Happy to be joined, I think, certainly a timely presentation today from Forum Energy Technologies. The ticker is FET. Company coming off a very strong 2025, what many would consider a challenging oil and gas year. Generated significant free cash flow, showed the benefits of the diversification of their revenues and services. Obviously, the last couple of weeks, everyone's paying attention to oil. I think we're lucky to have CEO Neal Lux and CFO Lyle Williams with us today for their presentation. With that, gentlemen, let me turn it over to you.
Yeah. Thanks, Steve. I think as we get started, just do a quick introduction of myself and Lyle. Again, Neal Lux, I'm President and CEO of FET. I was adopted into the company in 2017 when FET acquired a manufacturing company that helped start called Global Tubing. Spent the last 20 years or so in manufacturing for the upstream industry. A lot of time in operations sales and marketing, and product development. In fact, I do have a couple patents to my name, and that have been useful over time. Innovation and product development, incredibly important to my career, but also really important to FET and our strategy going ahead. We'll talk a little bit about that. Maybe I'll turn it over here quickly to Lyle as well.
Yeah, thanks for joining us today. Lyle Williams, this is my twentieth year with FET, so a long time in the saddle in a bunch of financial and operating roles. A few years before that with another energy equipment manufacturer. Long career in the space. Really pleased with the FET story and glad to get to share it with you today.
All right. Well, we'll get started, you know, beginning with forward-looking statements, non-GAAP. I think this will be familiar to you all. You know, with that, we'll begin with what we call Forum Energy Technologies at a glance. You know, first, we are a manufacturer with global reach. We address the market with two primary segments, our artificial lift and downhole segment, and a drilling and completions segment. Within artificial lift and downhole, our primary customers are our operators. These are the companies that own and produce hydrocarbons, companies like ExxonMobil, Canadian Natural Resources, Saudi Aramco internationally.
We provide products in this segment that help extend production, that protect downhole pumps, as well as increase the amount of oil that's produced per foot of lateral. Key products there that we get and we sell directly to operators. Within Drilling Completions, we sell to the world's largest oil field service companies, so companies like Baker Hughes, SLB, Halliburton, DOF Subsea. Within this segment, we provide a wide range of products for drilling equipment, for drilling rigs, as well as their consumables. We also provide coiled tubing, cased hole wireline, and subsea robotics that are used to install underwater production capabilities. Overall, about half of our revenue is outside the United States, geographic split.
About three-quarters of our revenue, if you look at the purchase cycle, is from activity-driven consumables. These are big-ticket items, not necessarily nuts and bolts, but bigger items that wear out over 2, 3, or 4 months, and our customers come back for additional equipment from us. Have a great turn there in a relationship with our customer base. Again, we follow their general activity. In addition, we also provide capital equipment. It's a smaller part of our portfolio, but it is our opportunity to participate in the upside. When the industry decides that it needs to invest more, they will generally buy our equipment to upgrade drilling rigs, frack fleets, as well as offshore equipment. Quick summary of our financial performance over the last 5 years.
Again, we've grown revenue at a steady pace from 2021. Our guidance, midpoint of our guidance next year is $840 million. Excuse me, guidance this year, 2026, we're in that year already, is $840 million, so that's up about 6%. Just below that is our EBITDA trend. Again, from 2021 to 2025, we increased EBITDA by about 4x and grew our margin by about 2.5x or slightly more. The midpoint of our guidance for 2026 on EBITDA is $100 million, so up about 16% over 2025. Strong financial performance. That is our company at a glance. I think maybe more interestingly to the audience here is why FET?
Why are we not only a good company but a great investment? It really comes down to four points I wanna share. First, we have a track record of outperformance. We are an incredible value. We've had significant capital returns and plan to continue. Finally, we are poised for growth. I think these four make up the basis of why we are a great investment. We're gonna walk through each of these on their own. Starting with track record of outperformance, it begins with key financial metrics. Compared to the Russell 2000, which is our small-cap index, we've grown our revenue at an annual rate of 10% compound from 2021 through 2025. Much faster than Russell, which is only at 7%. We've done that through market share gains and acquisitions.
Again, that we'll talk about our strategy a little more, but we've grown our revenue significantly faster than the Russell 2000. Also, we've grown our adjusted cash flow at a 46% compound annual rate. Again, almost, significantly faster, 5x faster than the Russell 2000 at only 9%. Part of that is due to our high operating leverage, and the other part is due to our capital-light business model. 2 things, 2 points of our business. We'll talk a little bit more as we go forward. That track record of financial metric outperformance has also led to our annualized stock price outperformance. Again, over the last 5 years, we've had compound annual growth rate of 25%, again, about 5x greater than the Russell 2000.
Over the last year, we've had significant acceleration, again, I think as the market has begun to recognize a lot of the good things we've been doing. We've had strong financial growth to deliver this, we've fortified our balance sheet, and we've had meaningful capital returns. Key drivers of our outperformance.
On incredible value, this is another key pillar of our investment thesis. It's our value. Here again, we compare FET to our small cap index, the Russell 2000. This time across a number of valuation metrics. Starting with free cash flow yield. With each share of FET, you're getting meaningfully more free cash flow than the average Russell 2000 stock. Advantage, FET. Looking at more traditional valuation metrics, we are 2x-3x less expensive than the average stock in the Russell 2000. Advantage, FET. Finally, how are we doing that? Are we using a lot of leverage? Not at all. We have about one-third the leverage of an average Russell 2000 stock. Again, advantage FET. We're an incredible value with room to grow despite the terrific share price returns that Neal mentioned over the past 12 months.
The third pillar we wanna talk about and mention is our capital returns, which have been significant and are based around our free cash flow return framework. Let's talk about that. We've allocated our free cash flow to share repurchases and to debt reduction. In 2025, we reduced our number of shares outstanding by 10%, repurchasing 1.4 million shares of FET stock below $25 per share. That's less than half of our current share price, an incredible benefit to our FET shareholders. Also, over this time, we've transformed our balance sheet. For the past few years, we reduced the quantum of debt on our balance sheet by 69% and lowered our net leverage ratio from 3.9x to 1.2x at the end of last year. Our balance sheet is very strong with this low leverage.
We have ample liquidity, over $100 million of liquidity, a very flexible debt structure that could fund exciting investments, and no debt maturities until 2029. We are looking at any further reductions in our net debt as dry powder for strategic investments. Therefore, we expect to continue to deploy our free cash flow to either share repurchases or to acquisitions, comparing FET's free cash flow yield with that of any potential target opportunity. Our track record, relative value, and shareholder returns are compelling. Let me turn it back to Neal to talk about our vision for growth.
Yeah. I think really exciting what we've done, right? We've had a great track record. We remain an incredible value. I think as Lyle just laid out, we've had significant capital returns. The part that excites us, that gets us going in the morning and as we look ahead, is this company is poised for growth. Let's walk through that. It begins with our beat the market strategy, which is focused on, one, competing in targeted markets. We wanna compete where we have limited competition and our products are differentiated, ones that our customers value and that we have few competitors for. In these markets, we are gonna utilize our competitive advantage. We have a long manufacturing history, so it's our manufacturing know-how, as well as intellectual property. Also, our brands are sometimes decades old, so they're well-recognized.
Importantly, we are staffed with industry experts. Our teams understand how our products and solutions are utilized by our customers almost better than our customers do. This knowledge allows us to innovate continuously, right? We can continue to develop new technology. Also, it allows us to expand our addressable market, so we can go find new opportunities for our products and our solutions, and we can grow more quickly than the market. Finally, we're gonna leverage our global footprint. As I mentioned earlier, about half of our sales come from are outside the United States. By having this footprint in place, we are able to rapidly respond to customer demand, and in times of uncertainty like we are in now, we have a resilient and efficient supply chain.
Allows us to get products to where they need to go as quickly and safely and efficiently as possible. Since we implemented this strategy, we have grown our market share, and we define it as annualized revenue per rig, by 20%. Huge growth. Again, we are poised for growth, and we're gonna do that through our beat the market strategy. As we came into the back half of 2025, though, we refined the strategy a little bit, and we looked at our portfolio with, let's call it, a different lens. We started looking at, you know, what products do we have that are leaders and what products and solutions we have that address growth markets. Thinking about our leadership markets, the products and solutions we have here are about 2/3 of our revenue.
In leadership markets, we have meaningful share, we have solutions that are fully adopted by the industry, and we have broad geographic exposure. Here, again, we have about 36% share, which again is very meaningful, and this addressable market is about $1.5 billion in size. A couple examples. Coiled tubing. We are one of three global manufacturers of quench and temper coiled tubing, again, following our strategy. Cased hole wireline. We produce the workhorse for frac applications wireline. Again, we are one of three suppliers of this key technology. ROVs or remotely operated vehicles. We believe we have the largest installed base of world-class remotely operated vehicles that install subsea infrastructure globally. Again, leadership technology. Final example, sand and flow control products. These products are produced in Canada from our acquisition two years ago called Variperm.
Variperm is the leader in sand and flow control products for thermal oil sands. Again, in Canada, long life assets where their products are critical to continuous production. As we think ahead to 2020, 2030, our leadership goal is we want to sustain our edge in these markets. As this market grows over time, we're gonna maintain our market share at 36%, ideally a little bit more, and we're gonna grow with the market. Alternatively, how are we gonna grow even faster? We think about that. We look at our growth market. This is our opportunity for new customer acquisition. Our growth markets share a lot of the characteristics of our leadership markets. Again, we're targeted where we're gonna compete, and we're gonna have few competitors.
However, this innovation is earlier on the adoption cycle, so it's just gaining adoption, or it may be more limited in geographic reach. We may be very strong in the US, but less so internationally. This product has opportunity for growth. For us, the addressable market here is actually twice the size of our leadership market, and we only have 8% share. Our opportunity is to grow that share. Couple good examples, where we're gonna target. One is defense. We mentioned in, or we had an announcement, excuse me, last year about a massive order for a rescue submarine that addresses the defense market. We have sold these vehicles that we adopted the technology we have for oil and gas, and we applied it to the defense industry.
This is a great growth market for us, especially in the geopolitical environment we are in today. Another example is Coiled Line Pipe. This is a product where we took the infrastructure that we had in place for one product line, and we added a new process to it that allowed us to address a new market. We're utilizing existing infrastructure, but addressing a new and larger market. We're beginning to grow that product very quickly. In fact, our sales last year in footage were much more than the previous two or three years combined. Again, we're hitting that growth target there. Another two examples I wanna provide, and the one I really wanna hit is our pump protection. This is within our Artificial Lift and Downhole segment. Our pump protection equipment extends the life of downhole pumps for our customers.
In the United States, we went to our customers with the value proposition that was very simple. By buying our product, you're gonna produce more oil, and you're gonna do it at a lower cost. The value proposition hit, and it hit well, and we have high market share in the U.S. We have a very similar opportunity internationally, and the market is actually four times bigger, and they're just choosing today not to protect their pumps. We're gonna take the success we've had in the United States, and we're gonna export it internationally. That's a great theme of what we do here at FET. Again, take great products in one region, and we expand and sell them worldwide.
Our goal with our growth markets is to double our share over the next five years, and we wanna go from 8%-16% share. Big gain. That versus last year that would grow our revenue from about $800 million to about $1 billion if the market stayed flat. What does this mean for our investors? Well, let's look at it first looking at our revenue. In a flat market scenario where there's really no growth in our industry, right? No further demand for oil and gas or more growth and investment, by gaining share, we believe we can grow our revenue from about $800 million in 2025 to $1 billion in 2030 just by taking market share. That's not our base case.
Our base case is we believe we can actually double our revenue because the market that we're in is actually gonna grow as well. Let me hit those market points. What's gonna support that growth? First of all, we think global GDP is gonna expand at its historical pace. We think urbanization is also gonna expand at its historical pace, and that electricity demand, again, for AI as well as onshoring manufacturing, is gonna drive demand for oil and natural gas. We are gonna have to grow investment in these two critical commodities to overcome decline rates that they have as well as new investments. This will mean we have to add rigs and that the rigs that we add have to have the service efficiency that we've had at historical levels.
For us, surface efficiency, service efficiency means they're spending more per rig because they're using the equipment that we provide that allows them to do more with less. As we think about that opportunity, we think our markets are gonna grow about 9% a year for the next five years. Market growth at 9%, and then we're gonna grow our market share at about a 5% CAGR. Combining those, we believe we could grow our sales 15% annually for the next five years and organically double our revenue from about $800 million last year to $1.6 billion in 2030. What does that mean for our financials? Again, two scenarios on the right.
Revenue from $791 million in 2025 to $1 billion in a flat market or $1.6 billion in what we call our FET 2030 growth market. EBITDA. Incremental revenue. We believe about 25%-35% of our incremental revenue will turn into EBITDA. Again, in that scenario, in our growth scenario, we will quadruple EBITDA by doubling revenue. Free cash flow. We will turn 60%-70% of the incremental EBITDA into free cash flow, and we'll triple our free cash flow. As we think about the opportunity ahead, with our markets growing, with our share gains, we can double revenue, quadruple EBITDA, and triple free cash flow in the next five years. I think that's a compelling growth story that we have at FET. Putting it together, we have a track record of outperformance.
We are an incredible value today, especially compared to our peers in the Russell 2000. We've had significant capital returns that are only gonna get better, and we are poised for growth, and we have a great story ahead. With that, I'm gonna pause and hand it back to Steve for some questions.
Thanks so much, Neal. Thanks, Lyle. Very informative. A lot of big numbers coming out at the end of it. I think people are gonna be interested in some of the numbers you ran through for everyone. I think there's one place we have to start the Q&A at, and I do see some questions in the queue. As a reminder to everyone, if you do have a question, press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. If you don't see the Q&A button, it's probably hidden under that More button. Click on that and you'll see Q&A. We do have quite a few already. As I said, the way we have to start is obviously the conflict in the Middle East, what's going on in Iran right now. You do have some exposure to those markets.
The flip side is there should be some, theoretically, some benefits here from higher crude prices. I know it's somewhat speculative a couple of weeks in, but and maybe an unfair question, but can you give us your thoughts on both those.
Yeah
Situations?
Yeah, no, it's something that's top of mind for us, especially for us and our people, right? I think.
Yeah
We have, you know, we have a, like, 60 or 70 employees that work in the region. You know, for us, number one is, are they safe? Are they secure? And are they able to, you know, are their families as well? Thankfully, you know, all that has gone very well. You know, again, our regional leaders have done a great job there, so really appreciate that. I think in the, let's call it the short term, anytime there's war, especially in a key region like that where we operate, I think there could be disruption. You know, we ship product, you know, through the Strait of Hormuz, just like the tankers come in and out, so that is a restriction that we're having to work around.
I think short term, definitely disruption. As we sit back and think, though, what does this ultimately mean for crude and natural gas markets? 20% of the world's LNG comes from Qatar. I think the world's consumers of LNG are gonna look to diversify. The US is a great ally there to supply that, and again, we would be a part of that growth. On the crude side, we entered the year with the thought that maybe 2026 we would build inventories, you know, as production came online and demand caught up. I think with this war action, I don't think that's the case any longer.
If you look at the strip price today, you know, looking out the next 12 months, the average monthly price is around $85 a barrel. You know, with December, you know, being north of $75 or so. That should encourage investment if our customers believe that is sustainable. I think we'll see over the next few weeks, few months if that is. If that is sustainable, I think that increases the odds of our FET 2030 growth scenario happening. That would be exciting for us. Again, war is never the best scenario.
Yeah.
This is going to rechange and refocus the world's energy markets, and we're gonna participate in that.
Helpful comments, obviously your comments around safety, very important. How short-term impactful should we be thinking about that in terms of the disruptions? Should we be starting to think about that in terms of how much you export out of that area?
Yeah, I think if it, you know, we're watching that closely.
Yeah.
You know, we haven't seen anything specifically, Steve, but.
Okay
I think if this were to go on another month, another 60 days, I would absolutely be concerned. We're gonna watch that closely. You know, I think your listeners or followers may have seen, you know, some of the service companies have already talked about disruption.
Yeah.
They are our customers, so I do worry that could be happening. We don't have anything to note as of yet.
Got it. Thanks for that.
Steve, maybe just to put it in context, last year the Middle East represented around 11% of our revenue. So to give an order of magnitude of what we're talking about, that's a relatively small piece of our business, but in the long term, one that we're counting on growing.
Got it. Thanks, guys. That's helpful. Going back to what we saw coming out of 2025 from you, obviously growing backlog, strong book-to-bill in a challenging year. Can you sort of walk through the pieces there? It was within some of your comments throughout the presentation. Your 2026 guidance, which was certainly above where we were, our expectations.
Mm-hmm
Certainly partly was driven by that really strong backlog and certainly can give investors confidence about those marks. Can you walk a little bit through what the contributions are to that significant backlog expansion?
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. Maybe I'll start, kind of give the context and how it relates to our strategy, and then Lyle can kind of jump in with just kind of more specific numbers there. I think it's a execution really of our beat the market strategy, right? We have focused on new product development, and that has allowed us to book new orders. I think you mentioned our backlog, you know, is one of the highest we've had entering a year. I forgot the exact number. I wanna say 10%-12% of that backlog is from new products that we've developed recently, so it's in the last year or so. The innovation piece is key to that.
One item there that I haven't mentioned specifically, but is our Unity operating system. This is a software control system that we've added to our remotely operated vehicles that allows our customers to control an ROV from shore. Instead of having employees on a vessel and paying them, you know, for months at a time and having.
Yeah.
Redundancy there, they're able to operate that ROV from the shore. It's a huge benefit.
Wow.
Yeah, Steve, maybe put some numbers on that. Last year in 2025, our book-to-bill ratio or bookings compared to revenue was 113%.
Yeah.
As Neal mentioned early in our presentation, about 75% of our revenue is activity driven consumables. Typically the book-to-bill on those is 1-to-1. A 1.13 book-to-bill is really strong for us. It led us to have a backlog at the end of last year of $312 million. That's the highest backlog in 11 years for us.
Wow.
Really a nice tailwind as we look into 2026, and even some of that will bleed over into 2027.
Excellent. We do have a question, you sort of covered this, but let me ask it anyway, in terms of whether you have a sustainable margin target. I guess you sort of covered this with those incremental margins, right?
Mm-hmm.
As long as you keep growing, if you can have that type of a 35% incremental margin. You don't necessarily have a target margin ratio, do you?
I think the incremental is our target for sure. But you know, we also, Steve, and I think you know this well, is we did cut costs, some structural-
That's right.
costs out in 2025 that we're gonna have some benefit here in 2026. We originally targeted $10 million of cost out. We increased it to $15 million. We recognized some of it last year, but we're gonna have a full year benefit of a lot of that cost here this year. We've added a strategic objective, or we've had a strategic objective of operational excellence, right? Can we turn inventory faster? Can we take cost out of our business? It's an area where our operations teams are focused very well. We wanna make sure we take advantage of top line growth, but we're gonna be very selective on where we do that. We're not gonna grow low margin businesses.
To be quite honest, where we do see the growth, it is in our higher margin businesses. I think we should expect to see those incremental margins and again, with sales growth, grow our margins over time.
Excellent. I know we don't have a lot of time. We may be running a little bit over, but I gotta get in a question about, 'cause I get asked about it all the time, and I'm sure you do as well, regarding the buyback. You've still got plenty of room left under the current $75 million. You've been talking about using 50% of free cash flow for the buyback. At any point, do you shift that strategy given, you know, the stock performance over the last, you know, 12 to 18 months?
Yeah, Steve, we're really pleased with the buyback program, as we mentioned in the deck. Ran through a lot last year. We still have a lot left under our board authorization, so plenty of runway to go. Under our debt documents, plenty of capacity for that. Our capacity for buybacks this year is about $30 million worth of capacity that we could buy back this year. As we mentioned in our capital return section of the deck, our debt, our net debt is at a pretty low level.
Yeah.
We're comfortable with our leverage ratio. As we think about where do we deploy all this cash flow that we'll generate under FET 2030, that's gonna be buying back our shares or looking at acquisitions.
Any change in the M&A landscape recently?
M&A is healthy. Obviously, there's quite a few targets out there that would fit our criteria, businesses that look like ours. We wanna choose to target, compete in targeted markets. We want differentiated technologies.
Yeah
that our customers value. We're only gonna do deals that are financially accretive to us and maintain the health of our balance sheet.
Excellent. I know we're a little bit over time, but I'll leave the floor to you, Neal and Lyle, if you wanted to make any closing remarks before we wrap up the presentation.
Yeah. No. Thanks, Steve. Again, I cannot be more excited about FET. Again, I think we're a great company. I think we are an even better investment. Again, track record, value, capital returns, and really exciting for us is we have a growth trajectory ahead of us, and looking forward to delivering on that.
Excellent. Neal Lux, Lyle Williams from Forum Energy Technologies, the ticker is FET. I'm sure they're happy if we didn't get to your questions to respond to any questions you may have, or you certainly can reach me, Steve Ferazani at Sidoti, and I can certainly pass along your questions. Thanks so much, Neal. Thanks, Lyle, and hope everyone enjoys the remainder of the conference.
Thanks, Steve.
Thank you.