Good day, and welcome to the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Winter Investment Conference 2025. The next presenting company is Ascent Industries. If you'd like to ask a question during the webcast, you may do so at any point during the presentation by clicking the Ask Question button on the left side of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit Send to submit. I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Brian Kitchen, CEO of Ascent Industries. Brian, the floor is yours.
Okay, great. Thank you very much, and thanks for everyone for joining. Good morning, good afternoon. Let's go ahead and jump right in. As she mentioned, Brian Kitchen, President and CEO of Ascent Industries Company. The slide that you should see in front of you is slide number three. So before we just jump in, Ryan Kavalauskas, our CFO, and I have been together for a number of years, about 10, to be precise, and we've worked together at an array of different companies. Prior to joining Ascent, we worked at another turnaround, a smaller specialty chemical company called Clearon, located in Charleston, West Virginia.
This context is important because at the time we joined that company, we were losing about $8 million a year of Adjusted EBITDA, and at the time of sale, roughly four, four and a half years later, we were delivering roughly $36 million of Adjusted EBITDA on a Trailing 12 basis. So obviously, through that process, we've learned a lot. We always said if we had the opportunity to do it all over again, we would learn from our prior lessons, and here we are today. So Ryan and I are together. We put the band back together. We've got a lot of great people that we've worked with in the past, which have been absolutely core to the results that we've been able to deliver in such a short period of time. So for those of you that aren't familiar with Ascent, we're a 75-year-old company, publicly traded, obviously.
We started off as a specialty chemical company back in 1945. At about 20 or so years into that journey, the decision was taken to diversify the company. We got into stainless steel tubular production. It sounds a little bit strange, and I agree with you. It is. There were absolutely no synergies between those businesses, but for decades, literally, the company operated two very different segments up until very recently. Ryan and I joined the company back late 2023, early 2024, moved into our current roles early 2024 as CEO and CFO.
When we moved into our current roles, we tapped a lot of people that we worked with in the past from Clearon, from Dow, from Advancion and others, and basically built out a management team and gave them the keys to do what they do best and deliver extraordinary results in a very short period of time. And that's what we've been focusing on ever since. Earlier this year, we did execute our portfolio optimization strategy. We sold off two of our operating tubular assets. And then more recently, within the past month or so, we jettisoned the last holding that we had in the segment. So today, we stand as a pure-play specialty chemical company. We have roughly 200 employees, over 170 customers. We have three manufacturing assets, one in Virginia, one in Tennessee, and one in South Carolina.
Roughly 95% of our sales are supported with domestically sourced raw materials, so we're not subjected to the tariffs, and our top line last year was nominally $80 million of sales, so just talk for a minute about some of the highlights since the new management team was installed back early 2024. So pretty significant turnaround and gross profit, roughly 171% or $11 million improvement on a trailing 12 basis. Significant improvement in Adjusted EBITDA. We did generate roughly $54 million of proceeds of the sale of our tubular assets. That's pre-net working capital true-up of ASTI. We've also generated or saved about $2.1 million of annualized costs through transacting our idle Munhall facility that was a part of the tubular segment, so as we roll into 2026, that $2.1 million will no longer be hit with that.
In terms of outstanding shares, we've been very aggressive in buying back our shares. This year, we have retired about or bought back about 7.2% of our outstanding shares, or 726,000, and more recently, with our organic growth mandate, we have won a $10 million piece of net new business that will go into full run rate effect in the first quarter of 2026, so we've got a lot of really strong momentum building up across the enterprise. We've been incredibly aggressive at tackling our costs. We've been incredibly aggressive at managing the quality of business that we have rolling through our assets, and obviously, we're starting to see that roll through our gross margin and our overall Adjusted EBITDA for the business, okay, so a little bit on who we are, what we do, and how we operate, so we are a pure-play specialty chemical company, you know.
What do we do? We manufacture and sell key raw materials that go into an array of different market applications. I'll touch more on that here in a couple of minutes. But we sell raw materials. We manufacture and sell raw materials. But then we also operate custom manufacturing as well. And what we like to do is really come alongside of our customers and meet them where they are and provide services that help support their strategic objectives. In some instances, customers need help developing a specific formulation. In other cases, they might need supply chain solutions. But what we like to do is come alongside of them and meet them in those moments that matter most to them, whether that's from an R&D perspective or whether that's from commercial and contracting or innovative supply capabilities. But we've really found a very interesting niche in doing that.
What we found specifically over the past year, year and a half, is really partnering with the small to mid-size manufacturers that may have been buying raw materials from larger chemical providers. When that happens, in many instances, those larger chemical manufacturers are really not going to be great innovation partners, especially for the small to mid-size guys. Whereas we're a batch manufacturer, we have the ability to kind of lean in and tailor customized solutions, customized technical solutions for our customer needs, and to scale that from really, really small quantities, 500 gallons, all the way up to millions of pounds and do that cost-effectively. When we do that, we find that that business is generally stickier, it's generally more ratable, generally more predictable, and generally more margin and creative.
When you take a look at the array of services that we provide versus kind of the competitive landscape, what you'll see is we're effectively operating as, number one, a chemical manufacturer, but we also have capabilities to deliver custom-tailored solutions as well as being kind of that distribution arm for, again, smaller to mid-size customers as well. We've really found that to be a sweet spot, like I said earlier, how do we win? We connect with our customers in the way that they want, when and where and how they choose, and that message is resonating, and it's resonating incredibly well when you consider kind of how our overall selling project pipeline has taken shape specifically over the past year, so where do we participate? Like I mentioned earlier, we deliver tailored specialty chemical solutions in a wide array of high-value segments, so we participate in life sciences.
We participate specifically in personal care. We participate specifically in agriculture, in HI&I, but then we also participate in an array of other performance material markets, so oil and gas, water treatment CASE, which is coatings, adhesives, sealants, elastomers, pulp and paper, and many others, but really where we're focused in is HI&I, oil and gas, water treatment CASE are kind of our areas of focus when you think about it from an SG&A allocation perspective. We have an asset base, right, so this is a little bit of good news, bad news, right, so the bad news is we have an excess amount of available capacity, so we're underutilized, and we have resultant absorption. The good news is, right, from an investment standpoint, is we're grossly underutilized, and in order for us to crank out more volume, we don't require a significant amount of capital.
So today, our utilization is a little south of 50%, and what you see on the right-hand side of the slide is our ongoing year-on-year capital requirements is pretty low, right, so anywhere from like $1-$3 million, and that's not because we're running the plant with duct tape and popsicle sticks. That's what's required to run our plants safely and reliably, and we will not compromise on either of those, so tons of organic growth way inside of the existing asset base without significant ongoing capital requirements. What we've been working on over the past one to two years is filling the plants with higher margin business that's generally more ratable and generally more predictable. Back in 2023, when we joined the company, roughly 90% of our sales was toll manufacturing. 10% of it was selling products.
One of the things that I liked when I did my diligence before joining the company is not only do we have well-cared for, well-maintained assets, but we also had IP or products effectively sitting up on the shelf that we weren't doing anything with them. So one of the first things that we did was really rallied around the products that we have on the shelves and worked to monetize those and take those out to market and sell more of those. And what you see in the middle of the slide here is last year, we shifted that mix from 90% custom manufacturing, 10% product sales, to roughly 75% of custom manufacturing, 25% of product sales in 2024. And you've seen the resultant improvements in our gross margin profile, not just because of that, but in part because of that very purposeful shift that we have been driving.
You can see year to date, that shift that we implemented last year is holding pretty strong. Really good improvements in overall gross margin from continuing operations over the past several quarters. So growth, right? So we've got grossly underutilized assets without significant capital reinvestment exposure. What are we doing to make the plants scale safely and drive significant growth? So Q1 to Q3, just a couple of statistics. We've executed. We've won 73 selling projects. The average cycle time was roughly three months. The sales cycle is a little bit longer, right? In the specialty chemicals arena, it can range from anywhere from three months to 12 months, depending on the complexities, depending on the product, depending on the application, depending on the customer qualification requirements. But up until through Q3, our sales cycle has been actually pretty low at roughly three months.
Our conversion rate, again, year to date, has been roughly 16%. We've seen some improvements in that over the past quarters, but we're continuing to work on improving that overall conversion rate. And when you look at our Q1 through Q3 wins by business model, roughly 65% of the wins were for custom manufacturing. 35% were from product sales. So compare and contrast that with what you saw on the previous slide. We're actually shifting more of our mix over to product sales from a pipeline perspective. Where are we winning? So year to date, 77% of our wins from a top line perspective have come through existing customers. So we're being successful in expanding our share of wallet. Similarly, though, we've been very successful in winning business with new customers, customers that we haven't worked with in the recent past.
And you can see between them very good, solid EBITDA margin profiles for those pieces of business that we have been winning, and you can see at the bottom there, for us, obviously, the scale, not only the scale, but the scale and the quality of our selling project pipeline is absolutely critical to driving very, very aggressive organic growth inside of the existing assets, so what we like to see is a continued build of that. You can see from Q1 to Q2, a significant increase of roughly 45%. From Q2 to Q3, roughly 26% build, and this is net of any projects that we have won or projects that have been terminated. This is actual kind of quarter-on-quarter build of the overall pipeline, so the size and the scale is growing.
Before I pivot off of this real quick, one thing I'd like for everybody to understand, in order for something to make its way into our selling project pipeline, a few things need to happen. Number one, we need to verify the way you think about it. A, have we made this product before? If it has, obviously, it goes into the pipeline. B, we need to know that we have the technical capabilities to actually manufacture the product inside of our asset base. But underpinning all of that is an expressed customer need. So the scale, the build of our pipeline is not underpinned by any one salesperson that has a twinkle in their eye that says, "Well, the market size is $1 billion, and I think I can get 80% of it." That doesn't make its way into the pipeline.
The only thing that makes its way into the pipeline are projects that are sponsored, that are underwritten by specific customers who have expressed customer needs. So this has been and will continue to be a core part of our growth story moving forward. So path forward, 2026 to 2030, for us, it's all about durable earnings growth. So a couple of things. So where are we going? What we're building to is an enterprise that has a gross margin profile of nominally 35%, an enterprise that has an SG&A profile of nominally 15%, and then flow through to EBITDA and that kind of 15%-20% EBITDA margin range. And look, we're on our way. So 2023, 2024 was all about kind of stabilizing and fixing the foundation.
We drove a lot of improvements during that time period with an aggressive focus on optimizing our costs and getting the right people on the bus. This year, it was all about portfolio optimization. We've been very successful in executing all aspects of that. We've built up our cash reserves. We've got nominally $60 million worth of cash parked and ready to support organic growth objectives, inorganic growth objectives, as well as shareholder-friendly share repurchases. But for us, it's all about driving this organic growth to maximize our operating leverage and turn this company into an incredibly profitable, well-run specialty chemicals enterprise. I think I jumped the gun a little bit on capital. So we have zero debt, just to be clear, right? Zero debt. We've got $58 million worth of cash. We've got debt capacity of nominally $30 million. So overall capacity to invest is roughly $88 million.
And that's after, just to be clear, that's after repurchasing roughly 7.2% of our outstanding shares through the third quarter of this year. So as I mentioned earlier, we've got capacity to invest. What I'd really like and what we're driving towards is getting high return on invested capital projects brought to the table where we can invest internally, right? Because generally, the return should be higher and the risk profile should be lower. So we're constantly beating the drum on that. But additive to that, right, M&A has been and will continue to be a part of our overall capital allocation strategy. We have been under LOI on a couple of occasions, one more recently back in the third quarter. And I think the key thing that I would say on that is, yes, we're in market, but we're not going to do transactions just to get bigger, right?
This is about improving the overall quality of the enterprise. So where we cannot find a property or come to terms that delivers the appropriate return, we will walk. And we have a proven track record of doing that. And then third, we're going to continue to be active in repurchasing shares, right? For us, this is an and. It's not an or. We don't need to make trade-offs. So, the long and the short of it, really strong foundation. We spent a lot of time over the past year and a half to two years kind of fixing the foundation, stabilizing, really turning the growth engine on. It's great to now see some of these strategic organic growth objectives really beginning to translate into wins and setting us up very, very nicely as we roll into 2026. Strong cash position, very disciplined approach.
Want to make sure that we do right by our shareholders. So why invest in Ascent? We're clean, right? The portfolio is optimized. We're no longer a confused two-segment company that has absolutely no synergies between them. We're stabilized. We are growth-ready. We've got growth capacity in place that does not require significant year-on-year reinvestments. We do have near-term upside just through our organic growth strategy and the successes that we're beginning to mount. Strong balance sheet. And look, we're undercovered. And from our perspective, we're undervalued today. So we've got a team of just incredible people that have done an absolutely brilliant job over the past year and a half to two years to set us up for what's going to be a really fun and exciting 2026 to 2030 horizon.
And with that, I'm going to take a drink of coffee and open it up for any questions that you might have. Operator, am I still live?
Yeah, you are. If you want to have a look at the Q&A tab on your webcast.
Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that was still. Absolutely. That wasn't muted. So yeah, let's start smashing through some of these questions. So first question is, how should we think about 2026 revenue growth between proprietary products and custom manufacturing? I think that the slide that I shared a few minutes ago is a pretty good indicator of what you should expect as we roll into 2026. So what I flashed was roughly a 65-35 split. 65% custom manufacturing, 35% product sales on these selling project pipelines that we have pulled down today.
I think that that's pretty representative of what you should expect to see as we roll into 2026. What are we seeing as the strongest near-term demand across HI&I, oil and gas, water treatment, and CASE? What I would say is, from a size and scale of kind of discrete projects, we're seeing a lot in the oil and gas space. We're seeing a lot in the CASE space that are of significant size and scale and consequence. That's not to diminish the volume, the sheer number of projects we're seeing in the other segments like HI&I and water treatment and even ag. So just a lot of really good activity. We've got really good diversity in the markets that we participate in. We're not going to run away from that, but we are getting hyper-focused in from a resource allocation perspective.
Are you seeing any easing in raw material costs? Is pricing relatively stable across the key inputs? Yeah. I mean, look, there's been some volatility throughout the year on key raw materials, but our agreements that we have with customers are structured in a way where we're able to pass along those increases when and where they do come through. One of the first hires that we made when I joined the company was bringing on strategic sourcing resources, and they've done not just a brilliant job in reducing our overall cost, but they've done a really good job of working alongside of R&D and manufacturing and qualifying secondary sources to mitigate supply risk as well as to mitigate exposure from tariffs. Today, we're 95% supported with 95% of our revenue is supported with domestically sourced raw materials.
We did ourselves a lot of favors by executing on that over the past year and getting that in place. Okay. The new $10 million piece of business, what kind of gross margins can that generate? What I would say is accretive to the gross margin profile that we've had over the past trailing 12 months. I'm not going to get into specificity on that particular piece of business. Can you comment on the competitive environment, whether customers are looking for reshoring or near-shoring alternatives? Yeah. In fact, so again, this is good news, bad news, right? From a tariff situation standpoint, it's actually been more good news for us because we have received a lot of inquiries or some inquiries from customers that have global supply chains and looking to kind of reshore those here into the U.S., where the vast majority of their demand is located.
We've been successful in picking up projects, a couple of projects from customers in Japan and in Europe and in Canada. So we're going to continue to beat that drum. One of the cool things about our company, I'm not sure that I mentioned this earlier, we have three manufacturing assets in the Southeast, but we have some built-in redundancy across those assets. So as prospective customers are engaged, not only are they surprised to learn that we're a domestic manufacturer, but they're even more surprised to hear that we have three domestic manufacturing assets and we have built-in redundancy just from a risk mitigation standpoint. So that value proposition is resonating incredibly well with prospective and current customers. Are we seeing any tariff impact on raw materials or customer demand? And how should we think about that heading into 2026? I kind of touched on this earlier.
No, we're not seeing an adverse impact on tariff impacts. What I would say, again, is it's been more favorable to us as we get more looks at new opportunities related to reshoring than anything else. Let's see here. I think that's exhausted the questions. So folks, if you have questions, please don't hesitate to populate them in the box here, and I'll do my best to answer them. While we're waiting on a couple of more questions to come through, again, we're very excited about the road ahead. I'm incredibly proud of the team that we put in place and the work that they've done to get us to this point. From a cost standpoint, our costs are well under control. That's not to say that we're not laser-focused in on continuous improvement because we are.
But I think we've set the table from a cost perspective as we roll into 2026. And for us, it's organic growth, organic growth, and organic growth. Just getting incredibly aggressive and unleashing the sales and marketing team that we put in place a year, year and a half ago to do what they do best. Looks like there's some more questions that came in here. Can you expand on the utilization levels across Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina sites and how much operating leverage remains? What I would say is significant operating leverage. That 50% range that I mentioned earlier, that's on the high side or very conservative. So our utilization is actually a bit lower.
From a leverage standpoint, from a priority perspective, we get the biggest bang for our buck by jamming more volume through the Virginia facility just based on the overall cost basis and the overall absorption that we have today. So that's where we've got a lot of resources focused. But similarly, with Tennessee and South Carolina, gross underutilization and tons of runway for organic growth. What's the updated timeline for monetizing the Munhall asset and eliminating the $2.1 million drag? That is done. And I apologize if that wasn't clear earlier. That catalyst is done and behind us. That was transacted within the past 30 days or so. There was a press release that was issued on that. So as we roll into 2026, we will no longer have that $2.1 million annual drag.
Quickly, can the pipeline of new customers convert to recurring revenue under the chemicals as a service model? I mean, that really depends on the specific opportunity and the resultant cycle time. But like I mentioned earlier, the sales cycle time could range anywhere from three months to 12 months, depending on the product, the customer, the application, the qualification requirements, and the like. But what I would say, underpinning all of that is, generally speaking, on the custom manufacturing type of opportunities, once they're integrated into the asset base, those opportunities generally become pretty sticky because there's just a lot of work that goes into bringing volume in, and there's an equal amount of activity that's required to take volume out. So we've had a number of customers in our portfolio that have been with us literally for over four decades, and we intend to keep it that way.
Are all of the other side of the business gone? So that's related to tubular, yes. The tubular segment is officially gone. We have no tubular assets. We have no tubular sales. We have no tubular drag. What we have today is a pure-play specialty chemical company that is void of any other non-chemical segment distractions. We got one more here. What is the public company that I aspire to be? I mean, look, there's a lot of great public companies out there. I like them for different reasons. You take a look at companies like Hawkins. Really admire the service model that they have built up over time underpinned by core manufacturing assets. You've got other great companies like the Stepan of the world, the Dow's of the world from an operational excellence perspective. It's a difficult question.
We can give more into that in a one-on-one. So I'll give you some more color. But a lot of great companies, but we're seeking to be best. We've done ourselves a lot of favors over the past year. We're set up nicely for the next 2026 to 2030. It's an exciting place to be. We've got a lot of great employees, and customers are really leaning into the changes that we've made. So with that, operator, I think we're out of time.
Thank you very much. That does conclude Ascent Industries' presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.