 12-month period, June 30, 2024 to March 31, 2025, was CAD 38.3 million.
This compares to CAD 24.6 million for the previous period. This was an increase of 56%. Last 12-month adjusted EBITDA increased to CAD 14.2 million, or 37% of revenues, versus CAD 7.4 million and 30% of revenues for the previous LTM period. The revenue and adjusted EBITDA have increased, but we have also had some major accomplishments, including significant U.S. expansion and the shifting of the business away from major pipeline customers. Adjusted EBITDA worked out to CAD 0.15 per share versus CAD 0.10 per share over the same period, despite a higher share count. The exit fleet count was 1,566 towers at the quarter end. This was an increase of 229 quarter-over-quarter. In terms of the future outlook, we completed an equity raise in Q1 2025 and started to expedite our growth. We are aggressively expanding across the southern U.S. and ramped up our sales team.
While this will result in slightly lower margins as we expedite U.S. growth, the revenue continues to grow, and we are already seeing this spending pay dividends as we gain traction in areas like Austin, Texas, Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix, Nevada. We are also going to invest in enterprise-level sales growth and plan to assess the viability of fixed camera installations within our monitoring room, being a differentiator in that market. We continue to expand our revenues in the retail segment and the residential construction segments, both in Canada and the U.S. These two verticals are where we see large potential, and we will continue to allocate resources in order to grow our revenues in these verticals. We continue to grow our revenues with key customers, and as we expand our footprint, current customers are requesting services at more and more locations.
As you can see from the chart, our current customer base is fully diversified by industry verticals, and despite recent tariff and potential economic threats, we are not seeing a slowdown in demand or opportunity. Some of our customers, such as in the home builder segments, are even taking more security to protect fully built homes. Moving on to a discussion on the balance sheet, it has really been set up to support our growth trajectory. We exited Q1 with a cash balance of CAD 20.4 million. We have CAD 10 million of borrowing room on our current banking facility. We have net cash of just over CAD 1 million after factoring in the CAD 19.3 million of total debt. Our net debt to LTM EBITDA is essentially zero. This will increase over time as we deploy capital, but it will be offset by growing EBITDA.
$1 million of the debt is expected to come due next quarter, and that'll be retired from free cash flow. The PP&E balance increased on a net basis by almost $9.5 million to $52.2 million due to the continued investments and growing the company's fleet of security towers. A portion of that increase is sitting under assets under construction as we purchase a number of longer lead components in order to ramp up our growth and meet our production targets. We try to keep this around four to six weeks of production, but are managing AUC actively so that we aren't tying up capital unnecessarily. A review of our cash flow statement for Q1 2025, adjusted operating cash flow increased 159% year-over-year to $3.6 million, demonstrating the growing cash flow generation capacity of the business.
Capital expenditures ramped up in Q1 as well as our manufacturing capability is streamlined, and we have staffed up our team and established our processes. Maintenance CapEx continues to represent a small portion of that total CapEx number, and during the quarter, we repaid CAD 1.9 million of debt and finance leases. I'll now hand over the call to Todd, who will provide you with an operations update and some insights into our go forward strategy.
Thanks, Amin. Great job. Good morning, everybody. As you saw from our numbers that we put out yesterday, we had another wonderful quarter, a strong quarter. You know, the thing that excites me the most is we maintained an EBITDA level of 35% + with the growth that, you know, I'll speak to it again. I mean, you've heard me, all of you have heard me talk a lot about the platform. You know, as we expand our platform in the U.S. and still in Canada, you know, it's great how we're managing our costs. To touch just on the U.S., where we're operating right now, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and also in Tennessee, we have towers also in Washington, some going to South Carolina and North Carolina. The platform is growing.
To build out the platform throughout Q1, you know, and into the start of Q2 here, we've hired about 10 extra salespeople in the U.S., and not just 10 in the U.S., it was seven there and about three more in Canada. The growth we're seeing in Canada is very exciting. The brand's very strong. You know, the internal growth on our customer list, a lot of you have heard me talk to that before. There's huge opportunity just inside the customer base we have without even bringing on new clients. The U.S., obviously, is built up of a lot of new clients onboarding day after day. You know, several clients, some just in some one day, for example. To spin into the operations and sales across the company, I already touched on the U.S. and Canada, the sales side.
The Amin staff, Amin's added some people there, obviously, into accounting, different sectors of that platform as well. Like I said, you know, we're pretty excited to see that we maintain these margins. You know, our management, right from the top to the bottom, does an unbelievable job of watching costs. You know, our eyes on that all the time. It's also you got to drive your revenue, but we got to maintain our cost levels. We've got a very dedicated team. You know, just to speak to Zedcor's culture, you know, I get last night we were here late. Everybody sits and talks about the business. Go for dinner, sit and talk about the business. Had a great opportunity yesterday. It was 10 to four.
One of our operators from the monitoring center, he was in two hours early to, you know, just see how things were going with the day shift and getting ready to start a shift at 6:00 A.M. The reason I'm touching on that, it just shows the dedication of, you know, the whole team and our culture. You know, that's what drives the number one, one of our number one core values, which is service excellence. You know, to go deeper into the manufacturing side of the operations, we're right now building 30-35 towers. By the end of August, we'll be at 40 towers. You know, and we're seeing the demand's not stopping. For example, right now we're operating 14 branches. You know, you run some simple numbers, 10 towers per branch a month. That's 140 towers, you know, a month that's required.
I do not know if anybody read the press release, but there is some Tony Sciara. He is moving on to be the President of Corporate Development. What that is going to entail is Tony is going to build out a national sales team and drive the bus on, you know, chasing the sales from the top. We are quite excited to have Tony in that. Tony was a big part while he was the main reason we got Home Depot to begin with. James is going to be taking on operations for North America. Gives us a chance to, you know, focus on both sides. Right now we do the sales from the field level, and now we are obviously hitting it from boardrooms. I am quite excited about that operational change.
You know, I think the biggest thing that we're seeing with the towers right now is we're going to be on our goal of the 1,200-1,400. It's not going to be a problem for us to achieve. We're right on track. Since we opened up our manufacturing plant, we've built 860 towers as of yesterday. By the end of the week, we should be around, you know, close to that 875. And obviously, 32 next week, we're at 900. We're getting on the treadmill of keep adding that. You know, we want to get the business to a place we've been running so strong utilization, you know, 98%-95% all the time. And towers going here, towers going there. The goal is to build up inventory and, you know, to be able to take on some of these bigger projects when it comes.
I think we're doing a great job of managing that. We might as well open it up for any questions. Amin, I'm sure there's going to be some good ones we can speak more to. Sorry, Joe, go ahead.
Thank you, Todd. We will now take questions from analysts only. The first question comes from Kyle McPhee from Cormark Securities. Go ahead, Kyle.
Hi, everyone. Once again, great execution. Hats off to you and your team. First question from me on the relationship between the rate of fleet additions and utilization of your fleet. We've all been getting used to seeing Zedcor pump out more and more towers every quarter while keeping utilization rates very high. The towers are just flying off the assembly line. Now you're set to once again increase the rate of fleet additions. I'm curious if you think Zedcor is getting close to an inflection point where the towers do not fly off the assembly line as quickly to get into the hands of clients. You know, is that a near-term dynamic we should be aware of for utilization, or are you still very much in a spot where demand can quickly absorb whatever you get off the line over the next year or so?
No, I think, Kyle, great question. Thanks. You know, as quick as we can build the towers, obviously, you know, we've done a great job in, you know, raising the capital. And we've got the capital to move forward. You know, we're streamlining the facility, the assembly plant all the time. We just did a little bit of a restructuring there actually last week. It gives us the ability to forecast, you know, like, okay, we can do six towers a day right now, no problem. We can go to 35, no problem. What's it going to take to get 50? You know, now we've got it. The outside of the business has matured to where we can see add four people, we can, you know, build 50, 60.
We're doing a great job of procuring all of our suppliers, you know, the metal builders, that side of the business as well, all of our camera suppliers. You know, we stay quite ahead of it. You know, now we're starting to PO larger numbers. Amin, do you have one?
Yeah, I think some of it we're also trying to catch up to the demand. Like all these branches are kind of sitting at 100% or close to 100% and do not have a ton of inventory sitting available to sell. That kind of, I do not want to say demotivates, but it does not drive the salesperson necessarily. Some of it is to catch up to the demand as well, Kyle.
Also to talk a little more on that, Kyle. You know, I talk about the platform over and over. We're at about 14 branches, like I said now. You know, and that's where this plateaus a bit. You build out the platform. Now we're going to feed the platform for a bit. You know, we're pausing opening up any other branches. When I say that, it doesn't mean we won't work in other states. We have different ways that we can move into a city without getting the facility set up and moving forward on that. You know, I think it'll probably be Q4 realistically before we really look at taking on any more branches. I think we got to, you know, obviously get set up exactly what you said and ready for the demand that's coming. It's not stopping.
I mean, obviously, like Tony with the restructure we're doing there, you know, Tony's what they're going to be chasing. Those are long runway jobs. You know, we have quite a few trials right now with different box stores and stuff going on that I'm obviously not going to get in and talk about. You know, one of those when these come to fruition, it's going to put, you know, where we need more towers. That's what we're setting up the company for right now is because we've built the platform. The 1,200-1,400 towers, Kyle, is there to feed that, the platform. Now we'll execute when we need, you know, 300-400 for one client. We'll build the, you know, when we talk about that, the 300-400 or 200 for a client, none of these people expect you to drop those off the next morning.
are logistic issues on their end, getting prepared, getting the store manager ready for the towers to come to them. We went through that with Home Depot Canada. You know, it takes time. It is going to be sitting down with them, making a schedule plan. Okay, we want you to produce 25-30 a month for us. We will get these towers in place.
Got it. Okay. That's great color and great to hear. Last one for me, just on the economics you generate with different client types. You know, you have lots of active discussions with small and large and very large clients. Is there any reason to think that the return on capital or the margin profile you're generating is already or will be much different across these client types? How is that dynamic shaping up at this point in your company evolution?
I think we're looking generally for the margin to stay about the same. We're going to kind of offset some of the price discounts we might have to give with efficiencies based on scale. It is probably customer by customer, Kyle. Until we get into some of those contract discussions, it's hard to say at this point.
I think to add to that, you know, Kyle, the other thing we're doing a great job of is we're bringing the cost of the tower down, you know, month after month. You know, a lot of that's driven too just from efficiencies in our, you know, in our production. You can all of a sudden build 35 towers a week with the same amount of people by changing your processes, tightening everything up. Also, where you're seeing some of our vendors, you know, give us discounts. We're looking at different things. You know, all the tariff stuff you hear in the news and everything. We've locked in with our steel provider. The costs aren't going up. Tariffs aren't affecting him. You know, we've got a really good, you know, visual on where the cost of the tower is.
I truly believe that, you know, over the next few months, we might even be able to get it down 10%. That obviously at the end of the day helps margins. What you can do with pricing. To talk a little more about, you know, the pricing and the margin, it's fairly geographical as well, Kyle. For example, you know, Denver rates might be higher there compared to a different state. We see that from state to state. Some places are a little more saturated than others. Some aren't, right? That's a big component to it as well.
Okay. Appreciate all those answers. I'll pass the line.
Thanks, Kyle.
Thank you, Kyle. The next question comes from Gabriel Leung from Beacon Securities. Go ahead, Gabriel.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on all the progress. I have a two-part question for you. You know, obviously the growth has been phenomenal over the last little while. I'm just curious, how are you guys thinking about your pace of growth now versus profitability? How are you balancing that out now given the much bigger scale that you're at right now? Are you thinking about sort of normalized EBITDA margins yet versus growth rates? That's the first question. The second question would be, likewise, given the bigger scale, do you feel you've got the organizational structure to manage this pace of growth, or do you think you need to add to the bench strength at this point?
I'll tackle the first one. I think our focus is going to be growth while trying to keep an eye out on the margins at all times. Normalized margins, I think there's the potential to expand those. We kind of had a discussion with our board yesterday as well when we were looking at the Q1 results. Ultimately, the focus is going to be on growth. We're not going to let the margins slip below 30%. If the opportunity is there to expand into major markets, we're going to take that opportunity while trying to keep the margins as high as we can. It's kind of a trade-off. Totally get it. The margins catch up pretty quick once we make that initial investment into a new region. The longer lead items are kind of the strategic sales or the national sales that we talk about.
That is not a huge cost initially. Like we could build that out slowly over time without impacting margins significantly. Todd, do you want to take the second half?
Yeah, sure. About bench strength. You know, Gabriel, I think we've got great bench strength, obviously. You know, I lead that and I got to keep an eye on all that. The executive team, unbelievable. All managers of every department, unbelievable. You know, these guys, a lot, some of them have been with the company a long time. Some are new. You know, even the new staff we see, it goes back to what I spoke to, you know, in the first part of this call was our culture. And, you know, these guys are not eight to five people. We all do what it takes and multiple hats. You know, I think we've come a long ways even on that, Gabriel. When we were smaller, it was multiple hats. Sorry. Now we're getting quite a bit better structure.
You know, we've got a great, great platform how we're building this out with the managers of the branches, the job they're doing, looking after, you know, their sales team, their people, their equipment. You know, it's kind of copy and paste. You know, obviously we're going to keep building out the bench strength when we think it's needed. Right now, it's, you know, we've also, that I never mentioned on the call, I forgot about, was, you know, the service techs. We have to keep doing that to have service excellence. In this industry, we hear it quite often that the service isn't there how it could be. We know that, you know, at the end of the day, we've got a great product. We've got great people, but we got to supply our clients with great service. That's one thing we won't let slip.
You know, that's maintaining the growth in the room. We've even changed that whole process how that works. The U.S. side, our operation center is going to be open there, like where we do all our tower setups and configuring. We've already got the team in place. We'll probably be by the end of June live with that, the monitoring center, you know, into Q3, Q4. We've did so much streamlining in the monitoring side that, you know, we've got room here to let the growth keep going in Canada to do the monitoring until we truly actually need to move it down to the U.S., which we're going to do at, you know, it's a great sales feature, you know, and for anybody that's new on the call, there again, one more thing that cuts Zedcor apart. We're not doing our monitoring overseas, right? It's in-house. Everybody's an employee. There's a lot that goes into that.
That's awesome. No, thanks for that. Just one more thing for me, just in terms of further expansion in the U.S., Todd, I think you had talked about, you know, exploring going into California and Florida. It sounds like maybe some of that might be just pushed down to later this year. Just on the expansion, are there opportunities to expand via acquiring local service providers or resellers versus sort of organically building out branches?
No, we have other ways we go around it. You know, Gabriel, we have ways that we can store towers. You know, you get a guy on the ground there without getting the building. We've done that quite often in new areas. You know, for example, like I said, we have towers in Washington. We've got towers in Wisconsin, Illinois, in the Carolinas. We'll have towers in Florida before we have buildings there. You want to add to that, Amin?
Yeah, I think on the M&A front, if that's the question, Gabriel, it's tough right now. Like people's heads are in the clouds in terms of valuations. They have older equipment. It'd be mostly acquiring a customer list. I don't know if it's a customer list we want. They might be at lower rates. They might not be used to the higher level of service, which you have to pay for. It'd be kind of on a case-by-case basis. We've looked at a few, nothing recently, but it wasn't anything that was worth kind of pursuing beyond the initial like teaser stage, older equipment, older technology. We would have to revamp all that. We would have had to really assess if the people fit the culture as well that we've built here and maintained.
Gotcha. No, thanks for that. Congrats again on the progress.
Thanks, Gabriel.
Thank you, Gabriel. The following question comes from Sean Jack from Raymond James. Go ahead, Sean.
I think he might be muted. Yeah, I think he might be having some technical difficulty.
Hey.
Oh, hey. We can hear you now, Sean.
Okay. Awesome. Obviously there's been a lot of expansion into new cities recently. How much of the growth, oh, are you guys getting your feedback?
A little bit, but we can still make you out.
Okay. Sorry. How much of the growth into the new areas has been directly encouraged by existing customers versus just more greenfield expansion?
I'd say probably 10%-15%, maybe up to 20% existing customers. And then it's a lot of it's us setting up, you know, getting the flag in the ground and let's go, right, and chase the work. And, you know, I'd say that's probably pretty reasonable, that 20%.
Yeah. Some of it's driven.
Some regions are more. That is the reason we went there, 100%. And then, you know, one thing we are learning, this works everywhere. So.
Some of it is driven by proximity or the availability of good people. Like Phoenix was more of a greenfield expansion. That guy knew people in other locations and referred them. We felt they would be good hires. We kind of took the leap. Like Todd said, we know it works everywhere. If a good person comes along and we feel the investment is worthy and we feel we could service it and maintain the service levels, that is how Vegas got started. We knew there was demand there. We were not ready to go there, but we found the right guy. That expedited the expansion and the proximity between Phoenix and Las Vegas. Some of the Phoenix sales were being made in Las Vegas. We said, let's hire the guy and focus it and really push that expansion as well.
Okay. Perfect. Another question from me. Just thinking about, you know, there's in these past two quarters, there's been a little bit more commentary, specifically on the growth in Canada. Obviously, the United States is going to be the main driver, it sounds like. But wondering if we should expect, you know, kind of the ongoing trend from these past two quarters of like, you know, call it 30-40 towers per quarter. Is that reasonable moving forward, or should we expect that to increase?
For Canada?
Yeah, for Canada, we have an increasing.
No, it's going to be increasing. Sean, for example, we just sent 40 towers here in the last two weeks. You know, growth was slowed in Q1 due to some permitting stuff out east in Toronto, projects getting delayed, weather here in western Canada, you know, in Calgary and Edmonton. We had quite a cold winter. Some stuff got delayed there. Canada right now is at 99.9% utilized. Moving towers around to make jobs happen. Trucks are hauling towers here as we speak from the factory. I think you're going to see it come on a lot stronger. You know, probably into Q3 here, opening a branch out east, another one. It's going to be exciting for the Ontario side of things. Ontario's back. It's rocking and rolling. It's awesome.
I think the growth here, we had about 30% growth is what we thought around that 300 tower number. I think we're going to have no problem beating that for the Canadian side of the business.
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. No, that's all great, Colby. That's all from me. Thanks.
Thanks, Sean.
Excellent. I think that wraps up all our questions. Thank you, everybody, for jumping on and have a good day.
Have a great day. Thank you, Avery.