Forum Energy Technologies, Inc. (FET)
NYSE: FET · Real-Time Price · USD
82.26
+1.57 (1.95%)
Sep 15, 2026, 1:23 PM EDT - Market open
← View all transcripts

EnerCom Denver – The Energy Investment Conference

Aug 18, 2026

Summary

Forum Energy Technologies highlighted strong revenue and cash flow growth, significant shareholder returns, and a capital-light model. The company aims to double revenue and quadruple EBITDA by 2030 through market share gains, product innovation, and global expansion, supported by favorable industry trends.

Operator

Morning. Thanks for joining us here once again for EnerCom. Hard to believe, 31 straight years here at EnerCom. A great mix of return attendees and, of course, some new ideas, some new people, and of course, with that always comes some new opportunity. I'm Jim Felton with EnerCom. Look forward to seeing all of you tonight at Casino Night, a great event, a great fundraiser for a great cause. I am happy, it's my pleasure this morning to introduce Forum Energy Technologies, a global energy products company serving the drilling, subsea, completions, production, and infrastructure markets. It's my pleasure again to introduce the Chief Financial Officer of the company for Forum Energy, and Executive Vice President, Lyle Williams. Lyle. Get you all powered up. There you go.

Lyle Williams
CFO and EVP, Forum Energy Technologies

Thank you, Jim, and thanks to the EnerCom team for hosting us. Lyle Williams, glad to be here and introduce you to FET or Forum Energy Technologies. Before we get started, and obviously we'll have some forward-looking statements, so you know the drill with our disclaimer there. Let me first introduce you to FET. As Jim said, we're a global manufacturer of equipment for the upstream industry, providing value-added solutions to our customers around the world. When we think about our business and how we attack the market, really through two segments. First segment is artificial lift and downhole. We provide downhole equipment as well as surface processing equipment to the world's largest E&Ps. We do that around the world, and our goal there is to help them produce more oil and more gas at a lower cost.

The other segment, drilling and completions, we manufacture a mix of consumable and capital equipment, and we sell that to the world's largest service companies. That helps them be safer and more efficient drilling wells and completing wells faster and at a lower cost. When we think about where we sell our products, we leverage our global footprint, manufacturing equipment in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Germany, and Saudi Arabia, and we sell our products around the world. About half of our revenue comes from the United States, the other half internationally. Big markets that we participate in are Canada, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. I think a very interesting thing about our product portfolio, and we'll talk about this a bit more, is our mix of revenue. Nearly 80% of our revenue comes from what we call activity-based consumables.

We're not dependent on service company CapEx to grow our revenue. We're looking at activity levels and what that means for the industry. The other 20% of our revenue is CapEx. We sell capital to the big service companies to help them improve the efficiency of their operations. We've grown our revenue and EBITDA really well over the last several years. We just updated our full year 2026 guidance in our last earnings call. So a revenue of $890 million, about a 13% growth year-over-year, and EBITDA of $120 million. That's a 40% growth on a year-over-year basis. So a big move for us this year. I'll talk a little bit about where that's coming from. Market cap for FET is just tickling a billion. So if I do my job today, maybe we'll get there. So that's who FET is.

Let me talk a little bit about why FET and why we think FET is a good investment for investors. Really four reasons that we will walk through today. First, our track record of outperformance. Second, despite that outperformance, we are still an incredible value. We have had significant returns of capital to shareholders, and most importantly, we are poised to grow our business organically. Let me walk you through these points and what that looks like. First, starting with our track record of outperformance. When we look at our revenue, we have grown our revenue well over the last five years, compound annual revenue growth rate of 10%. We compare that to the Russell 2000, so other small cap opportunities who have grown at a compound annual growth rate of 7%. A big focus for FET is generating cash flow.

We have grown our cash flow rate at a compound growth rate of 46% per year, so massive growth in cash, and you can see how that compares to the growth in cash flow for the Russell 2000 as an average. Now, how have we done that? We have done that through taking market share and through targeted acquisitions. We have done that through the nature of our business as a manufacturing company with high operating leverage. As we grow, we generate a lot of incremental profit. Finally, FET is a capital-light business. We do not need a lot of capital expenditures to grow. Typically, CapEx has run for us about 1% of revenue, and we think we can grow our revenue about 50% from where we are today without having to change that model. So a lot of upside from a cash flow perspective.

What does that mean for returns? Over the last five years, and this is through the end of June, we have grown our share price at a compound rate of 16% per year. Again, compared to other small cap companies, really outperforms that. Just in the last year, we increased our stock price 158% relative to what the Russell did. Obviously, there, our strong financial performance is a big piece of that. We have got a great balance sheet. We will talk about that in a second, but we have de-levered our balance sheet materially over the last number of years. We have got no debt maturities until 2029 and a really healthy ability to grow if we were needing to call on that. Finally, we have talked about our significant outlook for growth, and I will focus on that in a couple of minutes.

Despite that great run-up, we still think FET is an incredible value. We compare FET on a bunch of different valuation metrics here to a smaller group of the Russell 2000. Really, companies focused on manufacturing or industrial-looking companies. First, looking at free cash flow yield. Our free cash flow yield on a 2026 basis, back where we were about a month or so ago, is 17%, almost three times what you would get with an average Russell 2000 manufacturing company. From a valuation perspective, whether you look at EV to EBITDA or price to sales, you are getting kind of double the value with FET. Finally, we talked about leverage. Our net debt to EBITDA leverage is 1.1x , compared to the average company in that peer group of about two. What that yields for FET is really strong cash generation relative to the option.

We've got a compelling relative valuation, and we've got a strong and flexible balance sheet to support growth. We also talk about significant capital returns. We've generated a lot of cash over the last several years, so what have we done with that cash? First, we've repurchased quite a bit of shares and focused on targeted acquisitions. Over the last two years, we've repurchased about 1.5 million shares outstanding. Net reduction in our share count of about 1 million shares or roughly 8% of our share count. At the same time, we focused on net debt reduction and de-leveraging the business, giving us a lot of dry powder for further growth. Specifically, if you look at our net leverage ratio over the last five years, we've gone from almost 4x leverage, which was a high number, to 1.1x at the end of June.

A really great position that we put us in. Overall, our capital returns framework of balancing shareholder returns and net debt reduction reduced our share count by 8%, reduced our outstanding debt by 67%, and at the same time, we've completed five accretive acquisitions that have tucked in and grown our business and improved our product portfolio. Good track record of outperformance. Still an incredible value with good shareholder returns. What's really exciting to us is how do we grow, right? If you're looking at small cap companies, I think that's got to be a piece of the story and where do we grow. Let me talk to you about our organic growth strategy and what that looks like. We call this our beat the market strategy. Obviously, we're tied to a cyclical industry. When it's up, we want to be up more.

If it's going to be down, we want to be down less. How do we compete? We compete and we choose to compete in targeted markets. These are markets that have limited competition with differentiated product offerings and good barriers to entry. We compete in markets where we can utilize our competitive advantages. Those would be manufacturing know-how. Several of the products that we manufacture are complex and would be very challenging for a new entrant or where we have intellectual property protection. We also compete with brands that are well-known in the industry and with industry experts. Each of our product families are led by veterans from the service companies or from the operators who know how our products work in practice and know how to solve the customer's problems. We stay ahead of the game with continuous innovation.

That could be iterative innovation, where we're making small changes to stay ahead of the competition, or it could be new products where we're stepping out and increasing the total addressable market that we compete in. Finally, I mentioned our global footprint. We can leverage, and we do leverage our global footprint. That could be making it easier for us to respond to customer demand or maintaining a very resilient supply chain. How has that worked for us? What's that look like? We measure our success and beat the market strategy by comparing our global revenue to the global drilling rig count. Just a good measure of industry activity. You can see that over the last four years, we've increased our revenue per rig by 27%. We think of that as taking market share, as we've grown faster than the market.

We look at where we've done that. We mentioned our mix of revenue. In the United States, we generate United States revenue compared to United States drilling rigs, about $700,000 per rig. Internationally, it's about half that, of $350,000. A great tailwind for FET is the internationalization of what's gone on with unconventional drilling, in the United States now to areas like Argentina, the Middle East, discussions in Australia, and North Africa. As the technology that has been deployed in the U.S. to make our industry so efficient is being called on outside the United States , it's a great opportunity for FET to raise our revenue per international rig. Beat the market strategy is working. We're delivering share gains. More so than that, we have opportunities to leverage our product portfolio and take additional market share.

Really, we break that down into a couple of ways to think about that. About two-thirds of our revenue is based on what we call leadership markets. These are products that compete and where we have meaningful market share, where the solutions that we're offering are fully adopted by the industry. There's not a question of does it work? They're globally accepted, so we sell around the world. The markets there are leadership markets, about $1.5 billion, and in aggregate, FET has 36% share. We have a dominant position in these markets, and our long-term goal is to sustain our edge through the continuous innovation that we talked about and grow with the market. The other third of our revenue competes in growth markets. These are our opportunities to take share and grow our share.

In aggregate, these are bigger markets, about $3 billion in total size, and we have 8% share with an opportunity to grow. These are still targeted markets with few competitors where we compete with differentiated products. But the difference is maybe we're early in the technology adoption cycle, or we compete in one market and we have an opportunity to compete more globally in another market. Our five-year goal is to double our market share to 16%. Could say it was to take our market share to 36%, that's clearly what we challenge our teams with. But just doubling that market share would add about 33% to our 2025 FET revenue. That is our opportunity to take market share, acquire new customers, and grow FET organically.

When we think about a couple of examples of how that's worked and how we continue to leverage that, I'll pick one from the leadership markets, in this case, cased hole wireline. Cased hole wireline is the workhorse for unconventional wells in the United States We compete in a targeted market. There are two other global manufacturers of cased hole wireline, and we, Forum, have done a great job of taking share. A few years ago, we introduced a new greaseless wire, greaseless cable that allows our customers, the wireline customers, to operate a lot faster and is one of the drivers of efficiency in the U.S. oil and gas markets. As we see unconventional wells being developed around the world, our wireline products are being pulled by these service companies around the world as well. So we're penetrating the global market with wireline.

Opportunity to take that leadership market and expand it outside the U.S. Another example is where we're increasing our total addressable market. We are one of the leading manufacturers of heat transfer units, radiators, for the hydraulic fracturing industry. If you look at a hydraulic fracturing truck, on it'll be a pump, there'll be an engine, and there'll be a big cube style radiator. Most cube style radiators are ours, GHT branded radiators. When our hydraulic fracturing customers moved into the power generation space, they came to us and said, "We need a bigger radiator for our bigger engine for power generation." We developed that a few years ago, called the Powertron. We've sold quite a few and have a great backlog of radiators now for portable, mobile, behind-the-meter power generation. Just this year, we also expanded that more by introducing a stationary radiator.

We're seeing these power generation units not being set to move continuously, but being more long-term installed base for AI data centers or for oil and gas operations. We introduced a stationary radiator in the first quarter, had our first commercial orders for that in the second quarter. We see that as a huge growth market opportunity for FET. What we've done there is gone tangential to something we were already really good at, broaden our product portfolio, and attack a new market. Two examples of how we've done on our growth strategy and how we think we can take additional share. Also, we think we've got a great industry tailwind and a great setup here.

Most of you will be familiar with this, but obviously, if we look at global oil supply, you can see the trend over the last number of years, global oil supply has increased at a rate of about 1% per year. It's very reasonable that that's going to continue to grow at 1% per year because of the factors of, first, growing demand. GDP is growing. There's more urbanization, which proven fact, when people move from rural to urban areas, they use more power. There are billions of people who are looking to live like the rest of us live. We think that's a great tailwind for growth. Also, if you look at the services industry, there's going to be investment required to be able to increase supply, even at this rate. Global rig count, that means global rig count's going to go up.

We're believers in that. We're also believers that the use of unconventional technologies that have been in the U.S. are going to move around the world. That's going to be a great tailwind for FET. We also have this regional conflict in the Middle East that's had a great opportunity to pull forward what we think is demand. Big disruption to regional oil supplies, big drawdown in global inventories, and increased prioritization of security for energy rather than just supply of energy. We're seeing more and more demand growing around the world with that. We think overall, the industry fundamentals are going to be another tailwind for FET's growth. Let's put that all together and share what we call our FET 2030 plan of a financial forecast of what could this look like.

A little bit of a complicated chart, but on the left-hand side, you can see our 2025 revenue and 2026 results and two bars over the right-hand side. At the bottom, we talk about our growth strategy. This is growing from 8%- 16% share in our growth markets, adding about $250 million of revenue, taking FET to $1 billion in revenue. That is about a 5% compound annual growth rate. 2026 shows our result ahead of that line, so we are already doing pretty well there. We think the market grows, though, just as I said on the last slide, and that market growth, combined with share gains, could help us double our revenue to $1.6 billion. We lay out two cases, a flat market, if you are not such a bull for where the market is going, or a growth market and what could that look like.

What does that do for FET from a financial perspective? It takes our revenue from, call it roughly $800 million in 2025, and I will focus on the 2030 growth case of $1.6 billion. So doubling our revenue over that five-year period. How do we think about the bottom line? FET is a manufacturing company, and we have got a lot of operating leverage inherent in our business model. We should generate 25%- 35% incremental EBITDA for every dollar of revenue. If we do that, then that would allow us to quadruple EBITDA, as you see on the right-hand side. Importantly, we have a capital light model. We do not need a lot of CapEx to grow. So we should generate $0.60-$0.70 of every dollar of EBITDA should turn into free cash flow. So tripling our free cash flow.

FET 2030 for us is the path to how do we continue to grow in a growing market, taking market share, double our revenue, quadruple our EBITDA, and triple our cash flow.

That is our growth strategy. That is what we are really pretty excited about as FET, and we look forward to where we go. Just as a recap, FET, a global manufacturer of value-added solutions for our customers, both the operators and the service companies. We have had a great track record of success. We are still an incredible value from a valuation perspective. We are focused on managing good returns of the cash that we have, both to shareholders and to manage debt. And we are poised for growth. Good opportunity going forward. So appreciate the opportunity to share FET with you today. We have got a breakout session after this and look forward to it. Thanks very much.